Best-selling Tolkien expert Brian Sibley (The Lord of theRings: The Making of the Movie Trilogy and The Lord of the RingsOfficial Movie Guide) presents a slipcased collection of fourfull-color, large-format maps of Tolkien's imaginary realmillustrated by John Howe, a conceptual designer for the blockbusterfilms directed by Peter Jackson. The set includes a hardcover bookdescribing in detail the importance and evolution of geographywithin Tolkien's epic fiction and four color maps presented withminimal folds, including two (Beleriand and Numenor) never beforepublished in this country.

illinois,that long slice of the heartland stretching fro lake michigan fto kentucky,may be the most american place of all.its great patriot,abraham lincoln,and its great athlete,michael jordan,stand for what s best about our country. the prairie state has some of the midwest s richest farmlnd,and,by geographic luck,illinors also has the vital metropolis of chicago.the windy city took in the continent s resources and shipped them far and wide ,becoming the nation s railroad hub and later its crossroade of the air.after the dev-astating 1871fire,visionary planners and architects like daniel burnham and louis sullivan designed boulevards,gracious parks,and beaux arts buildings thet make this one of the most livable of cities. both chicago and downstate illinois have grow them,like john dere s plow; the prairie style homes of frank lloyd wright;mail-order merchandising from sears and wards;an ener-getic,all-american literture from carl sandburg,nelson algren,gwendolyn brooks,and saul bellow;and the soulf

Paul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe bycollecting the best writing on travel from the books that shapedhim, as a reader and a traveler. Part philosophical guide, partmiscellany, part reminiscence, The Tao of Travel enumerates “TheContents of Some Travelers’ Bags” and exposes “Writers Who Wroteabout Places They Never Visited”; tracks extreme journeys in“Travel as an Ordeal” and highlights some of “Travelers’ FavoritePlaces.” Excerpts from the best of Theroux’s own work areinterspersed with selections from travelers both familiar andunexpected: Vladimir Nabokov J.R.R. Tolkien Samuel Johnson Eudora Welty Evelyn Waugh Isak Dinesen Charles Dickens James Baldwin Henry David Thoreau Pico Iyer Mark Twain Anton Chekhov Bruce Chatwin John McPhee Freya Stark Peter Matthiessen Graham Greene Ernest Hemingway The Tao of Travel is a unique tribute to the pleasures and painsof travel in its golden age.

Discover Amsterdam Delve into the life of a great artist at the Van GoghMuseum Find the perfect brown café, secret hang-outs of Dutch drinkersfor centuries Find out how to skip the queues at the city's topattractions Spice up your visit at one of Amsterdam's Indonesianrestaurants In This Guide: Three authors, over 700 recommendations, five neighborhoodswalks, three bike tours Color Architecture chapter on the city's buildings, old andnew Comprehensive Day Trips chapter includes Leiden, Utrecht andHaarlem

The city long-adored for its medieval beauty, old-timey brasseries, and corner caf s has even more to offer today. In the last few years, a flood of new ideas and creative locals has infused a once-static, traditional city with a new open-minded sensibility and energy. Journalist Lindsey Tramuta offers detailed insight into the rapidly evolving worlds of food, wine, pastry, coffee, beer, fashion, and design in the delightful city of Paris. Tramuta puts the spotlight on the new trends and people that are making France s capital a more whimsical, creative, vibrant, and curious place to explore than its classical reputation might suggest. With hundreds of striking photographs that capture this fresh, animated spirit and a curated directory of Tramuta s favorite places to eat, drink, stay, and shop The New Paris shows us the storied City of Light as never before.

In the entire universe, there seems to be one constant that most everyone shares: the notion of beauty. This fact is not scientific, it is not logical, and the value of this knowledge is hard to assess. But the certainty is absolute as every one of us looks into a meadow of waving flowers, gazes at the surf and the sea, or looks deep into the night sky at the stars and beyond. God's Art explores the grace, the texture and the colors of this beautiful universe, and asks a lot of questions along the way: Why isn't the universe gray instead of such a rich incredible range of colors; Why is there so much variety in all things from snowflakes to galaxies; Why are we blessed with an appreciation for all this wonder if it does not contribute to our survival? Questions are more fun than answers, and a well-phrased quandary will keep us occupied longer than a stark fact. This is a beautifully illustrated book of questions.

This stunning volume was the gift book of the year when it firstpublished, and the images that grace its pages remain iconic. Fromthe famous Afghan girl whose haunting green eyes stare out from thebook’s cover, and her poignant story that captured the world’sinterest, to award-winning photography culled from the Society’svast archives, The Photographs offers readers an inside look atNational Geographic and a sharp-eyed view of the world. The bookshowcases the skill and imagination of such notable Geographicphotographers as David Doubilet, William Albert Allard, Sam Abell,Jim Stanfield, Jodi Cobb, Jim Brandenburg, David Alan Harvey, andmany more. They share their techniques, as well as personal andcolorful anecdotes about individual images and their adventures inthe field—sometimes humorous, sometimes terrifying, always vividlycompelling. Author Leah Bendavid-Val writes about thephotographers’ achievements from technical, journalistic, andartistic perspectives. Five chapters cover core Nationa

