Born in Cairo in 1942, Penelope married Oliver Worsley and went to live in Yorkshire, where they had four children. Footsteps to the Jungle traces Penelopes earlier life, the discovery of Huntingtons Disease, the death of her son Richard and what led her to set up an international charity in his memory. The Karen Hilltribes Trust is focused on helping the Karen people in the mountainous area of northwest Thailand to help themselves to build a better future. This illustrated book is a personal story that shares tragedy, illness and challenges, resulting in the huge rewards of working with others
Adventures in the scientific exploration of the American tropics, related by the prize-winning naturalist writer. Maslow recounts the exploits of thirteen pioneers--"inspired characters in mythopoetic settings. Call them Indiana Einsteins, and call us fortunate to have Maslow to tell their stories."--Kirkus Reviews.
Covers Giovanni Belzoni in Egypt; Jean Louis Burckhardt in Petra; John B. Seely and the Temples of Ellora in India; Charles Fellows in Asia Minor; Karl Mauch at Great Zimbabwe; Alfred Maudslay and Mayan pyramids in Guatemala; Richard Wetherill and Indian antiquities in the American Southwest; Hiram Bingham and Machu Picchu of the Incas; and Reginald Le May in Thailand.
The audacious, gripping travelogue of a writer chasing the ghost of Graham Greene into the heart of Africa. Of all the anarchic and war-torn African nations, none is more forbidding than Liberia, the land that nurtured child soldiers, the violent trade in "blood diamonds," even ritual murder. Graham Greene, in search of extreme adventure, ventured through its dense jungles to write the travel classic Journey Without Maps; three-quarters of a century later, Tim Butcher decided to follow Greene's footsteps, only to find the path even more ominous and overgrown than in his predecessor's day. Among the devils he encounters are masked sorcerers whose magical powers depend on cannibalism and missionaries long forgotten in the hinterland he traverses. Butcher, a former African correspondent for the London Telegraph and author of Blood River, his best-selling account of a dramatic journey through the Congo, has produced in this thrilling sequel a book that The Independent hails as "fascinating, harrowing, and eventful."
When the Spanish conquistador Francisco de Orellana set out on his search for cinnamon in 1541, he could not have anticipated that his travels would bring him to the bends of the world s longest river: the Amazon. Long a witness to evangelization campaigns, infrastructure development, and natural resource extraction, the river continues to arouse greed, competition, and fascination in its visitors. Following in the footsteps of past expeditions, The Jungle Book is a visual travel diary comprising discreetly staged scenes that reveal the diverse worlds of contemporary Amazonia and its surrounding areas. Photographer Yann Gross worked with different local communities in order to explore their lives in a time of ecological disintegration. Once immersed in their domestic world, the viewer soon forgets romantic cliches of forgotten lands and noble savages, and begins to question the guiding ideals of progress and development that inform escapist fantasies of the global south."
For nearly two decades Western governments and a growing activist community have been frustrated in their attempts to bring about a freer and more democratic Burma—through sanctions and tourist boycotts—only to see an apparent slide toward even harsher dictatorship. But what do we really know about Burma and its history? And what can Burma's past tell us about the present and even its future? In The River of Lost Footsteps, Thant Myint-U tells the story of modern Burma, in part through a telling of his own family's history, in an interwoven narrative that is by turns lyrical, dramatic, and appalling. His maternal grandfather, U Thant, rose from being the schoolmaster of a small town in the Irrawaddy Delta to become the UN secretary-general in the 1960s. And on his father's side, the author is descended from a long line of courtiers who served at Burma's Court of Ava for nearly two centuries. Through their stories and others, he portrays Burma's rise and decline in the modern world, from the time of Portuguese pirates and renegade Mughal princes through the decades of British colonialism, the devastation of World War II, and a sixty-year civil war that continues today and is the longest-running war anywhere in the world. The River of Lost Footsteps is a work both personal and global, a distinctive contribution that makes Burma accessible and enthralling.
Drawing on personal interviews with and recollections by veterans, the author of Biggest Brother chronicles the exploits of the Alamo Scouts, members of an elite Army reconnaissance unit during World War II, a group that spent weeks behind enemy lines to gather much needed intelligence for Allied forces in the Pacific.
The saga of the Elizabeth nicknamed the Black Mayflower that sailed out of the New York Bay in 1820 bound for West Africa continues. The victory of Negro colonies of Freetown and Liberia barked by the United States and Great Britain policing the waters of the Atlantic marked a new offensive in the beginning of the end of the Atlantic slave trade. This in turn sparked overzealousness of desperate slave lords led by Arab traders and kidnappers on the East Coast of Africa that accelerated the rise of the Indian Ocean slave trade. The echoing footsteps of these unrelenting Negroes to end slavery in Africa would be heard by most participants and observers in the form of success stories of Negro adventurers on African shores. The successful activities of the African American colony Liberia in a faraway land considered then as the Dark Continent quickly became the biggest campaign tool for politicians in the United States. The elation led to the banging of tables in the United States Congress by philanthropists, religious leaders as well as politicians, all scrambling to take credit for what was claimed to be a humane way to rid their streets and neighborhoods of the dangers of angry unwanted Negroes or hungry and vicious unowned slaves. Echoes of Footsteps is the second in the three-part novel series on the Birth of a Negro Nation, a saga in the legacy of the Atlantic trade. Deeds Not Words Would conclude the trilogy.
Our Fathers' Footsteps is about four men during World War II who had one thing in common: Normandy. Using family history, Don Levers tells the stories of their extraordinary circumstances and how they survived "What If?" moments.
