Travels in Spain

 

Mint condition. PB. 384pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

This book takes the reader on a journey from the earliest settlements on the Iberian Peninsula, through the influences of the Romans, the Goths and the Muslims, the traumas of expansion and the end of the Empire, right up to the present.

Riding on a donkey across Spain

 

Very good condition. PB. 336pp. $18 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Ludicrous, heart-warming and improbably inspirational, Spanish Steps is the story of what happens when a rather silly man tries to walk all the way across a very large country, with a very large animal who doesn't really want to.

Being larger than a cat, the donkey is the kind of animal Tim Moore is slightly scared of. Yet intrigued by epic accounts of a pilgrimage undertaken by one in three medieval Europeans, and committed to historical authenticity, he finds himself leading a Pyrenean ass named Shinto into Spain, headed for Santiago de Compostela.

Over 500 miles of extreme weather and agonising bestial sloth, it becomes memorably apparent that for the multinational band of eccentrics who keep the Santiagan flame alive, the pilgrimage has evolved from a purely devotional undertaking into a mobile therapist's couch.

'Hailed as the new Bill Bryson, he is in fact a writer of considerably more substance and the jokes come thick and fast' Irish Times

Andalusian scholar writes on Muslim interfaith relations

 

Rare book. PB. Mint condition. 231pp. Amazon sells this for over $40. Our price $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

A study of excerpts from the classical Andalusian scholar Ibn Hazm on Islamic theology as it pertains to other religions in the context of the unique convivencia experiment in multiculturalism of medieval Islamic Spain.

SOLD A comprehensive study of the Indian diaspora

 

SOLD to a lawyer in East Sydney, NSW

Mint condition. HB. 416pp. $100 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The Encyclopedia of the Indian Diaspora Book Description Brij V Lal has contributed to The Encyclopedia of the Indian Diaspora as an editor.Brij V. Lal is professor of Pacific and Asian history at the Australian National University.

About the author:

Brij V. Lal AM, FAHA is an Indo-Fijian historian. He was born in Labasa, on the northern island of Vanua Levu. He was educated at the University of the South Pacific, the University of British Columbia and the Australian National University. A harsh critic of the Bainimarama government, which originated in the military coup of 2006 and retained power in the 2014 elections, he is currently living in exile in Australia.

"I am currently working on a large scale project about Australia's engagement with the South Pacific from the 1940s to the 1980s, focusing on the Solomon Islands, Fiji and Vanuatu. My research on Fiji continues with a historical dictionary and a general interpretative volume for the University of Hawaii currently in preparation, along with a series of essays on the politics and culture of the Indian indentured diaspora. On the side, I continue to wrestle with the problems of writing about societies with unwritten pasts."

Essays on Islam, fundamentalism and freedom of speech in the West

 

Good condition. PB. 144pp. $15 including postage anywhere in Australia.

This collection of essays and occasional pieces have one unifying theme, the making of myth. This book looks at myths such as the Western myth of Islam and the exotic Orient, the Islamic myth of the decadent West, the myth of a plot centred around Salman Rushdie to denigrate the sacred personages of Islam, the utopian myths of fundamentalist preachers and the gurus of the new religious movements, the myth of causes in whose path death is perfect freedom.

A humorous Jewish memoir of life in the Soviet Sixties

 

Rare book. Mint condition. HB. 307pp. $30 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Read more about this book here.

A moving Holocaust biography

 

Rare book. Mint condition. PB. 254pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

This account of a teacher in Austria—a friend of Freud and one of the millions of victims of the Holocaust—is “beautifully written and deeply moving” (Joyce Carol Oates).

Peter Singer’s Pushing Time Away is a rich and loving portrait of the author’s grandfather, David Oppenheim, from the turn of the twentieth century to the end of his life in a concentration camp during the Second World War. Oppenheim, a Jewish teacher of Greek and Latin living in Vienna, was a contemporary and friend of both Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. With his wife, Amalie, one of the first women to graduate in math and physics from the University of Vienna, he witnessed the waning days of the Hapsburg Empire, the nascence of psychoanalysis, the grueling years of the First World War, and the rise of anti-Semitism and Nazism.

Told partly through Oppenheim’s personal papers, including letters to and from his wife and children, Pushing Time Away blends history, anecdote, and personal investigation to pull the story of one extraordinary life out of the millions lost to the Holocaust.

A contemporary philosopher known for such works as The Life You Can Save and Animal Liberation, Singer offers a true story of his own family with “all the power of a great novel . . . resonant of The Reader by Bernhard Schlink or An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro” (The New York Times).

