Books, Travel, Middle East

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Rory Stewart
The Places In Between
by Harvest Books (Paperback)

In January 2002 Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan-surviving by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers. By day he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers' floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient past. Along the way Stewart met heroes and rogues, tribal elders and teenage soldiers, Taliban commanders and foreign-aid workers. He was also adopted by an unexpected companion-a retired fighting mastiff he named Babur in honor of Afghanistan's first Mughal emperor, in whose footsteps the pair was following.Through these encounters-by turns touching, con-founding, surprising, and funny-Stewart makes tangible the forces of tradition, ideology, and allegiance that shape life in the map's countless places in between.

DK Publishing
Egypt (Eyewitness Travel Guides)
by DK Travel (Paperback)

Colin Thubron
Shadow of the Silk Road (P.S.)
by Harper Perennial (Paperback) (Release Date: 2008-07-01)

To travel the Silk Road, the greatest land route on earth, is to trace the passage not only of trade and armies but also of ideas, religions, and inventions. Making his way by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart, and camel, Colin Thubron covered some seven thousand miles in eight months—out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran into Kurdish Turkey—and explored an ancient world in modern ferment.

Ian Andrew, Dugald Steer
Egyptology
by Candlewick (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2004-11-04)

A new discovery from the publishers of DRAGONOLOGY! Discover the wonders of ancient Egypt through a fascinating journal from a lost expedition - a treasure trove of fact and fantasy featuring a novelty element on every spread. Here are just a few of EYGPTOLOGY's special features: 1) an extravagantly gilded cover, featuring a raised Horus hawk pendant with three encrusted gems 2) a playable game of Senet(ancient Egyptian checkers) including playing board, pieces, original-style dice, and rules 3) a souvenir booklet showing how to read simple hieroglyphs 4) a scrap of "mummy cloth" 5) a facsimile of the gilded mummy mask of King Tut 6) a gilded eye-of-Horus amulet with a "jewel" 7) fold-out maps 8) drawings and photographs 9) period postcards 10) a letter from the former Keeper of Antiquities at the British Museum, explaining which parts of this unique tale may be accepted as fact, which are guided by legend, and which reflect the ...

Paul Theroux
The Great Railway Bazaar
by Mariner Books (Paperback)

First published more than thirty years ago, Paul Theroux's strange, unique, and hugely entertaining railway odyssey has become a modern classic of travel literature. Here Theroux recounts his early adventures on an unusual grand continental tour. Asia's fabled trains -- the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Frontier Mail, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Mandalay Express, the Trans-Siberian Express -- are the stars of a journey that takes him on a loop eastbound from London's Victoria Station to Tokyo Central, then back from Japan on the Trans-Siberian. Brimming with Theroux's signature humor and wry observations, this engrossing chronicle is essential reading for both the ardent adventurer and the armchair traveler.

DK Publishing
Jerusalem and the Holy Land (Eyewitness Travel Guides)
by DK Travel (Paperback)

Matthew Firestone, Rafael Wlodarski, Anthony Sattin, Zora O'Neill
Egypt (Country Guide)
by Lonely Planet (Paperback)

Discover EgyptFind a Cairo coffeehouse to suit your own style; unwind, chat and inhale deeply over a sheeshaForget hot springs: try a hot sand bath in the middle of the desertTake belly-dancing lessons from the most famous teacher in EgyptRelax in the soft light of early morning on a Nile cruiseIn This Guide:Five authors, 295 days of research, hundreds of touts and a week-long scuba courseSpecial chapter on cruising the Nile: choose from timeless feluccas and splendid dahabiyyas, the Rolls Royce of their eraIllustrated Pharaonic Egypt chapter by world-renowned Egyptologist Dr Joann Fletcher brings the ancient rulers to life

Walking The Bible CD: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses
by HarperAudio (CD) (Release Date: 2003-11-25)

Rory Stewart
The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq
by Harvest Books (Paperback)

In August 2003, at the age of thirty, Rory Stewart took a taxi from Jordan to Baghdad. A Farsi-speaking British diplomat, he was soon appointed deputy governor of Amarah and then Nasiriyah, provinces in the remote, impoverished marsh regions of southern Iraq. He spent the next eleven months negotiating hostage releases, holding elections, and splicing together some semblance of an infrastructure for a population of millions teetering on the brink of civil war. The Prince of the Marshes tells the story of Stewart’s year. As a participant, he takes us inside the occupation and beyond the Green Zone, introducing us to a colorful cast of Iraqis and revealing the complexity and fragility of a society we struggle to understand. By turns funny and harrowing, moving and incisive, this book amounts to a unique portrait of heroism and the tragedy that intervention inevitably courts in the modern age. (08/08/2006)

Raja Shehadeh
Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape
by Scribner (Paperback)

Raja Shehadeh is a passionate hill walker. He enjoys nothing more than heading out into the countryside that surrounds his home. But in recent years, his hikes have become less than bucolic and sometimes downright dangerous. That is because his home is Ramallah, on the Palestinian West Bank, and the landscape he traverses is now the site of a tense standoff between his fellow Palestinians and settlers newly arrived from Israel.In this original and evocative book, we accompany Raja on six walks taken between 1978 and 2006. The earlier forays are peaceful affairs, allowing our guide to meditate at length on the character of his native land, a terrain of olive trees on terraced hillsides, luxuriant valleys carved by sacred springs, carpets of wild iris and hyacinth and ancient monasteries built more than a thousand years ago. Shehadeh's love for this magical place saturates his renderings of its history and topography. But latterly, as seemingly endless concrete is poured to build ...

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