Lands Of Lost Borders

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Lands of Lost Borders

Author : Kate Harris
Publisher : Knopf Canada
ISBN 13 : 034581679X
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (458 download)

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Book Synopsis Lands of Lost Borders by : Kate Harris

Download or read book Lands of Lost Borders written by Kate Harris and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2018-01-30 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE RBC TAYLOR PRIZE WINNER OF THE EDNA STAEBLER AWARD FOR CREATIVE NON-FICTION "Every day on a bike trip is like the one before--but it is also completely different, or perhaps you are different, woken up in new ways by the mile." As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she most craved--that of a generalist explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and philosopher--had gone extinct. From her small-town home in Ontario, it seemed as if Marco Polo, Magellan and their like had long ago mapped the whole earth. So she vowed to become a scientist and go to Mars. To pass the time before she could launch into outer space, Kate set off by bicycle down a short section of the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel Yule, then settled down to study at Oxford and MIT. Eventually the truth dawned on her: an explorer, in any day and age, is by definition the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. And Harris had soared most fully out of bounds right here on Earth, travelling a bygone trading route on her bicycle. So she quit the laboratory and hit the Silk Road again with Mel, this time determined to bike it from the beginning to end. Like Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer before her, Kate Harris offers a travel narrative at once exuberant and meditative, wry and rapturous. Weaving adventure and deep reflection with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of a world that, like the self and like the stars, can never be fully mapped.

Lands of Lost Borders

Author : Kate Harris
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780345816771
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (167 download)

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Book Synopsis Lands of Lost Borders by : Kate Harris

Download or read book Lands of Lost Borders written by Kate Harris and published by . This book was released on 2018-01-30 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Lands of Lost Borders

Author : Kate Harris
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062839314
Total Pages : 309 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (628 download)

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Book Synopsis Lands of Lost Borders by : Kate Harris

Download or read book Lands of Lost Borders written by Kate Harris and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Lands of Lost Borders carried me up into a state of openness and excitement I haven’t felt for years. It’s a modern classic."—Pico Iyer A brilliant, fierce writer, and winner of the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize, makes her debut with this enthralling travelogue and memoir of her journey by bicycle along the Silk Road—an illuminating and thought-provoking fusion of The Places in Between, Lab Girl, and Wild that dares us to challenge the limits we place on ourselves and the natural world. As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she craved—to be an explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and metaphysician—had gone extinct. From what she could tell of the world from small-town Ontario, the likes of Marco Polo and Magellan had mapped the whole earth; there was nothing left to be discovered. Looking beyond this planet, she decided to become a scientist and go to Mars. In between studying at Oxford and MIT, Harris set off by bicycle down the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel. Pedaling mile upon mile in some of the remotest places on earth, she realized that an explorer, in any day and age, is the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. Forget charting maps, naming peaks: what she yearned for was the feeling of soaring completely out of bounds. The farther she traveled, the closer she came to a world as wild as she felt within. Lands of Lost Borders, winner of the 2018 Banff Adventure Travel Award and a 2018 Nautilus Award, is the chronicle of Harris’s odyssey and an exploration of the importance of breaking the boundaries we set ourselves; an examination of the stories borders tell, and the restrictions they place on nature and humanity; and a meditation on the existential need to explore—the essential longing to discover what in the universe we are doing here. Like Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer, Kate Harris offers a travel account at once exuberant and reflective, wry and rapturous. Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of the self that can never fully be mapped. Weaving adventure and philosophy with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders celebrates our connection as humans to the natural world, and ultimately to each other—a belonging that transcends any fences or stories that may divide us.

The Desert

Author : Michael Welland
Publisher : Reaktion Books
ISBN 13 : 1780233892
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (82 download)

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Book Synopsis The Desert by : Michael Welland