Glenn A Baker's travel best

 

Very good condition. PB. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Glenn A Baker brings us his wry observations and sense of humour as he travels to Cuba and meets Castro, considers the moral dilemma of travelling to Burma, attends a Naadam, a festival of horse racing, archery and wrestling in Mongolia or waxes lyrical over the streets of Slovenia, to name but a few of his adventures.

Stalin and the new Russia

 

Mint condition. HB. 304pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

From the first publisher granted access to Stalin's personal archive, a provocative and insightful portrait of modern Russia—the most compelling since David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb.

To most Americans, Russia remains as enigmatic today as it was during the Iron Curtain era. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country had an opportunity to face its tortured past. In Inside the Stalin Archives, Jonathan Brent asks, why didn't this happen? Why are the anti-Semitic Protocols of Zion sold openly in the lobby of the State Duma? Why are archivists under surveillance and phones still tapped? Why does Stalin, a man responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people, remain popular enough to appear on boxes of chocolate sold in Moscow's airport?

Brent draws on fifteen years of unprecedented access to high-level Soviet Archives to answer these questions. He shows us a Russia where, in 1992, used toothbrushes were sold on the sidewalks, while now shops are filled with luxury goods and the streets are jammed with Mercedes. Stalin's specter hovers throughout, and in the book's crescendo Brent takes us deep into the dictator's personal papers to glimpse the dark heart of the new Russia. Both cultural history and personal memoir, Inside the Stalin Archives is a deeply felt and vivid portrait of Russia in the twenty-first century.

Travels through the Balkans, the Middle East & the Caucasus

 

Mint condition. PB. 364pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Eastward to Tartary, Robert Kaplan's first book to focus on a single region since his bestselling Balkan Ghosts, introduces readers to an explosive and little-known part of the world destined to become a tinderbox of the future.

Kaplan takes us on a spellbinding journey into the heart of a volatile region, stretching from Hungary and Romania to the far shores of the oil-rich Caspian Sea. 

Through dramatic stories of unforgettable characters, Kaplan illuminates the tragic history of this unstable area that he describes as the new fault line between East and West. 

He ventures from Turkey, Syria, and Israel to the turbulent countries of the Caucasus, from the newly rich city of Baku to the deserts of Turkmenistan and the killing fields of Armenia. 

The result is must reading for anyone concerned about the state of our world in the decades to come.

A short history of Kosovo

 

Good condition. Slight bends in cover. PB. 528pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Kosovo, a 55-mile-long plateau south of Serbia bordering Albania & Macedonia, should by all rights be a historical & political backwater. A Bulgarian geographer who visited Kosovo during WWI remarked it was "almost as unknown & inaccessible as a stretch of land in Central Africa." The observation would prove ironically fitting by the '90s, as Central Africa & Kosovo both became sites of widespread genocide, fueled by ethnic hatreds, of the deepest international significance. 

Noel Malcolm, British historian & journalist who's written extensively about the Balkans (including a companion volume of sorts on Bosnia), provides an overview of Kosovo's long-standing cultural divisions in his "short history" (although, at more than 500 pages, a not so short book). 

Readers following the unfolding war in Kosovo thru newspaper & tv coverage may well ask why ethnic Albanians & Serbs are struggling so violently to command the small region. 

Kosovo, he explains, is the birthplace of Serbian nationalism; the defeat of Serbian forces there in 1389 by Turkish troops became emblematic of the fall of the Serbian empire, as it led to Turkish domination of the Balkans. 

Contemporary warriors of Serbia are evidently attempting to reverse the course of history by reclaiming the land from its Turkish conquerors--but in the absence of the Turks, they'll take it from the Albanians (the largest ethnic group among Kosovo's inhabitants) whose ancestors converted to Islam when Turks ruled the region. 

His lucid text shows again & again that the ethnic conflict in Kosovo is less a battle over bloodlines & religion than it's one over differing conceptions of national origins & history. 

"When ordinary Serbs learn to think more rationally & humanely about Kosovo, & more critically about some of their national myths," he concludes, "all the people of Kosovo & Serbia will benefit--not least the Serbs themselves."

History and memoir of the Chernobyl disaster

 

Excellent condition. PB. 404pp. $18 including postage anywhere in Australia.

A dramatic, minute-by-minute account of one of the most shattering events of the Cold War, from an award-winning historian.

On the morning of 26 April 1986 Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine.

The outburst put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation.

In the end, less than five percent of the reactor's fuel escaped, but that was enough to contaminate over half of Europe with radioactive fallout.

In Chernobyl , Serhii Plokhy recreates these events in all of their drama, telling the stories of the firefighters, scientists, engineers, workers, soldiers, and policemen who found themselves caught in a nuclear Armageddon and succeeded in doing the seemingly impossible: extinguishing the nuclear inferno and putting the reactor to sleep.

