Globe Corner Blogs

Each year, the New York Times publishes their annual list of the 100 Notable Books of the Year along with some additional supplemental lists (Book Critics Top Ten; roundups of major books in categories such as Travel, Cooking, and Photography)

The Globe Corner features those books on the Times lists that fit within the scope of our focus on travel and geographic reference materials.  All books in this category are discounted 15% or more.

The Times posted its list in last Sunday’s Book Review and we’ve posted the Globe Corner selection from the list on a special page on our blog devoted to the annual list.

Each year, Beth Harpaz,  the Associated Press Travel editor rings up The Globe Corner, along with a few other travel booksellers and publishers for her annual article, “Books for the traveler: Holiday gift suggestions”.  Her article started rolling out into newspapers around the country over the past few days — including the Washington Post, the New Orleans Times-Picayne, and the International Times Herald.

Her article begins:

Is there an avid traveler on your gift list? Or even someone who doesn’t go too far from home, but simply loves reading about faraway places and other cultures? Maybe you have a friend or loved one who might enjoy spending a winter’s day gazing at pictures of places they love or long to see. Books with a travel theme — whether practical, beautiful, inspirational or just a good read — make a good holiday gift. Here are a few ideas and recommendations….  For the rest of the article, visit the Washington Post’s version.

The Globe Corner picks  for AP include:

City Secrets Guidebook Series
There’s great news this year for fans of architect Robert Kahn’s City Secrets series. Remarkable contributors (writers, artists, curators, and others) reveal their favorite strolls, hidden gardens, buildings, shops, and restaurants. New editions of City Secrets London, City Secrets Rome, and City Secrets Florence, Venice & the Towns of Italy are available. City Secrets Manhattan, covering Kahn’s home turf, is due just before the holidays.

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City: A User’s Guide to the Past, Present, and Future of Urban Life
By P. D. Smith (hardcover, $40.00)
This collection of essays about urban life worldwide offers wonderful portraits on wide range of topics ranging from downtowns & skyscrapers;  shantytowns and favelas;  graffiti, street food, flash mobs, & skateboarding.

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Mourad: New Moroccan
by Mourad Lahlou (hardcover, $40.00)
Chef Mourad Lahlou, renowned for his Michelin-starred San Francisco restaurant,  presents a new, modern Moroccan cuisine in 100-plus recipes, lavishly illustrated with food and photographs from Morocco.

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Saraban: A Chef’s Journey Through Persia
by Greg and Lucy Malouf  (hardcover, $59.95)
The latest combination cookbook/travel memoir from Chef Greg Malouf and his writer wife Lucy, authors of critically acclaimed previous cookbooks which combine gorgeous photography with personal accounts on culinary travels through other parts of the Middle East (Turquoise (travels/recipes from Turkey) & Saha (travels/recipes from Lebanon & Syria)).  Saraban recounts their  journey through the culinary landscapes of ancient Persia and modern-day Iran.

The October Destination of the Month is South America — offering 15% off on all books and maps for South America.

Our October newsletter features, among other topics, a spotlight on Colombia.

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Cartagena--photo by Harriet

Focus on Colombia:

You know a travel destination has gone “mainstream” when The Boston Globe devotes the front page of its Sunday Travel section to it — as they did to a few weeks ago for a piece mostly focused on the Caribbean coast of Colombia around Cartagena.

Globe Corner customers have been aware for a few years about the positive changes underway in Colombia  and the great travel experiences that abound there.  See our store blog for some past “reports from the field” about Cartagena and Bogotá.

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Michelin Green Guide Colombia

For my first full day in Vilnius, I criss-crossed the cobble-stoned Old Town marveling at the fanciful Baroque architecture and the many beautiful churches whose steeples and bell towers reach for the sky.  It took only a few hours to see the highlights and so with a sense of accomplishment I stopped to rest in a cafe. If it were a few years earlier and I were on my massive post-college eurotrip this probably would have been my enduring memory of the city and the entire extent of my Lithuanian experience. This summer, however, I opted for more in depth travel. I flew in and out of Warsaw, but otherwise spent all my time in Lithuania. I had enrolled in a four-week Yiddish program. Classes were held at Vilnius University, which was founded in 1579 making it one of the oldest universities in Eastern Europe. We had two sessions of class in the morning and in the late afternoon we had lectures and guided tours of the city.  Every week we had an excursion. On one occasion, we were led to the forest outside the city by a Jewish partisan of the Second World War. In Yiddish, she spoke about what life was like in Vilnius before the war, her escape from the Ghetto, the daily struggle of living and fighting in the woods, and how she rebuilt her life after liberation.

