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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut
Nigel Barley · 192 pages
Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey
Isabel Fonseca · 322 pages
After the revolutions of 1989, the author lived and traveled with the Gypsies of Bulgaria, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the former Yugoslavia, Romainia, and Albania -- listening to their stories and recording their attempts to become something more than despised outsiders. In this book, alongside unforgettable portraits of individuals -- the poet, the politician, the child prostitute-
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.
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.
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
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
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 Marsh Arabs
Wilfred Thesiger · 237 pages
During the years he spent among the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq-long before they were almost completely wiped out by Saddam Hussein-Wilfred Thesiger came to understand, admire, and share a way of life that had endured for many centuries. Traveling from village to village by canoe, he won acceptance by dispensing medicine and treating the sick. In this account of a nearly lost civilization, he pay
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 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.
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.
In 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
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
Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art
Carl Hoffman · 336 pages
The mysterious disappearance of Michael Rockefeller in remote New Guinea in 1961 has kept the world, and even Michael's powerful, influential family, guessing for years. Now, the author, a journalist has uncovered startling new evidence that tells the full, astonishing story. On November 21, 1961, Michael C. Rockefeller, the twenty-three-year-old son of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, vanish
The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief
V.S. Naipaul · 241 pages
Nobel Prize-winning author Naipaul spirals outward from the central African country of Uganda, to Nigeria, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Gabon, and concluding in South Africa, to unearth in six chapters a sense of African ancestral belief and practice.
This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland
Gretel Ehrlich · 400 pages
For the last decade, Gretel Ehrlich has been obsessed by an island, a terrain, a culture, and the men and women who long for and love the complex frailties and treacherous beauty of a world defined by ice. Greenland, the world's largest island, 840,000 square miles in extent, is covered by the largest continental ice sheet in the world. Her guide, her inspiration, her companion in spirit was the g
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
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
Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice: An Ethnobotanist Searches for New Medicines in the Rain Forest
Mark J. Plotkin · 328 pages
"Fascinating and highly readable account of an ethnobotanist's research on medicinal plants and hallucinogens among the Trio and Oyana of Suriname/Brazil and the Yanomamo of Venezuela. In view of the declining importance of shamanism and loss of plant knowledge due to rapid cultural change, author encourages research promoting the patenting of indigenous knowledge of medicinal plants, which may al
The Island of the Colorblind
Oliver Sacks · 298 pages
Oliver Sacks has always been fascinated by islands - their remoteness, their mystery, above all the unique forms of life they harbor. For him, islands conjure up equally the romance of Melville and Stevenson, the adventure of Magellan and Cook, and the scientific wonder of Darwin and Wallace. Drawn to the tiny Pacific atoll of Pingelap by intriguing reports of an isolated community of islanders b
Nine Hills to Nambonkaha: Two Years in the Heart of an African Village
Sarah Erdman · 329 pages
Boychiks in the Hood: Travels in the Hasidic Underground
Robert Eisenberg · 246 pages
Boychiks in the Hood is your passport to the Hasidic "underworld" - a destination far different from popular expectations. When Robert Eisenberg, a secular Jew from Omaha, Nebraska, decided to investigate his family's distant Satmar connections, he unknowingly embarked on a journey that would carry him around the world and into the hearts and lives of the Hasidim. Armed with a loving curiosity an