Download or read book The Desert written by Michael Welland and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From endless sand dunes and prickly cacti to shimmering mirages and green oases, deserts evoke contradictory images in us. They are lands of desolation, but also of romance, of blistering Mojave heat and biting Gobi cold. Covering a quarter of the earth’s land mass and providing a home to half a billion people, they are both a physical reality and landscapes of the mind. The idea of the desert has long captured Western imagination, put on display in films and literature, but these portrayals often fail to capture the true scope and diversity of the people living there. Bridging the scientific and cultural gaps between perception and reality, The Desert celebrates our fascination with these arid lands and their inhabitants, as well as their importance both throughout history and in the world today. Covering an immense geographical range, Michael Welland wanders from the Sahara to the Atacama, depicting the often bizarre adaptations of plants and animals to these hostile environments. He also looks at these seemingly infertile landscapes in the context of their place in history—as the birthplaces not only of critical evolutionary adaptations, civilizations, and social progress, but also of ideologies. Telling the stories of the diverse peoples who call the desert home, he describes how people have survived there, their contributions to agricultural development, and their emphasis on water and its scarcity. He also delves into the allure of deserts and how they have been used in literature and film and their influence on fashion, art, and architecture. As Welland reveals, deserts may be difficult to define, but they play an active role in the evolution of our global climate and society at large, and their future is of the utmost importance. Entertaining, informative, and surprising, The Desert is an intriguing new look at these seemingly harsh and inhospitable landscapes.

The Land of Open Graves

Author : Jason De Leon
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520958683
Total Pages : 378 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (29 download)

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Book Synopsis The Land of Open Graves by : Jason De Leon

Download or read book The Land of Open Graves written by Jason De Leon and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2015-10-23 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this gripping and provocative “ethnography of death,” anthropologist and MacArthur "Genius" Fellow Jason De León sheds light on one of the most pressing political issues of our time—the human consequences of US immigration and border policy. The Land of Open Graves reveals the suffering and deaths that occur daily in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona as thousands of undocumented migrants attempt to cross the border from Mexico into the United States. Drawing on the four major fields of anthropology, De León uses an innovative combination of ethnography, archaeology, linguistics, and forensic science to produce a scathing critique of “Prevention through Deterrence,” the federal border enforcement policy that encourages migrants to cross in areas characterized by extreme environmental conditions and high risk of death. For two decades, systematic violence has failed to deter border crossers while successfully turning the rugged terrain of southern Arizona into a killing field. Featuring stark photography by Michael Wells, this book examines the weaponization of natural terrain as a border wall: first-person stories from survivors underscore this fundamental threat to human rights, and the very lives, of non-citizens as they are subjected to the most insidious and intangible form of American policing as institutional violence. In harrowing detail, De León chronicles the journeys of people who have made dozens of attempts to cross the border and uncovers the stories of the objects and bodies left behind in the desert. The Land of Open Graves will spark debate and controversy.

Borders

Author : Thomas King
Publisher : Little, Brown Ink
ISBN 13 : 0316593036
Total Pages : 195 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (165 download)

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Book Synopsis Borders by : Thomas King

Download or read book Borders written by Thomas King and published by Little, Brown Ink. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A People Magazine Best Book Fall 2021 From celebrated Indigenous author Thomas King and award-winning Métis artist Natasha Donovan comes a powerful graphic novel about a family caught between nations. Borders is a masterfully told story of a boy and his mother whose road trip is thwarted at the border when they identify their citizenship as Blackfoot. Refusing to identify as either American or Canadian first bars their entry into the US, and then their return into Canada. In the limbo between countries, they find power in their connection to their identity and to each other. Borders explores nationhood from an Indigenous perspective and resonates deeply with themes of identity, justice, and belonging.

The British in India

Author : David Gilmour
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 0374713243
Total Pages : 641 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (747 download)

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Book Synopsis The British in India by : David Gilmour

Download or read book The British in India written by David Gilmour and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An immersive portrait of the lives of the British in India, from the seventeenth century to Independence Who of the British went to India, and why? We know about Kipling and Forster, Orwell and Scott, but what of the youthful forestry official, the enterprising boxwallah, the fervid missionary? What motivated them to travel halfway around the globe, what lives did they lead when they got there, and what did they think about it all? Full of spirited, illuminating anecdotes drawn from long-forgotten memoirs, correspondence, and government documents, The British in India weaves a rich tapestry of the everyday experiences of the Britons who found themselves in “the jewel in the crown” of the British Empire. David Gilmour captures the substance and texture of their work, home, and social lives, and illustrates how these transformed across the several centuries of British presence and rule in the subcontinent, from the East India Company’s first trading station in 1615 to the twilight of the Raj and Partition and Independence in 1947. He takes us through remote hill stations, bustling coastal ports, opulent palaces, regimented cantonments, and dense jungles, revealing the country as seen through British eyes, and wittily reveling in all the particular concerns and contradictions that were a consequence of that limited perspective. The British in India is a breathtaking accomplishment, a vivid and balanced history written with brio, elegance, and erudition.