Each day, I made time to wander aimlessly about the Old Town. The winding medieval alleys always seemed to drop me off somewhere unexpected. There were hidden courtyards filled with hanging laundry and playing children. A spiraling staircase in a bar might lead deep underground to a musty-smelling cavern filled with the sounds of lively conversation and beer running from the tap. There was an old abandoned church not too far from the center. Sometimes a flock of birds would suddenly swoop from one of its opened windows. I popped in a store which sold only ladies’ gloves. They were soft and came in all colors from the bold autumnal reds and oranges to the wintry pastels of pink and blue. In a chocolate bar, I tried ginger and chilli pepper covered in chocolate. Then there were the places, which for a few weeks at least, I became a regular. For dinner I fell in love with a simple Chinese restaurant, which served a delicious vegetable fried rice. My favorite cafe was so small it served just coffee and pastries and had only two cramped seats. But they faced a floor-to-ceiling window on a busy pedestrian street and it proved a great place to people watch. Two rivers snake through the city of Vilnius and small hills provide stunning views of the red-roofed and many steepled Old Town.

Roughly the size of West Virginia and with a population of about three million, Lithuania may be a small country even by European standards, but much like its capital, there is a great deal to be explored. Lithuania has been influenced by Germans, Scandinavians, Poles, and Russians. Yet Lithuania has managed to retain its own very distinct character. Lithuanian is the closest living language to the Proto-Indo-European language. The Lithuanians were the ones to finally defeat the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Grunwald. Lithuania was the last European country to be Christianized. The Soviet Republic of Lithuania was the first to declare independence from the U.S.S.R. These facts are not only fun trivia, but they really show something about Lithuanians’ strong sense of freedom and the resilience of their beautiful culture.

Vilnius is a lovely city, but I decided that I wanted to see more of this great country. About thirty to forty minutes outside Vilnius is Trakai, a gorgeous castle on an island. It is possible to get tours of the castle, but an even better use of time might be to simply go boating around the castle, soaking up the sun and scenery. An hour and a half from Vilnius is the city of Kaunus. There are very few tourists in Kaunus, but city is truly as charming as Vilnius. Through its center lies a long, tree-lined boulevard with cafes, boutiques, and crowds of promenading locals. On one end is a gigantic, pale-blue Russian Orthodox Church. The other end leads to the Old Town, Castle, and the junction of two major rivers. But perhaps my favorite getaway was to Klaipeda and the Curonian Spit. Klaipeda (formerly Memel) has German roots and is located in Western Lithuania along the Baltic coast. It is the perfect jumping off point for the Curonian Spit, which is a narrow strip of land comprised of forests, sand dunes, and beaches. All in one day I was able to go visit a city, town, forest, and sea. I even climbed Witch’s Hill, a hill covered with trees and large wooden sculptures depicting scenes from Lithuanian folk tales. But alas, one month was still not enough time. There were many more places I had hoped to see, but they will have to wait for now.

We sent off the September Newsletter this morning to our email subscribers.  If you’re not already receiving the bi-monthly newsletter, you can sign up on our newsletter archives page.

One of this issue’s topics features new releases in the Beer and Wine category — always a staff favorite.

Two standout titles are:

The Great American Ale Trail:
The Craft Beer Lover’s Guide to the Best Watering Holes
by Christian DeBenedetti
“The Great American Ale Trail” is a comprehensive guide to the best places to drink craft beer in America. Author Christian DeBenedetti has traveled across the country to find the worthiest beer destinations, from major breweries to tiny farmhouse startups.  (September 2011)

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The Oxford Companion to Beer
The first major reference work to investigate the history and vast scope of beer, The Oxford Companion to Beer features more than 1,100 A-Z entries written by 166 of the world’s most prominent beer experts. Attractively illustrated with over 140 images, the book covers everything from the agricultural makeup of various beers to the technical elements of the brewing process, local effects of brewing on regions around the world, and the social and political implications of sharing a beer. (early October 2011)

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In the lazy, hazy dog days of August, the two company dogs finally set aside Skype and met in the same physical space on neutral ground at the company webmaster’s family camp on a remote pond in the New Hampshire mountains.

