Both a memoir in travel essays and an anti-guidebook, Bad Tourist takes us across four continents to fifteen countries, showing us what not to do when traveling. A woman learning to claim her own desires and adventures, Suzanne Roberts encounters lightning and landslides, sharks and piranha-infested waters, a nightclub drugging, burning bodies, and brief affairs as she searches for the love of her life and finally herself. Throughout her travels Roberts tries hard not to be a bad tourist, but owing to her cultural blind spots, things don’t always go as planned. Fearlessly confessional, shamelessly funny, and wholly unapologetic, Roberts offers a refreshingly honest account of the joys and absurdities of confronting new landscapes and cultures, as well as new versions of herself. Raw, bawdy, and self-effacing, Bad Tourist is a journey packed with delights and surprises—both of the greater world and of the mysterious workings of the heart.
Family secrets become a blackmailer's deadly weapon in this pulse-pounding thriller by the Amazon Charts bestselling author of No Good Deed. The shocking suicide of Beth Daniels's father--a prominent surgeon--has thrown the FBI agent into a tailspin. But when Beth heads to Saint Augustine, Florida, for the funeral, she'll need more than the emotional support of her boyfriend, retired detective Jon Lancaster. She'll need his gut instinct for solving a mystery. No sooner do they arrive than suspicions are aroused. There's the pair of Russians who seem to be watching every move the family makes. A final, cryptic phone call Martin Daniels made to his granddaughter. Strange blood evidence on his estate. More than $1 million missing from Martin's account. And his cell phone, wiped clean, along with clues to a double life. To Beth, it's disturbingly clear: the man she loved was a stranger. As she and Jon delve into Martin's past, they have no idea where the secrets will take them. Or how dangerous it will be to expose the conspiracies, the cover-ups, and the terrible truths of Martin's life--and death.
Lonely Planet: The world's leading travel guide publisher* A tourist on the Axis of Evil. 'You guys really are the axis of evil', our guide splutters over his stein of beer in the Pyongyang duck restaurant. 'You're always leaning out of the windows and taking photographs when I tell you not to.' In an age of plastic knives on planes, Tony Wheeler can make the extraordinary claim of having visited all the rogue countries currently on newsreaders' lips. Bad Lands is a witty first-hand account of his travels through places often perceived as having some of the most repressive and dangerous regimes in the world: Afghanistan, Albania, Burma, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea and Saudi Arabia. Taking into account each country's attitude to human rights, terrorism and foreign policy, he asks 'what makes a country truly evil?' and 'how bad is really bad?' - all the while engaging with a colourful cast of locals and hapless tour guides, ruminating on history and debunking popular myths. Written by the founder of Lonely Planet, this fascinating account of life in these closed-off countries will appeal to anyone with an interest in the state of the world today. With additional excursions to places that are slightly misguided, mildly malevolent, seriously off course, extraordinarily reclusive and much misunderstood. The second version of this popular title is well worth a read! Author: Tony Wheeler About Lonely Planet: Started in 1973, Lonely Planet has become the world's leading travel guide publisher with guidebooks to every destination on the planet, as well as an award-winning website, a suite of mobile and digital travel products, and a dedicated traveller community. Lonely Planet's mission is to enable curious travellers to experience the world and to truly get to the heart of the places where they travel. TripAdvisor Travellers' Choice Awards 2012 and 2013 winner in Favorite Travel Guide category 'Lonely Planet guides are, quite simply, like no other.' - New York Times 'Lonely Planet. It's on everyone's bookshelves; it's in every traveller's hands. It's on mobile phones. It's on the Internet. It's everywhere, and it's telling entire generations of people how to travel the world.' - Fairfax Media (Australia) *#1 in the world market share - source: Nielsen Bookscan. Australia, UK and USA. March 2012-January 2013 Important Notice: The digital edition of this book may not contain all of the images found in the physical edition.
The story of Henry Pulling, a retired and complacent bank manager, who meets his septuagenarian Aunt Augusta for the first time at what he supposes to be his mother's funeral. She soon persuades Henry to abandon his dull suburban existence to travel her to Brighton, Paris, Istanbul, Paraguay. Through Aunt Augusta, one of Greene's greatest comic creations, Henry joins a shiftless, twilight society; mixes with hippies, war criminals, and CIA men; smokes pot and breaks all currency regulations.
Fans of Cash Peters' "Bad Taste Tours" on public radio will hail this outrageously funny collection of essays about his experiences traveling to and reporting on the most bizarre and tacky tourist attractions across the United States.
