In this vividly written, politically-oriented travelogue, Tomas Klvana offers a stark narrative of his decade-long travels to Cuba, interweaving a political analysis of the country's current state with a critical assessment of the ideology that has shaped its development. Cuba: A Brief History of the End reveals an immersive tableau of tropical ......
In 2008, the Chinese government cracked down on protests throughout Tibet, and journalist Amy Yee found herself covering a press conference with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, his exile home in India. She never imagined a personal encounter with the spiritual leader would spark a global, fourteen-year journey to spotlight the stories of Tibetans in ......
Hong Kong is a city where limousines outnumber taxis, partygoers countdown to Christmas every December 24, and giant billboards of fortune tellers and cram school tutors compete with breathtaking skylines. This collection of essays zeroes in on the city's idiosyncrasies with deadpan precision. An outsider looking in and an insider looking out, ......
One Man's Bikepacking Journey to Discover History from a Different Kind of Saddle
The Pony Express has a hold on the American imagination wildly out of proportion to its actual contribution to the history and development of the West. It lasted less than eighteen months-about the amount of time it took author Scott Alumbaugh to plan and ride the route-and utterly failed by every measure of success attributed to it. The only ......
Inspired by tales of a mythic Round River, a circular stream where "what goes around comes around," John Hildebrand sets off to rediscover his home state. Wisconsin is in the midst of an identity crisis, torn by new political divisions and the old gulf between city and countryside. Cobbling rivers together, from the burly Mississippi to the ......
Years ago, Steve Hannah's chance detour through the Midwest cut short a planned cross-country trip. He found himself in Wisconsin, a distinctly different place from the east coast where he was born and raised. Charmingly beautiful and full of welcoming people, America's dairyland would soon become his home. Dairylandia recounts Steve Hannah's ......
The wood used by master craftsmen to create many of the world's legendary stringed instruments-violins and cellos, mandolins and guitars-comes from seven near-mythic European forests. In his latest book, Jeffrey Greene takes the reader into those woodlands and into luthiers' workshops to show us how the world's finest instruments not only ......
At the time of her death in 1962, Kathleen M. Murphy was recognized as "the most widely and most knowledgeably travelled Irish woman of her time . . . in so far as she let herself be known to the public at all." An abiding interest in sacred sites and ancient civilizations took Murphy down the Amazon and over the Andes, into the jungles of ......