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Books: Travel: Barbados
The Travel Bookby Roz Hopkins List Price: $50.00 Available from Amazon $31.50 On 7-21-2006 
See Item's Page From Booklist *Starred Review* Even the most avid readers of travel guides and travel literature will not have encountered a book quite like this one. It is huge and heavy but reasonably priced, and it is vastly informative, which is its calling card. All the writers who contribute to the Lonely Planet travel guide series have put heads, knowledge, and experience together and come up with an A-Z series of capsule profiles of every country in the world, 230 in number. Each country gets a two-page spread, on which are placed, like luscious dishes set before one at a feast, illustrations that are typical of Lonely Planet's unique, non-picture-postcard brand of shots. The accompanying text presents a cogent rundown of the best experiences for gaining the essence of the place; books to read beforehand; music to listen to before you go; food and drink to consume once you are there; and a few brief but pungent closing comments on the trademark things to do and buy and see and what, ultimately, is the best surprise awaiting the tourist. For borrowers in the travel section to sit down, look at, and make notes from, without taking off the premises. Brad Hooper Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Book Description The world is a breathtakingly big place, and in this big book we have undertaken the big task of detailing as much of it as we can - every single country, many of the larger dependencies and other, smaller destinations. With the traveler's experience at its heart, this book shows a slice of life in every corner of the globe, and all points in between, engaging the reader's senses in an adventure which conjures up the sights, smells, tastes, sounds and feel of our amazing world. |
Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Roadby Neil Peart List Price: $19.95 Available from Amazon $12.97 On 7-21-2006
See Item's Page Mike Fink, CNN Headline News "Peart’s story reminded me of Theodore Roosevelt’s travel West to overcome the sorrow of losing his wife and mother" Book Description In less than a year, Neil Peart lost both his 19-year-old daughter, Selena, and his wife, Jackie. Faced with overwhelming sadness and isolated from the world in his home on the lake, Peart was left without direction. This memoir tells of the sense of loss and directionlessness that led him on a 55,000-mile journey by motorcycle across much of North America, down through Mexico to Belize, and back again. He had needed to get away, but had not really needed a destination. His travel adventures chronicle his personal odyssey and include stories of reuniting with friends and family, grieving, thinking, and reminiscing as he rode until he encountered the miracle that allowed him to find peace. |
What Would the Founders Do?: Our Questions, Their Answersby Richard Brookhiser List Price: $26.00 Available from Amazon $16.38 On 7-21-2006 
See Item's Page From Publishers Weekly [Signature]Reviewed by Michael LindIt might be thought that nothing new could be said about America's founding fathers, in the midst of the contemporary avalanche of tomes about Washington, Jefferson and other early American leaders. But Rick Brookhiser, inspired perhaps by a Christian motto—"What Would Jesus Do?" (WWJD)—has come up with a way to describe the views of the architects of the American republic that is as entertaining as it is informative."Americans have been asking what the founders would do since the founders died," writes Brookhiser, a journalist and historian (Alexander Hamilton and The Way of the WASP). Combining the skills of a first-rate writer with those of a medium at a séance, Brookhiser channels the spirits of eminent early Americans in discussing contemporary public debates. At times, Brookhiser has to stretch to find an analogy between the era of the founders and today, such as his comparison between stem cell research and the old practice of robbing graves for medical research.In other cases, however, the conceit works to shed light on present and past alike. Should the U.S. attempt to spread democracy around the world? Brookhiser makes a case for the caution of Alexander Hamilton rather than the optimism of Thomas Jefferson. The war on drugs? "The founders would not have fought a war on drugs," but would have taxed them instead, Brookhiser declares, reasoning from the excise tax on whiskey imposed by the federal government. What would the founders do about Social Security? "Social Security follows none of their models (family provision, charity, reward for service, investment)." The book reveals that many of the public policy questions confronting the early American republic are similar to challenges Americans wrestle with today. The values of 18th-century Americans, by contrast, were radically different and benighted by modern standards. Jefferson, while opposing slavery, argued that blacks were inferior and should be expatriated from the United States. The founders took a male-dominated society for granted, though Hamilton was willing to consider sweatshop work for women: "It is worthy of particular remark, that, in general, women and children are rendered more useful by manufacturing establishments than they would otherwise be."With a rare union of wit and scholarship, What Would the Founders Do? presents history as a source of continuing debates, rather than as a set of answers. Comparing the founders to present-day Americans, Brookhiser concludes: "We can be as intelligent as they were, and as serious, as practical, and as brave. We can; as they said, all men are created equal."