Selections from the Travels and Journals Preserved in the Bombay Secretariat is a compilation of 14 documents, previously unpublished, relating to journeys taken or documented by officials of the East India Company. Most of the trips described were to and from cities in Afghanistan, Persia (present-day Iran), and Central Asia, but a few were by the Indian Navy to places on the coasts of the Arabian Peninsula. The documents, from the archives of the East India Company in Bombay (present-day Mumbai), were compiled by George William Forrest, the former director of records of the Imperial Record Office at Calcutta (present-day Kolkata). Forrest provides a lengthy introduction to the volume, in which he writes that these "tales of the exploits of the soldiers and sailors of the East India Company and these plain narratives of facts show that in searching the most opposite corners of the Eastern World they faced the dangers and distresses which beset them with calm courage and made good use of the opportunities of their calling for the furtherance of knowledge." Among the documents presented is the record of a journey from Yezd (Persia) to Herat (Afghanistan) and from Herat to Kabul via Kandahar, undertaken in 1826 by a French officer and translated into English in 1839 by a British officer in Kabul for transmission to the East India Company; the account of the journey by Major Elliott D'Arcy Todd from Herat to Simla (present-day India) in 1838; the February 7, 1838, report by Sir Alexander Burnes on the state of Herat and the surrounding region; and the English translation of a report in Persian of a mission undertaken by a Persian adventurer, Mohamed Hoosain, on behalf of the amir of Kabul to the king of Persia in 1837-38. The purpose of this journey, as explained by Mohamed Hoosain, was to sound out the Persian ruler on an arrangement to protect Afghanistan against the Sikh kingdom that was then threatening from the east. The report was translated in early 1839 by order of Burnes (then British resident in Kabul, who was later to be killed in the uprising of 1841) and transmitted to Bombay as part of the historical record.
How technologies can get it wrong in sports, and what the consequences are—referees undermined, fans heartbroken, and the illusion of perfect accuracy maintained. Good call or bad call, referees and umpires have always had the final say in sports. Bad calls are more visible: plays are televised backward and forward and in slow motion. New technologies—the Hawk-Eye system used in tennis and cricket, for example, and the goal-line technology used in English football—introduced to correct bad calls sometimes get it right and sometimes get it wrong, but always undermine the authority of referees and umpires. Bad Call looks at the technologies used to make refereeing decisions in sports, analyzes them in action, and explains the consequences. Used well, technologies can help referees reach the right decision and deliver justice for fans: a fair match in which the best team wins. Used poorly, however, decision-making technologies pass off statements of probability as perfect accuracy and perpetuate a mythology of infallibility. The authors re-analyze three seasons of play in English Premier League football, and discover that goal line technology was irrelevant; so many crucial wrong decisions were made that different teams should have won the Premiership, advanced to the Champions League, and been relegated. Simple video replay could have prevented most of these bad calls. (Major League baseball learned this lesson, introducing expanded replay after a bad call cost Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga a perfect game.) What matters in sports is not computer-generated projections of ball position but what is seen by the human eye—reconciling what the sports fan sees and what the game official sees.
Retirees Dottie and Joe Loudermilk, who cruise the land in a trailer home, hit Washington, D.C., to visit their son Eddie in this humorous second entry in the series after @Going Nowhere Fast.^
Praise for THE TRAVELS OF A T-SHIRT IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY "Engrossing . . . (Rivoli) goes wherever the T-shirt goes, and there are surprises around every corner . . . full of memorable characters and vivid scenes." —Time "An engaging and illuminating saga. . . . Rivoli follows her T-shirt along its route, but that is like saying that Melville follows his whale. . . . Her nuanced and fair-minded approach is all the more powerful for eschewing the pretense of ideological absolutism, and her telescopic look through a single industry has all the makings of an economics classic." —The New York Times "Rarely is a business book so well written that one would gladly stay up all night to finish it. Pietra Rivoli's The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy is just such a page-turner." —CIO magazine "Succeeds admirably . . . T-shirts may not have changed the world, but their story is a useful account of how free trade and protectionism certainly have." —Financial Times "[A] fascinating exploration of the history, economics, and politics of world trade . . . The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy is a thought-provoking yarn that exhibits the ugly, the bad, and the good of globalization, and points to the unintended positive consequences of the clash between proponents and opponents of free trade." —Star-Telegram (Fort Worth) "Part travelogue, part history, and part economics, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy is ALL storytelling, and in the grand style. A must-read." —Peter J. Dougherty, Senior Economics Editor, Princeton University Press author of Who's Afraid of Adam Smith? "A readable and evenhanded treatment of the complexities of free trade . . . As Rivoli repeatedly makes clear, there is absolutely nothing free about free trade except the slogan." —San Francisco Chronicle
