Tourism History

There is an ancient Chinese proverb that states, "Two tigers cannot share the same mountain." However, in East Asia, there are three tigers on that mountain: China, Japan, and Korea, and they have a long history of turmoil and tension with each other. In his latest entertaining and thought-provoking narrative travelogue, Michael Booth sets out to discover how deep, really, the enmity is between these three "tiger" nations and what prevents them from making peace.

The Andes Mountains are the world's longest mountain chain, linking most of the countries in South America. Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and author Kim MacQuarrie takes us on a historical journey through this unique region, bringing fresh insight and contemporary connections to such fabled characters as Charles Darwin, Pablo Escobar, Che Guevara, and many others.

The magnificent Danube both cuts across and connects Central Europe, flowing through and alongside 10 countries: Romania, Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, and Germany. Travelling its full length from east to west, against the river's flow, Nick Thorpe embarks on an inspiring yearlong journey that leads to a new perspective on Europe today. Thorpe's account is personal, conversational, funny, immediate, and uniquely observant - everything one expects in the best travel writing.

The RMS Titanic sailed from Southampton en route for New York on her maiden voyage with 2,228 passengers and crew on board. On 14 April, 1912, at twenty minutes before midnight, sailing at almost full speed, she struck an iceberg and sank in just two and a half hours. Over 1500 lives were lost. This is the story of a great tragedy described by the surviving passengers, officers, and crew who were on board that night. Firsthand accounts help to explain why so few of the passengers took to the lifeboats.

When Johnson went to work for the US Antarctic Program (devoted to scientific research and education in support of the national interest in the Antarctic), he figured he'd find adventure, beauty, penguins, and lofty-minded scientists. Instead he found boredom, alcohol, and bureaucracy. As a dishwasher and garbage man at McMurdo Station, Johnson quickly shed his illusions about Antarctica.

In this compelling narrative, O'Connor seeks out neuroscientists, anthropologists and master navigators to understand how navigation ultimately gave us our humanity. Biologists have been trying to solve the mystery of how organisms have the ability to migrate and orient with such precision - especially since our own adventurous ancestors spread across the world without maps or instruments. O'Connor goes to the Arctic, the Australian bush and the South Pacific to talk to masters of their environment who seek to preserve their traditions at a time when anyone can use a GPS to navigate.

In January 2012, having covered a Somali pirate trial in Hamburg for Spiegel Online International, Michael Scott Moore traveled to the Horn of Africa to write about piracy and ways to end it. In a terrible twist of fate, Moore himself was kidnapped and subsequently held captive by Somali pirates for 977 days. Yet Moore’s own struggle is only part of the story: The Desert and the Sea falls at the intersection of reportage, memoir, and history.

"Eastern Europe" has gone out of fashion since the fall of the Soviet Union. Ask someone today, and they might tell you that Estonia is in the Baltics or Scandinavia, that Slovakia is in Central Europe, and that Croatia is in the eastern Adriatic or the Balkans. In fact, Eastern Europe is a place that barely exists at all, except in cultural memory. Yet it remains a powerful marker of identity for many, with a fragmented and wide-ranging history defined by texts, myths, and memories of centuries of hardship and suffering.

Armed with knife, fork, and corkscrew, Peter Mayle travels to every corner of France. From bouillabaisse to escargot, here is all the glory and pleasure of the French table in the most satisfying audiobook. Bon appétit!

In a personal but objective narrative based on the Bounty's log, Bligh himself tells of the stormy voyage to Tahiti, his crew's insatiable attachment to the island paradise, and the incredible 3,600-mile journey to safety after the mutineers cast him, and 18 loyal crew members, adrift in a small, open boat with few supplies. Bligh's detractors say this narrative has many distortions and omissions; others judge it a remarkably dispassionate record.

On May 24, 1869 a one-armed Civil War veteran, John Wesley Powell, and a ragtag band of nine mountain men embarked on the last great quest in the American West. The Grand Canyon, not explored before, was as mysterious as Atlantis - and as perilous. The 10 men set out from Green River Station, Wyoming Territory, down the Colorado in four wooden rowboats. Ninety-nine days later, six half-starved wretches came ashore near Callville, Arizona.

This beautiful literary collection explores the spectacular natural features of Yosemite through the eyes of some of the most extraordinarily talented writers. In 1851, Lafayette Bunnell chronicled his travels with the Mariposa Battalion, the first non-natives to visit Yosemite Valley. Following in his footsteps, Theodore Roosevelt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Clarence King, Frederick Law Olmsted, Joaquin Miller, and Horace Greeley made their pilgrimages and were moved to recount their observations. Included here as well is the work of John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club.

An account of his journey through England – from Southampton to the Black Country, to the North East and Newcastle, to Norwich and home – English Journey is funny and tender. But it is also a forensic reading of a changing England and a call to arms as passionate as anything in Orwell’s bleak masterpiece. Moreover, it both captured and catalysed the public mood of its time. In capturing and describing an English landscape and people hitherto unseen, Priestley influenced the thinking and attitudes of an entire generation.

On 8 August 1914, five days after the outbreak of World War One, the Endurance, a wooden-hulled, coal-fired icebreaker, set sail for the South Pole, in a bid to complete the first-ever trans-Antarctic expedition, which would cross the continent from the Weddell Sea to Scott's base at Cape Evans, via the Pole. However, despite the best planning, the ship succumbs to the ice floes of the Weddell Sea, and is subjected to months of uncontrollable drifting before its crew makes a scramble for Elephant Island, where they battle constant cold and starvation.

A collection of non-fiction essays about the counter-culture of the 1960s that dives deep into the issues that marked the era: female empowerment, increasing freedom around sexuality, vibrant subcultures, and the rise of psychedelic drugs. In this sprawling work, Wolfe profiles Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and compares him to Jay Gatsby, interviews one of the first women to get breast implants, and hangs out with freewheeling surfers (aka The Pump House Gang).

Is it really possible to love one's enemies? That's the question that sparked a fascinating and, at times, terrifying journey into the heart of the Middle East during the summer of 2008. It was a trip that began in Egypt, passed beneath the steel-and-glass high-rises of Saudi Arabia, then wound through the bullet-pocked alleyways of Beirut and dusty streets of Damascus, before ending at the cradle of the world's three major religions: Jerusalem.

Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa. Two ancient lakes joined by underground rivers. Two lakes that seem to hold both the turbulent memories of the region's past and the secret of its enduring allure. Two lakes that have played a central role in Kapka Kassabova's maternal family. As she journeys to her grandmother's place of origin, Kassabova encounters a historic crossroads.

Cubans today, most of whom have lived their entire lives under the Castro regime, are hesitantly embracing the future. In his new book, Anthony DePalma, a veteran reporter with years of experience in Cuba, focuses on a neighborhood across the harbor from Old Havana to dramatize the optimism as well as the enormous challenges that Cubans face: a moving snapshot of Cuba with all its contradictions as the new regime opens the gate to the capitalism that Fidel railed against for so long.

Stuart Maconie is one of the keenest observers of English identity. Who better to take the temperature of the nation at this uncertain waymark on our national journey? Deftly weaving history and politics in engaging, conversational prose, The Full English is a love-letter to England written in Maconie’s inimitable style. As we wend our way through towns and cities, by Megabus and Avanti train, we meet a rich cast of characters and delve into the seldom-explored crevices of our national psyche.

Sarah Vowell exposes the glorious conundrums of American history and culture with wit, probity, and an irreverent sense of humor. With Assassination Vacation, she takes us on a road trip like no other, a journey to the pit stops of American political murder and through the myriad ways they have been used for fun and profit, for political and cultural advantage.