The Debatable Land: The Lost World Between Scotland and England

Author : Graham Robb
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393285332
Total Pages : 348 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (932 download)

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Book Synopsis The Debatable Land: The Lost World Between Scotland and England by : Graham Robb

Download or read book The Debatable Land: The Lost World Between Scotland and England written by Graham Robb and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[An] entertaining work of geographical sleuthing.…Surprises abound." —The New Yorker An oft-overlooked region lies at the heart of British national history: the Debatable Land. The oldest detectable territorial division in Great Britain, the Debatable Land once served as a buffer between England and Scotland. It was once the bloodiest region in the country, fought over by Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and James V. After most of its population was slaughtered or deported, it became the last part of Great Britain to be brought under the control of the state. Today, its boundaries have vanished from the map and are matters of myth and generational memories. In The Debatable Land, historian Graham Robb recovers the history of this ancient borderland in an exquisite tale that spans Roman, Medieval, and present-day Britain. Rich in detail and epic in scope, The Debatable Land provides a crucial, missing piece in the puzzle of British history.

Travel

Author : Peter Whitfield
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781851243389
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (433 download)

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Book Synopsis Travel by : Peter Whitfield

Download or read book Travel written by Peter Whitfield and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No previous generation has ever travelled so energetically or so obsessively as ours, nor has travel writing ever been so much in fashion as it is now. But behind the self-conscious literary artistry of today's narratives there lies a rich and fascinating history of travel writing, stretching back over several thousand years.Travel writing has emerged from migration, war, exploration, trade, conquest, pilgrimage, science, and poetic longing. But when they recorded their travels, the military commanders of Greece and Rome, the navigators of the Age of Discovery, the diplomats and missionaries of the seventeenth century, the dilettantes who set out on the Grand Tour, the romantic travellers and the scientists of the nineteenth century all had one thing in common: they were re-imagining the world, re-interpreting it in their own minds and for their readers.This is the first general survey of the entire history of travel literature, with illustrations reproduced from manuscripts and books in the Bodleian Library's collections. Writers covered include Marco Polo, Sir John Mandeville, Thomas Coryate, Captain Cook, T.E. Lawrence, and Christopher Columbus as well as Boswell and Johnson, Byron, Ruskin, Defoe, Conrad, and James. This book highlights over a hundred texts, showing how one motive for travelling has been succeeded by another, and how travel writing has often inhabited a strange borderland between truth and imagination, fact and fiction. It demonstrates how travel writers have slowly outgrown their traditional stance of superiority to all things 'foreign', and have moved towards a deeper sensitivity to other lands and other cultures.

Poacher's Pilgrimage

Author : Alastair McIntosh
Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1532634455
Total Pages : 471 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (326 download)

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Book Synopsis Poacher's Pilgrimage by : Alastair McIntosh

Download or read book Poacher's Pilgrimage written by Alastair McIntosh and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-03-09 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The islands of the Outer Hebrides are home to some of the most remote and spectacular scenery in the world. They host an astonishing range of mysterious structures - stone circles, beehive dwellings, holy wells and 'temples' from the Celtic era. Over a twelve-day pilgrimage, often in appalling conditions, Alastair McIntosh returns to the islands of his childhood and explores the meaning of these places. Traversing moors and mountains, struggling through torrential rivers, he walks from the most southerly tip of Harris to the northerly Butt of Lewis. The book is a walk through space and time, across a physical landscape and into a spiritual one. As he battled with his own ability to endure some of the toughest terrain in Britain, he met with the healing power of the land and its communities. This is a moving book, a powerful reflection not simply of this extraordinary place and its people met along the way, but of imaginative hope for humankind.

Between East and West

Author : Anne Applebaum
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0525433198
Total Pages : 349 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (254 download)

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Book Synopsis Between East and West by : Anne Applebaum

Download or read book Between East and West written by Anne Applebaum and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2017-06-13 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1991, Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag, Iron Curtain and Red Famine, took a three-month road trip through the borderlands between the fallen Soviet Union and Europe—lands that became Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania and Moldova. In her iconic reportage, which has become indispensable history, she captures the harrowing story of a region that is once again threatened by Russia. An extraordinary journey into the past and present of the lands east of Poland and west of Russia—an area defined throughout its history by colliding empires. Traveling from the former Soviet naval center of Kaliningrad on the Baltic to the Black Sea port of Odessa, Anne Applebaum encounters a rich range of competing cultures, religions, and national aspirations. In reasserting their heritage, the inhabitants of the borderlands attempt to build a future grounded in their fractured ancestral legacies. In the process, neighbors unearth old conflicts, devote themselves to recovering lost culture, and piece together competing legends to create a new tradition. Rich in surprising encounters and vivid characters, Between East and West brilliantly illuminates the soul of the borderlands and the shaping power of the past.

