Walking Europe's Edge
Walking Europe's Edge

Author: Stephen Powell

Publisher: Silverwood Books

Published: 2021-09-23

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 9781800420601

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Portugal is both a celebrated and an unknown land. Millions come to enjoy its beaches and the fashionable coastal cities of Lisbon and Porto. In this sense it looms large in the minds of many. But its out-of-the-way places, its turbulent history and contemporary challenges are little-known outside of the country's boundaries. From autumn 2018 to spring 2019, British journalist Stephen Powell travelled the length of Portugal, following a zigzag path of nearly 1,500 kilometres on foot. Away from the mass tourism, he wanted to form his own unhurried impressions of this very distinctive country. He discovered a very mixed reality. The dark side was the blight of rural exodus that is emptying so many villages. But he also found a profoundly generous, warm-hearted people with time to converse - a gift that is not found everywhere. "Stephen Powell's beautifully written account of his life-changing walk through Portugal enriches the reader with his insights and impressions of the country's history, culture, scenery and spirit. For me, the book was a fascinating journey of discovery through Portugal's lesser-known provinces, further enhanced with exquisite illustrations by two of his daughters, Megan and Rachel. Simply wonderful." Valerie Poore, memoir author

Border
Border

Author: Kapka Kassabova

Publisher: Graywolf Press

Published: 2017-09-05

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 1555979785

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“Remarkable: a book about borders that makes the reader feel sumptuously free.” —Peter Pomerantsev In this extraordinary work of narrative reportage, Kapka Kassabova returns to Bulgaria, from where she emigrated as a girl twenty-five years previously, to explore the border it shares with Turkey and Greece. When she was a child, the border zone was rumored to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, and it swarmed with soldiers and spies. On holidays in the “Red Riviera” on the Black Sea, she remembers playing on the beach only miles from a bristling electrified fence whose barbs pointed inward toward the enemy: the citizens of the totalitarian regime. Kassabova discovers a place that has been shaped by successive forces of history: the Soviet and Ottoman empires, and, older still, myth and legend. Her exquisite portraits of fire walkers, smugglers, treasure hunters, botanists, and border guards populate the book. There are also the ragged men and women who have walked across Turkey from Syria and Iraq. But there seem to be nonhuman forces at work here too: This densely forested landscape is rich with curative springs and Thracian tombs, and the tug of the ancient world, of circular time and animism, is never far off. Border is a scintillating, immersive travel narrative that is also a shadow history of the Cold War, a sideways look at the migration crisis troubling Europe, and a deep, witchy descent into interior and exterior geographies.

Walking Since Daybreak
Walking Since Daybreak

Author: Modris Eksteins

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780618082315

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Part history, part autobiography, Eksteins relates the tragic story of the Baltic nations before, during, and after World War II through personal stories from his family. Photos and map.

Walking in the European City
Walking in the European City

Author: Timothy Shortell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-02-24

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1317000641

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Sociologists have long noted that dynamism is an essential part of the urban way of life. However, walking as a significant social activity and crucial research method (in spite of its ubiquity as part of urban life) has often been overlooked. This volume considers walking in the city from a variety of perspectives, in a variety of places and with a variety of methods, to engage with the question of how walking can contribute to the sociological imagination and reveal sociological knowledge. Bringing together new research on sites across Europe, Walking in the European City addresses the nature of everyday mobility in contemporary urban settings, shedding light not only on the ways in which walking relates to other social institutions and practices, but also as a method for studying urban life. With attention to intersections of race and ethnicity, gender and class, as well as the manner in which processes of gentrification transform urban space, this book examines questions of access to public places, exploring the ways in which urban dwellers’ use of and relation to neighbourhood spaces are shaped by inequalities of status and power. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, geography and anthropology with interests in urban studies, mobility and research methods.

Where the Wild Winds Are
Where the Wild Winds Are

Author: Nick Hunt

Publisher: Nicholas Brealey

Published: 2017-11-07

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1473658802

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Selected as a Book of the Year by the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator "Travel writing in excelsis." -Jan Morris, author of Venice "A thrilling and gorgeous tale, packed with meteorological wonder." -Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun Nick Hunt sets off on an unlikely quest: to follow four of Europe's winds across the continent. His wind-walks begin on Cross Fell, the highest point of the Pennines, as he chases the roaring Helm - the only named wind in Britain.In southern Europe he follows the Bora - a bitter northerly that blows from Trieste through Slovenia and down the Croatian coast. His hunt for the "snow-eating" Foehn becomes a meandering journey of exhilaration and despair through the Alpine valleys of Switzerland, and his final walk traces an ancient pilgrims' path in the south of France on the trail of the Mistral - the "wind of madness," which animated and tormented Vincent Van Gogh. These are journeys into wild wind, but also into wild landscapes and the people who inhabit them - a cast of meteorologists, storm chasers, mountain men, eccentric wind enthusiasts, sailors and shepherds. Soon Nick finds himself borne along by the very forces he is pursuing, through rain, blizzards, howling gales, and back through time itself. For, where the wild winds are, there are also myths and legends, history and hearsay, science and superstition - and occasionally remote mountain cabins packed with pickles, cured meats and homemade alcohol. Where the Wild Winds Are is a beautiful, unconventional travelogue that makes the invisible visible.

