Bestsellers Fall 2009
Top Travel Narrative & Armchair Travel Books
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1. Unaccustomed Earth
by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake delivers eight dazzling stories that take readers from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life.
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2. How to Read Buildings: A Crash Course in Architectural Styles
by Carol Davidson Cragoe
This practical primer is a handbook for decoding a building’s style, history, and evolution. Every building contains clues embedded in its design that identify not only its architectural style but also the story of who designed it, who it was built for, and why.
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3. The Cellist of Sarajevo
by Steven Galloway
In a city ravaged by war, a musician plays his cello for twenty-two days at the site of a mortar attack, in memory of the fallen. Among the strangers drawn into the orbit of his music are a young father in search of water for his family, an older man in search of the humanity he once knew, a young woman, and a sniper.
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4. The Sharper Your Knife the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears in Paris
by Kathleen Flinn
In 2003, Flinn, a 36-year-old American living and working in London, cleared out her savings and moved to Paris to pursue a dream diploma from the famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school.
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5. The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine
by Benjamin Wallace
The Billionaire’s Vinegar tells the true story of a 1787 Chateau Lafite Bordeaux – supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson – that sold for $156,000 at auction and of the eccentrics whose lives intersected with it.
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6. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
by Stieg Larsson
Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo combines murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue into one satisfyingly complex and entertainingly atmospheric novel.
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7. The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World
by Eric Weiner
Weiner doesn’t profess to know what happiness is, but with a beguiling mixture of psychological insight, scientific research, geopolitical analysis and wry humor, he successfully shows us where happiness is.
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8. Marco Polo Didn’t Go There
by Rolf Potts
Marco Polo Didn’t Go There is more than just an entertaining journey into fascinating corners of the world. The book is a unique window into travel writing, with each chapter containing a “commentary track” – endnotes that reveal the ragged edges behind the experience and creation of each tale.
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9. My Life in France
by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme
This is a delightful memoir of Julia’s years in Paris, Marseille, and Provence. Funny, earthy, forthright – Julia is with us on every page as she relishes the French way of life that transformed her, and us.
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10. Smile When You’re Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer
by Chuck Thompson
From Bangkok to Bogota, a hilarious behind-the-brochures tour of picture-perfect locales, dangerous destinations, and overrated hellholes from a guy who knows the truth about travel. Travel writer, editor, and photographer Chuck Thompson has spent more than a decade traipsing through thirty-five (and counting) countries across the globe, and he’s had enough.
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11. Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way
by Peter Kaminsky & Francis Mallmann
A trailblazing chef reinvents the art of cooking over fire. Gloriously inspired recipes push the boundaries of live-fired cuisine in this primal yet sophisticated cookbook introducing the incendiary dishes of South America’s biggest culinary star.
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12. Kilimanjaro: A Photographic Journey to the Roof of Africa
photographs by Hiltrud Schulz, text by Michel Moushabeck
Moushabeck and Schulz invite you along as they explore and climb Mount Kilimanjaro. In this book they capture the essence of this majestic mountain with over 200 full-color photographs and a narrative that smoothly ties together personal observations with the mountain’s history, its people and its ecology.
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13. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
by Haruki Murakami
An intimate look at writing, running, and the incredible way they intersect. While simply training for New York City Marathon would be enough for most people, Murakami decided to write about it as well. The result is a memoir about his intertwined obsessions with running and writing.
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14. Bicycle Diaries
by David Byrne
Since the early 1980s, David Byrne has been riding a bike as his principal means of transportation in New York City. Two decades ago, he discovered folding bikes and started taking them on tour with his band. The more cities he saw from his bicycle, the more he became hooked on this mode of transport and the sense of liberation it provided.
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15. World Heritage Sites: A Complete Guide to 878 UNESCO World Heritage Sites
The first book that full describes every official UNESCO World Heritage site – the world’s most extraordinary places – covers 141 countries and highlights the fascinating facts of almost 900 properties, including 20 in America and 15 in Canada.
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16. The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography
by Katharine Harmon
Maps can be simple tools, comfortable in their familiar form. Or they can lead to different destinations: places turned upside down or inside out, territories riddled with marks understood only by their maker, realms connected more to the interior mind than to the exterior world. These are the places of artists’ maps, that happy combination of information and illusion.
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17. Gourmet Rhapsody
by Muriel Barbery
In the heart of Paris, the greatest food critic in the world, is dying. Monsieur Arthens has been lording over the world’s most esteemed chefs for years. But now, during his final hours, his mind has turned to simpler things. He is desperately searching for that singular flavor, that sublime something once sampled, never forgotten, “the Flavor” par excellence.
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18. Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire
by Tilar J. Mazzeo
A young witness to the dramatic events of the French Revolution and a new widow during the chaotic years of the Napoleonic Wars, Barbe-Nicole Clicqout Ponsardin defied convention by assuming the reins of the fledgling wine business she and her husband had nurtured.
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19. The Prospector
by Jean-Marie Gustave L Clézio
Years after his father’s death, Alexis becomes obsessed with the idea of finding the Corsair’s treasure and, through it, the lost magic and opulence of his youth. He abandons job and family, setting off on a quest that will take him from remote tropical islands to the hell of World War I, and away from a love affair.
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20. Paris Underground
by Mark Ovenden
In this follow-up to the sensational Transit Maps of the World, Ovenden now turns his attention to the famous Paris transit system with its inimitable Art Nouveau inspired stations and Art Deco signs.
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21. Morning Glory Farm and the Family That Feeds an Island
written by Tom Dunlop, photographs by Alison Shaw
A beautiful and evocative look at this most traditional of farms, along with 70 favorite Martha’s Vineyard recipes. Enjoy the story of the family that for thirty years has brought healthy, locally grown food to the island.
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22. Other
by Ryszard Kapuscinski
Looking at the concept of the Other through the lens of his own encounters in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and considering its formative significance for his own work, Kapuscinski traces how the West has understood the Other from classical times to colonialism, from the age of enlightenment to the postmodern global village.
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23. Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China
by Fuschia Dunlop
When award-winning food writer Dunlop lived in China, she vowed to eat everything she was offered, no matter how alien or bizarre. This work is a unique, evocative account of Chinese culinary culture.
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24. Sibley Guide to Trees
by David Allen Sibley
Similar in size and format to “The Sibley Guide to Birds,” this illustrated guide identifies more than 600 tree species in North America.
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25. Stones of Aran: Labyrinth
by Tim Robinson
Robinson’s ambition is to find out both what it is to know a landscape extensively and intimately as possible and what it takes to make that knowledge, the sense of the landscape itself, come alive in writing.
