Staff Picks
Browse by Region: World, Asia, Middle East, West & South Asia, Australia & Oceania, Africa, Europe, North America, South America, Central America, & Caribbean, Polar Regions and Oceans
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World
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The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World $228.00 (20% off $285.00)
The Times Comprehensive contains 249 pages of reference maps of continents, countries, and oceans. In addition, it offers a 224-page gazetteer-index to more than 200,000 place names and geographical features, including full cross-referencing with alternative and former names, coordinates for every settlement, and a comprehensive glossary of geographical terms.
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Oxford Comprehensive Atlas of the World $200.00 (20% off $250.00)
The core of this leather-bound edition of the Oxford Comprehensive Atlas is the extensive world mapping section of 290 pages. These spectacular maps are accompanied by a set of six ocean floor maps and a 56 page section on World Geography which features colorful spreads on astronomy, biodiversity and the natural world, climate change and global warming, together with economic topics such as globalization.
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What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets by Faith D’Aluisio, photographed by Peter Menzel, $32.00 (20% off $40.00)
A stunning photographic collection featuring portraits of 80 people from 30 countries and the food they eat in one day, including: a Japanese sumo wrestler; a Massai herdswoman; world-renowned Spanish chef Ferran Adria; and an American competitive eater. Essays discuss the implications of our modern diets for our health and for the planet in a compelling blend of photography and investigative reportage.
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Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader: California Series in Public Anthropology written by Paul Farmer, foreword by Tracy Kidder, $22.00 (20% off $27.50)
For nearly thirty years, anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer has traveled to some of the most impoverished places on earth to bring comfort and the best possible medical care to the poorest of the poor. Partner to the Poor collects his writings from 1988 to 2009 on anthropology, epidemiology, health care for the global poor, and international public health policy, providing a broad overview of his work.
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The Fourth Part of the World: An Astonishing Epic of Global Discovery, Imperial Ambition, and the Birth of America by Toby Lester, $13.59 (20% off $22.99)
For millennia Europeans believed that the world consisted of three parts: Europe, Africa, and Asia. But they hinted at the existence of a “fourth part of the world.” In 1507, Waldseemuller and Ringmann, two scholars working in eastern France, made it real. Columbus had died the year before convinced that he had sailed to Asia, but Waldseemuller and Ringmann, after reading about the Atlantic discoveries of Columbus’s contemporary Amerigo Vespucci, came to a startling conclusion: Vespucci had reached the fourth part of the world.
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Strange Maps: Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities by Frank Jacobs, $24.00 (20% off $30.00)
Spanning many centuries, all continents, and the realms of outer space and the imagination, this collection of 138 unique graphics combines beautiful full-color illustrations with quirky statistics and smart social commentary. The result is a distinctive illustrated guide to the world.
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Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne, $20.76 (20% off $25.95)
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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The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography by Katharine Harmon, $36.00 (20% off $45.00)
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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The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner, $11.19 (20% off 13.99)
The author takes readers on a whirlwind tour of countries that are quietly pursuing the most American of obsessions – the pursuit of happiness – or, in the crabby author’s case, moments of “un-unhappiness.” Weiner doesn’t profess to know what happiness is, but with a mixture of psychological insight, scientific research, geopolitical analysis and wry humor, he successfully shows us where happiness is.
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An Atlas of Radical Cartography edited by Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat, $28.00 (20% off $35.00)
Radical Cartography pairs writers with artists, architects, designers and collectives to address the role of the map as political agent (rather than neutral document). Ten mapping projects dealing with social and political issues such as migration, incarceration, globalization, housing rights, garbage and energy issues are complemented by 10 critical essays and dialogues.
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Asia
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Secret History of the Mongol Queens by Jack Weatherford, $20.80 (20% off $26.00)
The Mongol queens of the thirteenth century ruled the largest empire the world has ever known. Yet sometime near the end of the century, censors cut a section from The Secret History of the Mongols, leaving a single tantalizing quote from Genghis Khan: “Let us reward our female offspring.” Only this hint of a father’s legacy for his daughters remained of a much larger story.
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Shanghai Girls
by Lisa See, $12.00 (20% off $15.00)
In 1937 Shanghai, twenty-one-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister, May, are having the time of their lives. Until the day their father tells them that he has gambled away their wealth. To repay his debts, he must sell the girls as wives to suitors who have traveled from Los Angeles to find Chinese brides. As Japanese bombs fall on their beloved city, Pearl and May set out from the Chinese countryside to the shores of America.