Most of the GCB customers are quite familiar with Ulla (the golden retriever whose official title is “store greeter” and “Dog Diva” of Harvard Square). Less visible has been the Kassie (pictured on the dock), the company webmaster’s new Bouvier puppy in Chicago. This blog post announces that Kassie has completed her apprenticeship and is now handling customer care issues when Ulla is napping.

Ulla reviewed all company policies during a dog staff meeting on the dock prior to a mountain hike and has signed off on Kassie’s readiness to step in to handle customer care problems when she is travelling (or just napping).

GCB joins National Geographic’s promotion of the new NG Boston Harbor Islands Map at the Landmarks Festival concert at the Hatch Shell – Wednesday at 7 pm. Stop by NG’s table for GCB’s special offer on NG trail map orders!

Landmarks Festival at the Shell
August 17 – 7PM

Program:
Die Fledermaus Overture
Johann Strauss II (1825 – 1899)

Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, op.23, 1st movement
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

http://www.landmarksorchestra.com/

Our latest newsletter featured the unusually large number of books released this spring on the subject of Paris — either new in hardcover, or newly released in paper.  You can view the full list in the newsletter.

All books on Paris are 15% off through August 15th!

Here’s a sampling of some June new releases of books on Paris:

Greater Journey: Americans in Paris
by David McCullough
McCullough’s latest history is the enthralling and untold story of the adventurous American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, architects, and others of high aspiration who set off for Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900, ambitious to excel in their work.  McCullough’s portraits include Augustus Saint-Gauden, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Samuel F. B. Morse, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Henry James, Mark Twain and Charles Sumner.+
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Dawn of the Belle Epoque:
The Paris of Monet, Zola, Bernhardt, Eiffel, Debussy, Clemenceau, and Their Friends
by Mary McAuliffe
Paris in 1871 was a shambles following military defeat, siege, and a bloody uprising, and the question loomed, “Could this extraordinary city even survive?” By 1900, the Belle Epoque was in full flower, but the decades between were marked by tension and conflict, as the new challenged the old in everything from politics to art, literature, music, science, and engineering. Mary McAuliffe takes the reader back to these perilous years following the abrupt collapse of the Second Empire and France’s uncertain venture into the Third Republic examining this era through the eyes of Monet, Zola, Debussy, Eiffel, Marie Curie, and others as they struggled with the forces of tradition. Through rich illustrations and evocative narrative, McAuliffe brings this vibrant and seminal era to life.

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Paris to the Past:
Traveling Through French History by Train
by Ina Caro
In one of the most inventive travel books in years, Ina Caro invites readers on twenty-five one-day train trips that depart from Paris and transport us back through seven hundred years of French history. Whether taking us to Orleans to evoke the miraculous visions of Joan of Arc, to Versailles to experience the flamboyant achievements of Louis XIV, or to the Place de la Concorde to witness the beheading of Marie Antoinette, Caro animates history with her lush descriptions of architectural splendors and tales of court intrigue.

Harvard Square customers have inquired about Ulla’s status in the wake of the closing of the Cambridge retail store.  Rest assured that our crack customer care representative is still reporting for duty every day to her cubicle (dog bed) at the GCB web site.  She does miss the visits from her fans in Harvard Square, but the opportunity to go swimming every day at an undisclosed Boston swimming hole is a fringe benefit of her new responsibilities.

In belated observance of Bastille Day, we are featuring Michelin, the pioneering French travel guide and map publisher.



The iconic Michelin Guides are 20% off through  August 15th:

– the annual Red hotel and restaurant guides

– the Green touring guides

Michelin maps for all countries are 15% off through August 15th, including:

– the Red (700 series) country maps and Orange (500 series) regional maps

– the harder-to-find Yellow (300 series) local maps

– and the really hard-to-find Green (100 series) Zoom maps