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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorIn an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale
Amitav Ghosh · 393 pages
Overview: Once upon a time an Indian writer named Amitav Ghosh set out to find an Indian slave, name unknown, who some seven hundred years before had traveled to the Middle East. The journey took him to a small village in Egypt, where medieval customs coexist with twentieth-century desires and discontents. But even as Ghosh sought to re-create the life of his Indian predecessor, he found himself i
Color: A Natural History of the Palette
Victoria Finlay · 448 pages
Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village
Elizabeth Warnock Fernea · 346 pages
Autobiographical account of two year's spent in a village of southern Iraq. The author accompanied her husband, who was doing anthropological research in the area.
Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present
Peter Hessler · 528 pages
From the acclaimed author of River Town comes a rare portrait, both intimate and epic, of twenty-first-century China as it opens its doors to the outside world.A century ago, outsiders saw Chinaas a place where nothing ever changes. Today the coun-try has become one of the most dynamic regions on earth. That sense of time -- the contrast between past and present, and the rhythms that emerge in a v
Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East
Gerard Russell · 368 pages
Despite its reputation for religious intolerance, the Middle East has long sheltered many distinctive and strange faiths: one regards the Greek prophets as incarnations of God, another reveres Lucifer in the form of a peacock, and yet another believes that their followers are reincarnated beings who have existed in various forms for thousands of years. These religions represent the last vestiges o
Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War
Tony Horwitz · 432 pages
Propelled by his boyhood passion for the Civil War, Horwitz embarks on a search for places and people still held in thrall by America's greatest conflict. The result is an adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where the ghosts of the Lost Cause are resurrected through ritual and remembrance. He joins "hardcore" reenactors; witnesses Klan rallies and calls for race war; finds that Ande
Sea of Glory: America's Voyage of Discovery, The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842
Nathaniel Philbrick · 452 pages
"Among the best books of this or any other year."-Los Angeles Times Book ReviewAmerica's first frontier was not the West; it was the sea-and no one writes more eloquently about that watery wilderness than Nathaniel Philbrick. In his bestselling In the Heart of the Sea Philbrick probed the nightmarish dangers of the vast Pacific. Now, in an epic sea adventure, he writes about one of the most ambiti
Nine Lives
William Dalrymple · 284 pages
From the Dust Jacket: A Buddhist monk takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet-then spends the rest of his life trying to atone for the violence by hand printing the best prayer flags in India. A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment as she watches her best friend ritually starve to death. A woman leaves her middle-class family in Calcutta, and her job in a jute factory, only to fi
Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica
Zora Neale Hurston · 301 pages
As a first-hand account of the weird mysteries and horrors of voodoo, Tell My Horse is an invaluable resource and fascinating guide. Based on Zora Neale Hurston's personal experiences in Haiti and Jamaica, where she participated as an initiate rather than just an observer of voodoo practices during her visits in the 1930s, this travelogue into a dark world paints a vividly authentic picture of cer
Tristes Tropiques
Claude Levi-Strauss · 418 pages
Tristes Tropiques was an immensely popular bestseller when it was first published in France in 1955. Claude Levi-Strauss's groundbreaking study of the societies of a number of Amazonian peoples is a cornerstone of structural anthropology and an exploration by the author of his own intellectual roots as a professor of philosophy in Brazil before the Second World War, as a Jewish exile from Nazi-oc
Indonesia, Etc: Exploring the Improbable Nation
Elizabeth Pisani · 416 pages
"An entertaining and thought-provoking portrait of Indonesia: a rich, dynamic, and often maddening nation awash with contradictions. Jakarta tweets more than any other city on earth, but 80 million Indonesians live without electricity and many of its communities still share in ritual sacrifices. Declaring independence in 1945, Indonesia said it would 'work out the details of the transfer of power
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
Anne Fadiman · 341 pages
When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos. Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their
The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes
Scott Wallace · 494 pages
Even today there remain tribes in the far reaches of the Amazon rainforest that have avoided contact with modern civilization. Deliberately hiding from the outside world, they are the unconquered, the last survivors of an ancient culture that predates the arrival of Columbus. Journalist Scott Wallace chronicles an expedition into the Amazon's uncharted depths, discovering the rainforest's secrets
The Discovery of France
Graham Robb · 480 pages
"From maps, migration and magic, to linguistic differences and tribal disputes, The Discovery of France tells the whole story of this remarkable - and surprising - country."--Jacket.
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death
Caitlin Doughty · 272 pages
Fascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty embarks on a global expedition to discover how other cultures care for the dead. From Zoroastrian sky burials to wish-granting Bolivian skulls, she investigates the world’s funerary customs and expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with dignity. Her account questions the rituals of the American funeral indust
The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut
Nigel Barley · 192 pages
The Songlines
Bruce Chatwin · 295 pages
Follow Chatwin on his journey into the 'Red Centre' of Australia. Part autobiography, part story, part history, part anthropology. Teaches us how Aboriginal Australians perceive their landscapes, and negotiate with each other in that vast, nomadic environment.
How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm: And Other Adventures in Parenting
Mei-Ling Hopgood · 292 pages
Hopgood discusses how cultural expectations and customs determine the way kids are raised--from how Kenyans live without strollers to how the Chinese potty train early.
The Forest People
Colin M. Turnbull · 288 pages
This study of the BaMbuti Pygmies of the Congo has become a classic work in the finest tradition of literate anthropology. Turnbull lived among the BaMbuti for three years, not as a clinical observer, but as a friend, learning their customs and sharing their daily life. Turnbull describes their hunting parties and nomadic camps, their love affairs and ancient ceremonies--the molimo, in which the P
People of the Deer
Farley Mowat · 303 pages
They were in harmony with the land but they were on the brink of extinction. Sixty years ago, the Ihalmiut numbered 7,000. When Farely Mowat visited them, their population had dwindled to forty. For two years, Mowat shared their hard life--the bleak winters, the shortages of food, the fervent struggle to withstand the intrusion of white men--and came to understand them.
An African in Greenland
Tete-Michel Kpomassie · 432 pages
Kon-Tiki: Across The Pacific In A Raft
Thor Heyerdahl · 239 pages
Presents the Kon-Tiki expedition led by explorer Thor Heyerdahl as he and his crew travel from South America and Polynesia on a raft made from balsa wood.