While it is clear that the immediate cause of the accident was a turbine test gone wrong, Plokhy shows how the deeper roots of Chernobyl lay in the nature of the Soviet political system and the flaws of its nuclear industry.

A little more than five years later, the Soviet Union would fall apart, destroyed from within by its unsustainable communist ideology and the dysfunctional managerial and economic systems laid bare in the wake of the disaster.

A poignant, fast paced account of the drama of heroes, perpetrators, and victims, Chernobyl is the definitive history of the world's worst nuclear disaster.

About the Author

Serhii Plokhy is Professor of History at Harvard University and a leading authority on Eastern Europe whose previous books include Lost Kingdom, The Gates of Europe and The Last Empire.

At the time of the Chernobyl explosion he lived behind the Iron Curtain less than 500 kilometres downstream of the damaged reactor

SOLD Travels through Istanbul

 

SOLD

Mint condition. PB. 396pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Istanbul: A Traveller's Reader is an wide-ranging and carefully chosen selection of writings, offering a richly layered view of Byzantine Constantinople and Turkish Istanbul. During the thousand-year Byzantine empire that followed its founding by Constantine the Great, Istanbul became a city of fabled riches; after falling to the Turks in 1453, its glories continued, maintained by the strength and wealth of the Ottomans.

Drawing on diaries, letters, biographies, travelogues and poems from the sixth century AD onwards, this evocative anthology recreates for contemporary visitors the vanished glories of Constantinople. It provides vivid eyewitness accounts of the coronation of a Byzantine emperor; the funeral of a sultan; the triumphal entry of Mehmet the Conqueror; the building of the Suleymaniye, the most magnificent of the city's mosques; and the death of Ataturk in 1938.

It also describes the rampant sexual exploits of the Byzantine empress-to-be Theodora; the public execution of a Turkish wife and her young, Christian lover; the near execution of an envoy given the unenviable task of transporting a large organ from England to Constantinople in 1599, a gift from Queen Elizabeth to Sultan Mehmet III, who was caught admiring the sultan's personal harem; and the unfortunate Frenchman caught drinking wine and eating a pork sausage while sketching in Hagia Sophia in the 1680s.

About the Author

Laurence Kelly is the editor of the Traveller's Reader series. Born in Brussels and educated at New College, Oxford, where he read history, he joined the Life Guards in 1950 and served in the Foreign Office. His interest in all things Turkish began in 1946 when he first visited Ankara and Istanbul whilst his father was in Turkey as British Ambassador.

Travels from Mexico to Poland

 

Excellent condition. PB. 442pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Autobiographical account of a writer's journeys to Mexico, New York and Poland.

Relates her experiences in Mexico as she tries to write a novel, the devastation of losing her New York home, and researching a novel in Poland.

Author was born in Germany and emigrated to Melbourne in 1948.

Her first book, 'The Auschwitz Poems', won the 1987 Victorian Premier's Award for Poetry, and 'Just Like That' received the 1995 NSW Premier Awards for Fiction.

She currently lives in New York with her husband, Australian painter David Rankin.

SOLD An hilarious travelogue of modern Turkey

 

SOLD

OK folks. I have read this book twice. It is hilarious and irreverent. At the same time, it is also very respectful of Turkish culture whilst poking fun at its political elite. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Rare book. Very good condition. PB. 306pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Inspired by a dusty fez in his parents' attic, Jeremy Seal set off in 1993 to trace the astonishing history of this cone-shaped hat. 

Soon, the quintessentially Turkish headgear became the key to understanding a country beset by contradictions.

About the author

Jeremy Seal is a writer and broadcaster. His first book, A Fez of the Heart, was shortlisted for the 1995 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. He is also the author of The Snakebite Survivors' Club and The Wreck at Sharpnose Point, and presenter of Channel 4's ‘Wreck Detectives’. He lives in Bath with his wife and daughters.

SOLD Simon Winchester returns to the Balkans

 

SOLD

Mint condition. HB. 267pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Award-winning journalist and author Simon Winchester takes readers on a personal tour of the Balkans.

Combining history and interviews with the people who live there, Winchester offers a fascinating glimpse into the complex issues at work in this chaotic region.

Unrest in the Balkans has gone on for centuries. A seasoned reporter, Winchester visited the region twenty years ago.

When Kosovo reached crisis level in 1997, Winchester thought a return visit to the beleaguered area would help to make sense out of the awful violence.

He decided to use Vienna and Istanbul, two great cities whose rivalries helped create the dynamics at work today, as the beginning and end points of his trip.

Not specifically a book about war, it is more a portrait of a place and its people in turmoil.

Simon Winchester offers an insightful look at a little understood.