In 1912, six months after Robert Falcon Scott and four of hismen came to grief in Antarctica, a thirty-two-year-old Russiannavigator named Valerian Albanov embarked on an expedition thatwould prove even more disastrous. In search of new Arctic huntinggrounds, Albanov's ship, the Saint Anna, was frozen fast in thepack ice of the treacherous Kara Sea-a misfortune grievouslycompounded by an incompetent commander, the absence of crucialnautical charts, insufficient fuel, and inadequate provisions thatleft the crew weak and debilitated by scurvy. For nearly a year and a half, the twenty-five men and onewoman aboard the Saint Anna endured terrible hardships and dangeras the icebound ship drifted helplessly north. Convinced that theSaint Anna would never free herself from the ice, Albanov andthirteen crewmen left the ship in January 1914, hauling makeshiftsledges and kayaks behind them across the frozen sea, hoping toreach the distant coast of Franz Josef Land. With only a shockinglyinaccurate map to g

standing work almost from the moment of publication.Beginningwith a groundbreaking interpretation of the ori-gin and nature ofthe city Lewis Mumford follows the city's developmentfrom Egypt andMesopotamia through Greece Rome and the MiddleAges to the modernworld. Instead of accepting the destiny of the city asthetendencies to metropolitan congestion suburban sprawl andsocialdisintegration, Mumford outlines an order integratingtechnical facilitieswith biological needs and social norms. Ascompelling as it is compre-hensive Mumfords award-winning work "isfar more than the study ofurban culture through the ages. It is arevitalization of civilizations( Kirkus Reviews).

“oklahoma,where the wind comes sweepin down the plain!”who doesn t know the stirring lyrics to the most famous of all state songs?rodgers &hammerstein s musical captures the rambunctious frontier spirit of this state-an even more captivating place in reality. in oklahoma,the american west and the american dream come together-sometimes in one person,like will rogers,the part-cheokeejournalist and vaudevillian who became the nation s best-loved humorist.woody guthrie,our lureate of folk song,also springs from oklahoma soil,as do journalist bill moyers and apache sculptor allan houser,whose work graces the white house lawn.oklahoma helped to create the cowboy icon:on the legendary chisholm trail,in touring wild west shows ,and in the movies ,with actors roy rogers and gene auty.amerca s oil boom began her,and “black gold”built the art deco skylines of tulsa and okla-homa city.hardy survivors of the dust bowl era,oklahomans planned and built the “mother road,”route 66,and afine collection of museu

From Fouad Ajami, an acclaimed author and chronicler of Arabpolitics, comes a compelling account of how a generation of Arabintellectuals tried to introduce cultural renewals in theirhomelands through the forces of modernity and secularism.Ultimately, they came to face disappointment, exile, and, onoccasion, death. Brilliantly weaving together the strands of atumultuous century in Arab political thought, history, and poetry,Ajami takes us from the ruins of Beirut's once glitteringmetropolis to the land of Egypt, where struggle rages between amodernist impulse and an Islamist insurgency, from Nasser'span-Arab nationalist ambitions to the emergence of an uneasy PaxAmericana in Arab lands, from the triumphalism of the Gulf War tothe continuing anguished debate over the Israeli-Palestinian peaceaccords. For anyone who seeks to understand the Middle East, here isan insider's unflinching analysis of the collision betweenintellectual life and political realities in the Arab worldtoday.

A million copy best-selling exploration of the animal kingdom, featuring facts and beautiful photos of over 2,000 wild animals from all habitats on planet Earth. Animal: The Definitive Visual Guide brings together the expertise of over 70 natural history specialists and the beautiful images of wildlife photographers from around the globe to illustrate, describe, and explain the incredible range of creatures in the animal kingdom. This fully up-to-date edition covers fascinating animals from across the globe including the newly discovered Skywalker Hoolock Gibbon, Jumping Spider, and Piglet Squid. From the smallest invertebrates to the mighty blue whale, Animal is a truly unrivalled look at life on planet Earth. Previous edition ISBN 9781405362337 ,

From adventurer, explorer, photographer, writer, pied piperPeter Beard—eleven irresistible tales, told to his daughter in histented encampment at Hog Ranch, Kenya, about life, about living,about Africa. He writes of the East African hills he came to know so well overfour decades, where time slows to infinity in a great bottomless,bottle green underwater world . . . about Nairobi in the 1950s,still a quaint, eccentric pioneer town, full of characters of allstripes and tribes, where rhinoceros roamed the streets and localresidents went to the movies in pajamas. He writes of the camp he built twelve miles outside of Nairobi sothat he would never be off safari, a forty-acre patch of bushcalled Hog Ranch (abutting Karen Blixen’s plantation), named forthe families of warthogs who wandered into camp, a camp populatedwith waterbuck, suni, dik-diks, leopard, giraffe, and occasionallylion and buffalo. In “Big Pig at Hog Ranch,” Beard tells the story of Thaka(translation from the Kikuyu: