Other books that might interest you

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  The Great Western Society - A...

  Anthony Burton

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  This chronicle of one of England’s most popular railway museums tells the remarkable story of four friends who turned their boyhood dream into reality.   Located in the Didcot Railway Centre in Oxfordshire, England, the Great Western Society is dedicated to preserving the steam locomotives and other artifacts of Great Western Railway. Starting in the 1830s and operating well into the 20h century, G.W.R. brough a sense of romance to train travel as it connected London to Western England and Wales. But while this British railway company is truly legendary, The Great Western Society has a fascinating history of its own.   Formed in 1960, The Great Western Society was founded by a group of schoolboys who wanted to save a Great Western Tank locomotive and an auto trailer. A letter they sent to The Railway Magazine proposing their idea led to one of Britain’s most successful heritage railway projects. Today that original project has blossomed into the best collection of Great Western rolling stock and locomotives in the world.

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  Rediscovering the Great Plains -...

  Norman Scott Henderson

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  An “engrossing” memoir of traveling Canada's Qu’Appelle River Valley via horse, canoe, and Native American dogsled (Calgary Herald).   The North American Plains are one of the world’s great landscapes—but today, the most intimate experience most of us are likely to have of the great grasslands is from behind the window of a car or train. It was not always so. In the earliest days, Plains Indians traveled on foot across the vastness, with only the fierce, wolflike Plains dogs as companions. Later, with the arrival of Europeans, horses and canoes appeared on the Plains. In this book, Norman Henderson, a leading scholar of the world’s great temperate grasslands, revives these traditional modes of travel, journeying along 200 miles of Canada’s Qu’Appelle River valley by dog and travois (the wooden rack pulled by dogs and horses used by Native Americans to transport goods), then by canoe, and finally by horse and travois.   Henderson interweaves his own adventures with the exploits of earlier Plains travelers, like Lewis and Clark, Francisco Coronado, La Vérendrye, and Alexander Henry. Lesser-known experiences of the fur traders and others who struggled to cross this strange and forbidding landscape also illuminate the story, while Henderson’s often humorous description of his attempts to find and train old Plains breeds of dogs and horses highlight the difficulties involved in recreating archaic travel methods. He also draws on the history of the world’s other great temperate grasslands: the South American pampas and the Eurasian steppes. Recalling the work of Ian Frazier and Jonathan Raban, Henderson’s account offers a deeper understanding of the natural and human history of the North American Plains.   “A captivating ‘biography of a landscape,’ its good humor blended with impressive scholarship, including snappy thumbnail histories of canoes, horses, dogs, barbed wire and those pesky blood-sucking mosquitoes.” —Publishers Weekly

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  A Mouthful of Stars - A...

  Kim Sunee

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  The acclaimed author of Trail of Crumbs shares recipes and stories from her many culinary adventures in this beautifully illustrated cookbook. 
   
  From Seoul to New Orleans, Provence, and beyond, Kim Sunee has spent her life exploring the world and its many cuisines. In A Mouthful of Stars, she shares her interpretation of some of her favorite recipes and cooking discoveries from her many travels.  
   
  Recipes range from Tuscan crostini di fegatini to Louisiana dirty rice, traditional North African dishes, and favorites from the years she spent in Provence and Paris. Each one tells a story of discovery and new horizons, of cherished togetherness, or replenishing solitude. A Mouthful of Stars is a culinary journey celebrating the author’s time in many lands and cooking in many kitchens.

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  My Family and Other Enemies -...

  Mary Novakovich

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  My Family and Other Enemies is part travelogue, part memoir that dives into the hinterland of Croatia. Mary Novakovich explores her ongoing relationship with the region of Lika in central Croatia, where her parents were born. 'Lika is little known to most travellers - apart from Plitvice Lakes National Park and the birthplace of Nikola Tesla' she says. 'It's a region of wild beauty that has been battered by centuries of conflict. Used as a buffer zone between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires for hundreds of years, Lika became a land of war and warriors. And when Yugoslavia started to disintegrate in 1991, it was here where some of the first shots were fired.' Shipped off to Lika as a child during the supposedly golden years of Tito to stay with relatives she barely knew, Novakovich has been revisiting Croatia ever since, researching the story of her family's often harrowing life: in 1941 her aunt was the only survivor of Serbs massacred by Croatian fascists; and her mother saved her grandmother from being buried alive when she was thought to be dead from typhus. Amidst adversity there is resilience and laughter, too, with plenty of light to balance the shade. Eccentric and entertaining characters abound, showing typically sardonic Balkan humour. And, this being the Balkans, much of daily life revolves around food, which features prominently. Throughout, aspects of Croatian history that relate to Lika are woven into the narrative to give the story some much-needed context. And in recounting her own family's tumultuous history, Novakovich opens up a world that is little known outside the Balkans, telling the stories of people whose experiences weren't widely reported at the time, when the devastation in Croatia was superseded by the Bosnian conflict and media attention moved elsewhere.

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  The Notorious Guide to Britain -...

  Paul Donnelley

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  A fun and informative trip around the highways (not forgetting the low ways) and byways of Great Britain. Within its pages you will find love and romance, murder and mayhem, royalty, aristocrats and commoners, politics and politicians, sex and scandal, sporting triumphs and sporting disasters, millionaires and eccentrics, film stars and train robbers and much more besides. Why were some customers at Harrods offered cognac or smelling salts during their visit to the store? What links DJ “Whispering Bob” Harris to a split pair of velvet trousers? Which high street store issued a patent for a drug to treat syphilis? The staff of which shop had uniforms by Mary Quant and hairstyles by Vidal Sassoon? Who placed a sign on her bedroom door bearing the legend ‘Chief Chick’? The cashpoint was invented while someone was having a bath A fascinating tour of the weird, wonderful, murderous and marvellous by Sunday Times Bestselling author Paul Donnelley

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  The Divine Heart of Darkness -...

  Catherine Bird

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  There is a universal assumption that associates darkness with fear and evil. Why is it that light has come to be exalted, venerated—worshipped even—whilst darkness has become demonised and feared? As a devoted lover of the dark, Catherine Bird seeks to ask how we can use the experience of darkness to lift our spirits, challenge our hearts and minds, and draw us closer into the heart of God. 
  
   
  Drawing on material not only from Biblical and religious studies, but also from anthropology, biology, sociology and the creative arts, The Divine Heart of Darkness offers a new way of understanding darkness and invites you to enter a new realm in which light and darkness co-exist and complement each other, both with beautiful and life-affirming qualities, and both with challenging and negative qualities—not reflecting a dichotomy of good and evil, but rather a balanced universe in which God’s nature is revealed in all things which are healing and affirming of life.

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