Travel : Essays & Travelogues

Richard Henry Dana left the privileged life of a Cambridge University scholar to see the world as a sailor aboard an American merchant vessel. From his experiences, he wrote this book to tell the truth about sailing from Boston to California - the hard way, around Cape Horn at the tip of South America. His story was just one chapter in an incredible life, but what a chapter: visiting the missions of California long before the Gold Rush, losing sailors overboard, putting up with the arrogance of officers, surviving the punishments meted out by a maniacal captain, and surviving the terrors of Cape Horn. more...

Price: $5.99

Simon Myers spent years in the Middle Kingdom trying to fathom just an inkling of China. In this work he offers an informed and personal account of China, aiming to go behind the cliches and provide a different take on life in this fascinating and frustrating country. more...

Price: $14.99

How wide is the gulf in understanding between the West and the Muslim world? How real is the risk of nuclear war on the subcontinent? What will be the long term effects of the Afghan Wars? How widespread - and how justified - is resentment towards the US and the West? Ethan Casey examines these compelling questions while living, working and teaching in Lahore, Pakistan - a Muslim country on the frontline of the US-declared 'war on terror'. more...

Price: $19.99

This volume is the first-ever English translation of the memoirs of Karl Heller, a twenty-year-old aspiring Austrian botanist who traveled to Mexico in 1845 to collect specimens. He passed through the Caribbean, lived for a time in the mountains of Veracruz, and journeyed to Mexico City through the cities of Puebla and Cholula. After a brief residence in the capital, Heller moved westward to examine the volcanoes and silver mines near Toluca. When the United States invaded Mexico in 1846–47 conditions became chaotic, and the enterprising botanist was forced to flee to Yucatán. Heller lived in the port city of Campeche, but visited Mèrida, the ruins of Uxmal, and the remote southern area of the Champotòn River." From there Heller, traveling by canoe, journeyed through southern Tabasco and northern Chiapas and finally returned to Vienna through Cuba and the United States bringing back thousands of samples of Mexican plants and animals. Heller's account is one of the few documents we have from travelers who visited Mexico in this period, and it is particularly useful in describing conditions outside the capital of Mexico City. In 1853 Heller published his German-language account as Reisen in Mexiko, but the work has remained virtually unknown to English or Spanish readers. This edition now provides a complete, annotated, and highly readable translation. more...

Price: $23.96

American Notes is the fascinating travel journal of one of nineteenth-century America's most celebrated visitors: Charles Dickens. A lively chronicle of his five-month trip around the United States in 1842, the book records the author's adventures journeying by steamboat and stagecoach, as well as his impressions of everything from schools and prisons to table manners and slavery. more...

Price: $15.50