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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorKon-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.
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
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.
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
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-
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 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.
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
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
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
The Places in Between
Rory Stewart · 322 pages
In January 2002 Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan--surviving by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers. By day he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers' floors, shared their meals,
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
Nine Hills to Nambonkaha: Two Years in the Heart of an African Village
Sarah Erdman · 329 pages
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
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.
The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut
Nigel Barley · 192 pages
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 Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific
J. Maarten Troost · 312 pages
The laugh-out-loud true story of a harrowing and hilarious two-year odyssey in the distant South Pacific island nation of Kiribati--possibly The Worst Place on Earth.At the age of twenty-six, Maarten Troost--who had been pushing the snooze button on the alarm clock of life by racking up useless graduate degrees and muddling through a series of temp jobs--decided to pack up his flip-flops and move
In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon
Redmond O'Hanlon · 317 pages
Color: A Natural History of the Palette
Victoria Finlay · 448 pages
The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World
Eric Weiner · 403 pages
Part foreign affairs discourse, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide, The Geography of Bliss takes the reader from America to Iceland to India in search of happiness, or, in the crabby author's case, moments of "un-unhappiness." The book uses a beguiling mixture of travel, psychology, science and humor to investigate not what happiness is, but where it is. Are people in Switzerland happier