Angle of Yaw

Author : Ben Lerner
Publisher : Copper Canyon Press
ISBN 13 : 1619320088
Total Pages : 144 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (193 download)

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Book Synopsis Angle of Yaw by : Ben Lerner

Download or read book Angle of Yaw written by Ben Lerner and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2006-10-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his bold second book, Ben Lerner molds philosophical insight, political outrage, and personal experience into a devastating critique of mass society. Angle of Yaw investigates the fate of public space, public speech, and how the technologies of viewing—aerial photography in particular—feed our culture an image of itself. And it’s a spectacular view. The man observes the action on the field with the tiny television he brought to the stadium. He is topless, painted gold, bewigged. His exaggerated foam index finger indicates the giant screen upon which his own image is now displayed, a model of fanaticism. He watches the image of his watching the image on his portable TV on his portable TV. He suddenly stands with arms upraised and initiates the wave that will consume him. Haunted by our current “war on terror,” much of the book was written while Lerner was living in Madrid (at the time of the Atocha bombings and their political aftermath), as the author steeped himself in the history of Franco and fascism. Regardless of when or where it was written, Angle of Yaw will further establish Ben Lerner as one of our most intriguing and least predictable poets.

Land of the Gods

Author : Philip Coppens
Publisher : Adventures Unlimited Press
ISBN 13 : 9781931882699
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (826 download)

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Book Synopsis Land of the Gods by : Philip Coppens

Download or read book Land of the Gods written by Philip Coppens and published by Adventures Unlimited Press. This book was released on 2015-02-25 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Land of the Gods is the historical, archeological story of the ancient inhabitants of Scotland, the Lothians and the Borders tribes, whom the Romans called the Goddodin. The Romans did not conquer these ancient inhabitants, though when they retreated from Britain, neighboring tribes tried to lay claim to their lands. Then a magnificent warrior emerged from these ancient Scottish tribes. Remembered as Arthur, he fought for the survival of his land and won, and his Camelot was the Lothians and Borders region. After his reign, the region was finally overrun and his people fled to Wales, where over time, the story of their magical kingdom to the north and their mythical hero coalesced into the myth of Camelot and King Arthur. Today, remnants of the spiritual architecture of these tribes are visible in Cairnpapple, Traprain Law and other ancient Scottish monuments. They accentuated their region's unique volcanic landscape to reflect their mythology, which spoke of gods descending to Earth from the sun god Loth.

Sixty Degrees North

Author : Malachy Tallack
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1681771888
Total Pages : 206 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (817 download)

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Book Synopsis Sixty Degrees North by : Malachy Tallack

Download or read book Sixty Degrees North written by Malachy Tallack and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sixtieth parallel marks a borderland between the northern and southern worlds. Wrapping itself around the lower reaches of Finland, Sweden, and Norway, it crosses the tip of Greenland and the southern coast of Alaska, and slices the great expanses of Russia and Canada in half. The parallel also passes through Shetland, where Malachy Tallack has spent most of his life.In Sixty Degrees North, Tallack travels westward, exploring the landscapes of the parallel and the ways that people have interacted with those landscapes, highlighting themes of wildness and community, isolation and engagement, exile and memory.An intimate journey of the heart and mind, Sixty Degrees North begins with the author's loss of his father and his own troubled relationship with Shetland, and concludes with an embrace of the place he calls home.

Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder

Author : Julia Zarankin
Publisher : Douglas & McIntyre
ISBN 13 : 1771622490
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (716 download)

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Book Synopsis Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder by : Julia Zarankin

Download or read book Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder written by Julia Zarankin and published by Douglas & McIntyre. This book was released on 2020-09-12 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Julia Zarankin saw her first red-winged blackbird at the age of thirty-five, she didn’t expect that it would change her life. Recently divorced and auditioning hobbies during a stressful career transition, she stumbled on birdwatching, initially out of curiosity for the strange breed of humans who wear multi-pocketed vests, carry spotting scopes and discuss the finer points of optics with disturbing fervour. What she never could have predicted was that she would become one of them. Not only would she come to identify proudly as a birder, but birding would ultimately lead her to find love, uncover a new language and lay down her roots. Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder tells the story of finding meaning in midlife through birds. The book follows the peregrinations of a narrator who learns more from birds than she ever anticipated, as she begins to realize that she herself is a migratory species: born in the former Soviet Union, growing up in Vancouver and Toronto, studying and working in the United States and living in Paris. Coming from a Russian immigrant family of concert pianists who believed that the outdoors were for “other people,” Julia Zarankin recounts the challenges and joys of unexpectedly discovering one’s wild side and finding one’s tribe in the unlikeliest of places. Zarankin’s thoughtful and witty anecdotes illuminate the joyful experience of a new discovery and the surprising pleasure to be found while standing still on the edge of a lake at six a.m. In addition to confirmed nature enthusiasts, this book will appeal to readers of literary memoir, offering keen insight on what it takes to find one’s place in the world.

Border Land, Border Water

Author : C. J. Alvarez
Publisher : University of Texas Press
ISBN 13 : 147731900X
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (773 download)

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Book Synopsis Border Land, Border Water by : C. J. Alvarez

Download or read book Border Land, Border Water written by C. J. Alvarez and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the boundary surveys of the 1850s to the ever-expanding fences and highway networks of the twenty-first century, Border Land, Border Water examines the history of the construction projects that have shaped the region where the United States and Mexico meet. Tracing the accretion of ports of entry, boundary markers, transportation networks, fences and barriers, surveillance infrastructure, and dams and other river engineering projects, C. J. Alvarez advances a broad chronological narrative that captures the full life cycle of border building. He explains how initial groundbreaking in the nineteenth century transitioned to unbridled faith in the capacity to control the movement of people, goods, and water through the use of physical structures. By the 1960s, however, the built environment of the border began to display increasingly obvious systemic flaws. More often than not, Alvarez shows, federal agencies in both countries responded with more construction—“compensatory building” designed to mitigate unsustainable policies relating to immigration, black markets, and the natural world. Border Land, Border Water reframes our understanding of how the border has come to look and function as it does and is essential to current debates about the future of the US-Mexico divide.

Lost in the Valley of Death

Author : Harley Rustad
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062965980
Total Pages : 373 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (629 download)

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Book Synopsis Lost in the Valley of Death by : Harley Rustad

Download or read book Lost in the Valley of Death written by Harley Rustad and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "By patient accumulation of anecdote and detail, Rustad evolves Shetler’s story into something much more human, and humanly tragic, into a layered inquisition and a reportorial force....suffice it to say Rustad has done what the best storytellers do: tried to track the story to its last twig and then stepped aside." —New York Times Book Review In the vein of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, a riveting work of narrative nonfiction centering on the unsolved disappearance of an American backpacker in India—one of at least two dozen tourists who have met a similar fate in the remote and storied Parvati Valley. For centuries, India has enthralled westerners looking for an exotic getaway, a brief immersion in yoga and meditation, or in rare cases, a true pilgrimage to find spiritual revelation. Justin Alexander Shetler, an inveterate traveler trained in wilderness survival, was one such seeker. In his early thirties Justin Alexander Shetler, quit his job at a tech startup and set out on a global journey: across the United States by motorcycle, then down to South America, and on to the Philippines, Thailand, and Nepal, in search of authentic experiences and meaningful encounters, while also documenting his travels on Instagram. His enigmatic character and magnetic personality gained him a devoted following who lived vicariously through his adventures. But the ever restless explorer was driven to pursue ever greater challenges, and greater risks, in what had become a personal quest—his own hero’s journey. In 2016, he made his way to the Parvati Valley, a remote and rugged corner of the Indian Himalayas steeped in mystical tradition yet shrouded in darkness and danger. There, he spent weeks studying under the guidance of a sadhu, an Indian holy man, living and meditating in a cave. At the end of August, accompanied by the sadhu, he set off on a “spiritual journey” to a holy lake—a journey from which he would never return. Lost in the Valley of Death is about one man’s search to find himself, in a country where for many westerners the path to spiritual enlightenment can prove fraught, even treacherous. But it is also a story about all of us and the ways, sometimes extreme, we seek fulfillment in life. Lost in the Valley of Death includes 16 pages of color photographs.