(May 5)Michael Lind, the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America's Greatest President. Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist It is a long and honored (and often abused) tradition to refer to the Founders while stating one's position on contemporary political controversies. For example, during the early, passionate arguments over New Deal legislation, FDR partisans asserted their intentions to use Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends. Brookhiser is a celebrated historian who has written extensively about some of the Founding Fathers. Here he brings his vast knowledge and considerable wit to bear on analyzing how they might approach some of our currently divisive issues. About political partisanship, Brookhiser points out that most Founders deplored "factions" but were willing to unsheathe swords in a good political tussle. Gay rights? Brookhiser doubts any of them would have promoted it, since even the "libertarian" Jefferson supported repression of sodomites. In a sense, this is a frivolous book, since the Founders were generally as ideologically inconsistent as liberals and conservatives are today. Who knows how they would have reacted to problems in a world they could not imagine? But as an intellectual exercise, this is an enjoyable, stimulating work. Jay Freeman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved |
Norway (Eyewitness Travel Guides)by Snorre Evensberget List Price: $20.00 Available from Amazon $13.00 On 7-21-2006
See Item's Page Book Description See the best Norway has to offer, from stunning fjords and solitary mountains to the cosmopolitan city of Oslo and small fishing villages, in this inspiring guide. Includes practical advice on hiking, skiing, night life and local culinary specialties. Features over 850 full-color photographs, maps and illustrations.
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All Things Hidden (A Seaport Suspense Novel)by Kathy Herman List Price: $12.99 Available from Amazon $10.39 On 7-21-2006
See Item's Page Book Description The Past Is Back Ellen Jones's hands are full after she begrudgingly brings her aging father to Seaport. Lawrence's memory is failing - though he can't seem to forget what he's been holding against Ellen for the past forty years. But when he's diagnosed with Alzheimer's, Ellen realizes she never released her resentment and it's too late for reconciliation. Then suddenly - literally overnight - her son, Owen, comes face-to-face with the consequences of his wilder days gone by. No one is prepared for the changes he, and the entire family, will have to make as a result. The past weighing heavily in the present, a clean start is out of the question for both Ellen and Owen. How can God heal their deepest wounds? Enter the least expected person of the bunch About The Author Kathy Herman is an award-winning poet and bestselling novelist who is very much at home in the Christian publishing industry, having served on staff at the Christian Booksellers Association for five years. She has drawn on her eleven years of bookstore experience as a children's products specialist to conduct related seminars in the U.S. and Canada. She has helped develop public school character-building curriculum and has also been a preliminary judge for the ECPA Gold Medallion Awards. Kathy and her husband, Paul, residents of Tyler, Texas, have three grown children and five grandchildren. |
Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings (Bantam Classics)by Jonathan Swift Available from Amazon $4.95 On 7-21-2006
See Item's Page From School Library Journal Gr 7 Up-Jonathan Swift's satirical novel was first published in 1726, yet it is still valid today. Gulliver's Travels describes the four fantastic voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a kindly ship's surgeon. Swift portrays him as an observer, a reporter, and a victim of circumstance. His travels take him to Lilliput where he is a giant observing tiny people. In Brobdingnag, the tables are reversed and he is the tiny person in a land of giants where he is exhibited as a curiosity at markets and fairs. The flying island of Laputa is the scene of his next voyage. The people plan and plot as their country lies in ruins. It is a world of illusion and distorted values. The fourth and final voyage takes him to the home of the Houyhnhnms, gentle horses who rule the land. He also encounters Yahoos, filthy bestial creatures who resemble humans. The story is read by British actor Martin Shaw with impeccable diction and clarity and great inflection. If broken into short listening segments, the tapes are an excellent tool for presenting an abridged version of Gulliver's Travels.-Jean Deck, Lambuth University, Jackson, TN Copyright 2001 Cahners business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.From AudioFile Naxos follows its usual practice of punctuating the narrative with carefully chosen classical music segments appropriate to the mood of the particular part of the story. Neville Jason reads this classic satire, supposedly a travelogue to remote islands with bizarre inhabitants, with an intense British voice that is crisp and effective. This is a heavy abridgment of the original, with some choppiness in continuity. Everyone will recognize the Lilliputians and the giants of Brogdingnag; the airborne islanders and intelligent horses are less familiar. Abridger Daniel Eilon retains the story's essential core, and Jason captures the tone well. D.W. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition. |