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Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes, $19.96 (20% off $24.95)
This is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese, but monsoon rain, mud, leeches, tigers, disease, malnutrition and the obstacles they discover between each other.…
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Wandering Lake: Into the Heart of Asia by Sven Hedin, $15.20 (20% off $19.00)
The lake of Lop Nur is one of the world’s strangest phenomena. “The wandering lake” has for millennia been in a perpetual state of flux, drifting north to south, often tens of kilometres. It was once the lifeblood of the great Silk Road kingdom of Loulan, and its peculiar movements confused even Ptolemy, who marked the lake twice on his map of Asia. Sven Hedin became captivated by the Lop Nur’s movements and the region surrounding it, proving that Lop Nur did indeed shift position and why.
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The Turkish Cookbook: Regional Recipes and Stories by Nur Ilkin and Sheilah Kaufman, $28.00 ($20% off $35.00)
Healthful and tantalizing, simple and delicious, Turkish cuisine is well on its way to becoming the next big trend in cooking. Inspired by the best of regional cooking, this unique collection of recipes shares a rediscovery of timeless authentic, healthful, refreshing and easy-to-prepare Turkish dishes, from classics to lesser known family favorites.
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Middle East
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The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East
by Neil MacFarquhar, $12.95 (20% off $15.95)
In Media Relations, MacFarquhar shares a lesser known side of the region, the story he always wanted to file, showing the daily lives and attitudes of people frequently obscured behind the curtain of violence – the stories of chefs and sex therapists, bloggers and academics struggling to reform on their own terms.
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Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour, $12.76 (20% off $15.95)
If conducting a love affair in modern Iran is not a simple undertaking, then telling the story of that love may be even more difficult. In a country where mere proximity between a man and a woman may be the prologue to deadly sin, where illicit passion is punished by imprisonment, or even death, telling that most redemptive of human narratives becomes the greatest literary challenge. Shahriar Mandanipour evokes a pair of young lovers who find each other through coded messages and internet chat rooms and their story entwines with an account of the author’s struggle.
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The Forever War by Dexter Filkins, $12.00 (20% Off $15.00)
The Forever War is the definitive account of America’s conflict with Islamic fundamentalism and a searing exploration of its human costs. Through the eyes of Filkins, we witness the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, the aftermath of the attack on New York on September 11th and the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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West & South Asia, Australia & Oceania
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Nine Lives: In Search of Sacred India by William Dalrymple, $21.56 (20% off $26.95)
Nine Lives illuminates the remarkable ways in which traditional forms of religious life in India have been transformed in the vortex of the region’s rapid change–a book that distills the author’s twenty-five years of travel in India, taking us deep into ways of life that we might otherwise never have known exist.
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War by Sebastian Junger, $21.59 (20% off $26.99)
Junger’s on-the-ground account follows a single platoon through a 15-month tour of duty in the most dangerous outpost in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. Through the experiences of these young men at war, he shows what it means to fight, to serve, and to face down mortal danger on a daily basis.
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Empires of the Indus by Alice Albinia, $13.56 (20% off $16.95)
One of the largest rivers in the world, the Indus rises in the Tibetan mountains and flows west across northern India and south through Pakistan. Albinia follows the river upstream, through two thousand miles of geography and back to a time five thousand years ago when a string of sophisticated cities grew on its banks.
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Sahyadris: India’s Western Ghats photographs by Sandesh V. Kadur, text by Kamaljit S. Bawa, $40.00 (20% off $50.00)
On the Malabar Coast of southern India, along the Arabian Sea, lies a range of mountains known as the Western Ghats, or Sahyadris. Countless species of plants and animals live here, many of which are found nowhere else on earth, and countless of which are still being discovered. The book features nearly 400 photographs that portray both India’s beauty and vanishing heritage.
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In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
In the spirit of Joyce’s Dubliners and Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s collection of linked stories illuminates a place and a people through an examination of the entwined lives of landowners and their retainers on the Gurmani family farm in the countryside outside of Lahore, Pakistan.
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Ginger and Ganesh: Adventures in Indian Cooking, Culture, and Love by Nani Power, $20.00 (20% off $25.00)
“Please teach me Indian cooking! I will bring ingredients and pay you for your trouble. I would like to know about your culture as well.” And with this posting on Craigslist, so begins Nani Power’s journey to learn traditional Indian cooking in the most ancient of ways – woman to woman. Welcomed warmly into the homes of strangers, Power meets women of all ages and backgrounds and learns the skills that were passed on to them from their own mothers. Power takes the reader into a culture, a cuisine and the female psyche, with recipes and stories.
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Africa
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Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working And How There Is A Better Way for Africa by Dambisa Moyo, $11.20 (20% off $14.00)
Dead Aid unflinchingly confronts one of the greatest myths of our time: that billions of dollars in aid sent from wealthy countries to developing African nations has helped to reduce poverty and increase growth. In fact, poverty levels continue to escalate and growth rates have steadily declined – and millions continue to suffer. Debunking the current model of international aid, Dambisa Moyo offers a bold new road map for financing development of the world’s poorest countries.
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The Antelope’s Strategy: Living in Rwanda After the Genocide by Jean Hatzfeld, $12.80 (20% off $16.00)
In The Antelope’s Strategy, Hatzfeld returns to Rwanda seven years after his last book to talk with both the Hutus and Tutsis he’d come to know – the killers who had been released from prison or returned from Congolese exile and the Tutsi escapees who must now tolerate them as neighbors. How are they managing with the process of reconciliation? Do they think in their hearts it’s possible?
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Blood River: The Terrifying Journey Through the World’s Most Dangerous Country by Tim Butcher, $12.80 (20% Off $16.00)
Ever since Stanley first charted its mighty river in the 1870s, the Congo has epitomized the dark and turbulent history of a continent. Daily Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher was sent to cover Africa in 2000. Before long he became obsessed with the idea of recreating Stanley’s original expedition — despite warnings that his plan was suicidal.
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Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder, $12.80 (20% Off $16.00)
Deo arrives in America from Burundi in search of a new life. Having survived a civil war and genocide, he lands at JFK airport with two hundred dollars, no English and no contacts. He ekes out a precarious existence delivering groceries, living in Central Park and learning English by reading dictionaries in bookstores. Then Deo begins to meet the strangers who will change his life.
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Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, $19.96 (20% off $24.95)
By the world-renowned novelist, playwright, critic, and author of Wizard of the Crow, an evocative and affecting memoir of childhood. Ngugi wa Thiong’o was born in 1938 in rural Kenya to a father whose four wives bore him a score of children. The man who would become one of Africa’s leading writers was the fifth child of the third wife. Ngugi deftly etches a bygone era, capturing the landscape, the people and their culture, and the social and political vicissitudes of life under colonialism and war.
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Europe
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The Siege by Ismail Kadare, $12.00 (20% off $15.00)
From Ismail Kadare, winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize.
In the early fifteenth century, as winter falls away, the people of Albania know that their fate is sealed when dust kicked up by Turkish horses is spotted from a citadel. Brightly colored banners, minarets, and tens of thousands of men fill the plain below. The Siege tells the story of the months that follow and the lives held in the balance, from the Pasha himself to the artillerymen, astrologer, blind poet and harem of women who accompany him.
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Far North: A Novel by Marcel Theroux, $12.00 (20% off $15.00)
Out on the frontier of a failed state, Makepeace – sheriff and perhaps last citizen – patrols a city’s ruins, salvaging books but keeping the guns in good repair. Into this cold land comes shocking evidence that life might be flourishing elsewhere.
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I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson, $18.40 (20% off $23.00)
An enthralling novel of a mother and son’s turbulent relationship from the author of Out Stealing Horses. It is 1989: Communism is crumbling, and Arvid Jansen is facing his first divorce. At the same time, his mother gets diagnosed with cancer. Over a few intense autumn days, we follow Arvid as he struggles to find a new footing in his life while all the established patterns around him are changing at staggering speed.
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The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman, $20.00 (20% off $25.00)
Set against the gorgeous backdrop of Rome, Rachman’s wry, vibrant debut follows the topsy-turvy private lives of the reporters, editors, and executives of an international English-language newspaper as they struggle to keep it–and themselves–afloat.
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Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, $13.56 (20% off $16.95)
This never-before-translated masterpiece is based on a true story. It presents a richly detailed portrait of life in Berlin under the Nazis and tells the sweeping saga of one working-class couple who decides to take a stand when their only son is killed at the front. With nothing but their grief and each other against the awesome power of the Reich, they launch a simple, clandestine resistance campaign.
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The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson, $22.36 (20% off $27.95)
The third and final novel in Stieg Larsson’s internationally best-selling trilogy. Lisbeth Salander–the heart of Larsson’s two previous novels–lies in critical condition, a bullet wound to her head, in the intensive care unit of a Swedish city hospital. She’s fighting for her life in more ways than one: if and when she recovers, she’ll be taken back to Stockholm to stand trial for three murders.
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The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson, $12.76 (20% off $15. 95)
Lisbeth Salander, the troubled, wise-beyond-her-years genius hacker, is the focus and fierce heart of the story. Mikael Blomkvist – crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium – has decided to publish a story exposing an extensive sex trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business, and government. On the eve of publication, the two reporters responsible for the story are brutally murdered. But perhaps more shocking for Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander.
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, $11.96 (20% off $14.95)
An international publishing sensation, The 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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Parisians: an Adventure History of Paris by Graham Robb, $23.16 (20% off 28.95)
From the Revolution to the present, Graham Robb has distilled a series of astonishing true narratives, all stranger than fiction. The result is a resonant, intimate history with the power of a great novel.
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Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire by Tilar J. Mazzeo, $12.79 (20% off $15.99)
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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City of Thieves by David Benioff, $12.00 (20% off $15.00)
During the Nazis’ brutal siege of Leningrad, Lev Beniov is arrested and thrown into the same cell as a handsome deserter named Kolya. Instead of being executed, Lev and Kolya are given a chance by complying with an outrageous directive: secure a dozen eggs for a powerful Soviet colonel to use in his daughter’s wedding cake.
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The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway, $12.00 (20% off $15.00)
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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North America
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Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, $13.55 (20% off $15.95)
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared.
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Schooner: Building a Wooden Boat on Martha’s Vineyard written by Tom Dunlop, photographed by Alison Shaw, $35.96 (20% off $44.95)
This coffee table book takes you through the construction of Rebecca of Vineyard Haven, a sixty-foot wooden schooner designed and built by the Gannon and Benjamin Marine Railway. At the time of her construction, she was the largest sailing vessel built on the Island of Martha’s Vineyard since the election of Abraham Lincoln. Nearly every part of her is built or cast or fashioned by hand.
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The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larsen, $12.80 (20% off $16.00)
When twelve year old genius cartographer T.S. Spivet receives an unexpected phone call from the Smithsonian announcing he has won the prestigious Baird Award, life as normal, if you consider mapping family dinner table conversation normal, is interrupted and a wild cross-country adventure begins, taking T.S. from his family ranch just north of Divide, Montana, to the museum’s hallowed halls.
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Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann, $12.00 (20% off $15.00)
It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in Colum McCann’s intricate portrait of a city and its people.
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The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven, $12.80 (20% off $16.00)
Traven spent most of his adult life in Mexico, where, under various names, he wrote several bestsellers and was an outspoken defender of the rights of Mexico’s indigenous people. First published in 1935, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is Traven’s most famous and enduring work – the dark, savagely ironic, and riveting story of three down-and-out Americans hunting for gold in Sonora.
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Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans by Dan Baum, $12.00 (20% off $15.00)
Nine Lives is a multivoiced biography of this dazzling, surreal, and imperiled city through the lives of nine characters over forty years and bracketed by two epic storms: Hurricane Betsy, which transformed the city in the 1960s, and Katrina, which nearly destroyed it. These nine lives are windows into every strata of one of the most complex and fascinating cities in the world.
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Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall, $19.96 (20% Off $24.95)
McDougall takes us from the high-tech science labs at Harvard to the sun-baked valleys and freezing peaks across North America where ever-growing numbers of ultra-runners are pushing their bodies to the limit, and, finally, to the climactic race in the Copper Canyons where a tribe of the world’s greatest distance runners shares their secrets.
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South America, Central America, & Caribbean
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Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin by Gabriel García Márquez, $11.20 (20% off $14.00)
In 1973, the film director Miguel Littín fled Chile after a U.S.-supported military coup toppled the democratically elected Socialist government of Salvador Allende, replacing it with the rule of General Augusto Pinochet. In 1985, Littín returned to Chile, bent on making a movie that told the truth about life under Pinochet.
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Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Triptych written by Marie Vieux-Chauvet, introduction by Edwidge Danticat, $12.00 (20% off $15.00)
Available in English for the first time, Vieux-Chauvet’s trilogy of novellas is a remarkable literary event. In a brilliant translation, Love, Anger, Madness is a scathing response to the struggles of race, class, and sex that have ruled Haiti.
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Gringa in Bogotá: Living Colombia’s Invisible War by June Carolyn Erlick, $15.96 (20% off $19.95)
As an experienced journalist, Erlick lets the things she observes lead her to larger conclusions. The courtesy of people on buses, the absence of packs of stray dogs and street trash, and the willingness of strangers to help her cross an overpass when vertigo overwhelms her all become signs of convivencia – the desire of Bogotanos to live together in harmony despite decades of war.
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Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way by Peter Kaminsky & Francis Mallmann, $28.00 (20% off $35.00)
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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Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann, $12.76 (20% off $15.95)
After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve “the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century”: What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z?
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Polar Regions and Oceans
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Stories of the Sea: Everyman’s Library Pocket Classics edited by Diana Secker Tesdell, $12.00 (20% off $15.00)
A gathering of the best maritime fiction from the last two hundred years: tales of shipwrecks, storms at sea, creatures from the deep and voyages that test human limits. Classic adventure stories by Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling and Jack London mix with marvelously imaginative tales by Isak Dinesen, Patricia Highsmith and J. G. Ballard.
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Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg, $20.76 (20% off $25.95) Award-winning writer and fisherman Paul Greenberg takes us on a culinary journey, exploring the history of the fish that dominate our menus: salmon, sea bass, cod and tuna. He visits Norwegian mega farms that use genetic techniques once pioneered on sheep to grow millions of pounds of salmon a year. He travels to the ancestral river of the Yupik Eskimos to see the only Fair Trade certified fishing company in the world. Fish, he reveals, are the last truly wild food.