Return to Glow
Return to Glow

Author: Chandi Wyant

Publisher:

Published: 2017-04-02

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780998463001

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

After a divorce and traumatic illness, Chandi Wyant set out on Italy's historic pilgrimage route to walk for forty days to Rome. With a boundless passion for Italy, she brings alive the history of the route while leading the reader on her inner journey as she finds sustenance and comfort from surprising sources.

Wanderlust
Wanderlust

Author: Rebecca Solnit

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2001-06-01

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1101199555

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A passionate, thought-provoking exploration of walking as a political and cultural activity, from the author of Orwell's Roses Drawing together many histories--of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores--Rebecca Solnit creates a fascinating portrait of the range of possibilities presented by walking. Arguing that the history of walking includes walking for pleasure as well as for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit focuses on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from philosophers to poets to mountaineers. She profiles some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction--from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton's Nadja--finding a profound relationship between walking and thinking and walking and culture. Solnit argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in our ever more car-dependent and accelerated world.

At the Water's Edge
At the Water's Edge

Author: Carl Zimmer

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 1999-09-08

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0684856239

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Everybody Out of the Pond At the Water's Edge will change the way you think about your place in the world. The awesome journey of life's transformation from the first microbes 4 billion years ago to Homo sapiens today is an epic that we are only now beginning to grasp. Magnificent and bizarre, it is the story of how we got here, what we left behind, and what we brought with us. We all know about evolution, but it still seems absurd that our ancestors were fish. Darwin's idea of natural selection was the key to solving generation-to-generation evolution -- microevolution -- but it could only point us toward a complete explanation, still to come, of the engines of macroevolution, the transformation of body shapes across millions of years. Now, drawing on the latest fossil discoveries and breakthrough scientific analysis, Carl Zimmer reveals how macroevolution works. Escorting us along the trail of discovery up to the current dramatic research in paleontology, ecology, genetics, and embryology, Zimmer shows how scientists today are unveiling the secrets of life that biologists struggled with two centuries ago. In this book, you will find a dazzling, brash literary talent and a rigorous scientific sensibility gracefully brought together. Carl Zimmer provides a comprehensive, lucid, and authoritative answer to the mystery of how nature actually made itself.

Hip Hop at Europe's Edge
Hip Hop at Europe's Edge

Author: Milosz Miszczynski

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2017-03-27

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0253023211

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Essays examining the impact of hip hop music on pop culture and youth identity in post-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe. Responding to the development of a lively hip hop culture in Central and Eastern European countries, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates how a universal model of hip hop serves as a contextually situated platform of cultural exchange and becomes locally inflected. After the Soviet Union fell, hip hop became popular in urban environments in the region, but it has often been stigmatized as inauthentic, due to an apparent lack of connection to African American historical roots and black identity. Originally strongly influenced by aesthetics from the United States, hip hop in Central and Eastern Europe has gradually developed unique, local trajectories, a number of which are showcased in this volume. On the one hand, hip hop functions as a marker of Western cosmopolitanism and democratic ideology, but as the contributors show, it is also a malleable genre that has been infused with so much local identity that it has lost most of its previous associations with “the West” in the experiences of local musicians, audiences, and producers. Contextualizing hip hop through the prism of local experiences and regional musical expressions, these valuable case studies reveal the broad spectrum of its impact on popular culture and youth identity in the post-Soviet world. “The volume represents a valuable and timely contribution to the study of popular culture in central and eastern Europe. Hip Hop at Europe’s Edge will not only appeal to readers interested in contemporary popular culture in central and eastern Europe, but also inspire future research on post-socialism’s unique local adaptations of global cultural trends.” —The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review “The authors of this edited volume do not romanticize and heroize the genre by automatically equating it with political opposition, a fate often suffered by rock before. Instead, the book has to be given much credit for presenting a very nuanced picture of hip hop’s entanglement—or non-entanglement, for that matter—with politics in this wide stretch of the world, past and present.” —The Russian Review