Madam Secretary: A Memoirby Madeleine Albright List Price: $27.95 Available from Amazon $17.61 On 7-21-2006
See Item's Page From Publishers Weekly Albright proposes to "combine the personal with policy" in these memoirs, a sensible narrative strategy, considering her emblematic struggles as a working mother breaking through the glass ceiling of the foreign policy establishment to become U.N. ambassador and secretary of state. Albright's recollections of her background as a child refugee from Czechoslovakia and its twin scourges of Nazism and Communism (later, she accounts for the belated discovery of her Jewish heritage) suggest a basis for her belief in "assertive multilateralism." Although she laments coining this derided term, it's an apt name for her doctrine that human rights should be protected by the international community, led by American power. In the Clinton administration, this was the hawkish position, opposed by Colin Powell, William Cohen and others more cautious about military commitments. Albright treats these and other rivalries with restraint, but she is relatively candid about policy and personality conflicts, to an extent unusual in a diplomat and welcome in an autobiographer. Pitched at a popular audience, Albright's anecdotal style is engagingly direct, but it's not suited to mounting a comprehensive defense of humanitarian interventionism in light of failures in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia. Albright is willing to admit mistakes, though she generally pursues the political memoirist's standard agenda of spinning the historical record. Filled with shrewd character sketches of world leaders, Albright's descriptions of the Balkan conflicts, the Middle East peace process and other critical negotiations are thorough and insightful. This memoir captures the disarmingly blunt purposefulness that made its author an irrepressible force in foreign affairs. Copyright 2003 Reed business Information, Inc. From The New Yorker This memoir by America's first female Secretary of State is a deeply conventional book, full of long accounts of negotiations and reflections on the proper uses of American power. Albright is not out to settle scores (her criticisms of colleagues are mild at worst) and seems, on balance, pleased with the foreign-policy record of the Clinton Administration. This might have made a dull book, were it not for Albright's appealing character—personally ingenuous but professionally sophisticated, earnest but hard-nosed. Her eye for details—clothing, food, travel conditions—helps bring the diplomat's world to life, and her portraits of foreign leaders are lively and evocative. The result is a book that creates a sense of policy made by real people, not by world-bestriding titans. Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to the Paperback edition. |
The Art of Travelby Alain de Botton List Price: $23.00 Available from Amazon $15.64 On 7-21-2006
See Item's Page From Library Journal An experienced traveler and the author of five books, including How Proust Can Change Your Life, De Botton here offers nine essays concerning the art of travel. Divided into five sections "Departure," "Motives," "Landscape," "Art," and "Return" the essays start with one of the author's travel experiences, meander through artists or writers related to it, and then intertwine the two. De Botton's style is very thoughtful and dense; he considers events of the moment and relates them to his internal dialog, showing how experiences from the past affect the present. In "On Curiosity," for example, which describes a weekend in Madrid, De Botton compares his reliance on a very detailed guidebook to the numerous systematic measurements Alexander von Humboldt made during his 1799 travels in South America. De Botton compares Humboldt's insatiable desire for detail with his own ennui and wish that he were home. There are also details about a fight over dessert, the van Gogh trail in Provence, and Wordsworth's vision of nature. Although well written and interesting, this volume will have limited popular appeal. Recommended for larger public libraries. Alison Hopkins, Brantford P.L., ON Copyright 2002 Cahners business Information, Inc. From Booklist Rather than lavishing pages on the sumptuous taste of a sun-ripened olive in Provence, philosopher de Botton examines what inspires us to escape the humdrum and purchase tickets to Tahiti, tromp through the countryside, or wander Rome. Left to one voice, such an inquiry might grow dull, but de Botton uses the lives and works of artists and writers to explore the premise. With each chapter, the author dissects our motivation to depart normality and go (he quotes Baudelaire) "anywhere, anywhere!" De Botton's anecdotal accounts of his own travels illustrate the theme of each chapter, such as exoticism or escapism, showing the unexpected (but all too common) disappointments inherent in getting away. Then, using the interior and artistic lives of others, de Botton probes the psychological underpinnings of why we go. The book shines when discussing Flaubert's lifelong urge for Egypt and painter Edward Hopper's affinity for the desolation of fuel stops and Automats. This literary travelogue feeds hungry readers seeking self-insight. Nicole Waller Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved |
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