Globe Corner Blogs

This varied list of unique books represents just a few of the fascinating and exciting new titles that have come into our store recently.

. . .

Cooks, Clowns, and Cowboys
by Andrew Bain

101 skills and experiences to discover on your travels.
You know the question s coming: what did you do on your holiday? Master the experiences in Cooks, Clowns and Cowboys and you can reply:
I created a perfume in France.
I danced the flamenco in Seville.
I mixed the perfect martini in New York.
I earned my cosmonaut stripes in Russia.
I rode with cowboys in Argentina.
Saddle up for a new you, and come back from your travels with more than just a suntan.

. . .

36 Hours USA & Canda: Northeast
by Barbara Ireland

The New York Times has been offering up dream weekends with practical itineraries in its popular weekly “36 Hours” column since 2002. The many expert contributors have brought careful research, insider’s knowledge, and a sense of fun to hundreds of cities and destinations, always with an eye to getting the most out of a short trip. Based on the best-selling book 36 Hours: 150 Weekends in the USA & Canada, the Times and TASCHEN now bring together the best of the Northeast and Canada. From the great urban centers on everyone’s travel list to surprising locales with undiscovered character and charm, the paths lead to fashionable clubs in Manhattan, quaint New England towns, the French America of Quebec, and well beyond.

. . .

The Appalachian Trail: Celebrating America’s Hiking Trail
by Brian King, Bill Bryson

The only illustrated book officially published with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, The Appalachian Trail explores this legendary footpath in detail: with a foreword by Bill Bryson and filled with more than 300 spectacular contemporary images, as well as unpublished historical photos, documents, and maps from the ATC archives. Once inspired by this wonderful celebration of the A.T., readers can plan their own hike using the removable and full-size copy of the official National Park Service’s map of the entire Appalachian Trail included inside each book.

. . .

To the River
by Olivia Laing

One midsummer week more than 60 years after Virginia Woolf drowned in the Ouse in 1941, Olivia Laing walked that same Sussex river from source to sea. The result is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape–and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love. Along the way, Laing explores the roles rivers play in human lives, tracing their intricate flow through literature and mythology alike. She excavates all sorts of stories from the Ouse’s marshy banks, from the brutal Barons’ War of the 13th century to the “Dinosaur Hunters,” the 19th-century amateur naturalists who first cracked the fossil code. Central among these ghosts is, of course, Virginia Woolf herself: her life, her writing, and her watery death. Woolf is the most constant companion on Laing’s journey, and this book can be read in part as a biography of this extraordinary English writer, refracted back through the river she loved. But other writers float through these pages too–among them Iris Murdoch, Shakespeare, Homer, and Kenneth Grahame, author of the riverside classic “The Wind in the Willows.” The result is a wonderfully discursive read, interweaving biography, history, nature writing, and memoir, and driven by Laing’s deep understanding of science and cultural history.

. . .

100 Greatest Trips 
by Travel & Leisure

From Travel+Leisure, the world’s leading travel magazine, comes the newest edition of 100 Greatest Trips, an invaluable and inspiring compendium of the year’s most distinctive destinations. Whether your dream is to escape to a thatched-roof safari camp in the heart of a South African game reserve; explore emerging wine regions in Portugal; live out your own Roman holiday in a chic Italian penthouse; or find the best spot to enjoy a kleine Mokka in Vienna; 100 Greatest Trips points the way to the places you’ll want to go next.

. . .

Ghosts of Spain
by Giles Tremlett

The appearance, more than sixty years after the Spanish Civil War ended, of mass graves containing victims of Francisco Franco’s death squads finally broke what Spaniards call “the pact of forgetting”—the unwritten understanding that their recent, painful past was best left unexplored. At this charged moment, Giles Tremlett embarked on a journey around the country and through its history to discover why some of Europe’s most voluble people have kept silent so long. In elegant and passionate prose, Tremlett unveils the tinderbox of disagreements that mark the country today. Ghosts of Spain is a revelatory book about one of Europe’s most exciting countries.

. . .

On the Map
by Simon Garfield

Simon Garfield’s Just My Type illuminated the world of fonts and made everyone take a stand on Comic Sans and care about kerning. Now Garfield takes on a subject even dearer to our fanatical human hearts: maps.   Imagine a world without maps. How would we travel? Could we own land? What would men and women argue about in cars? Scientists have even suggested that mapping—not language—is what elevated our prehistoric ancestors from ape-dom. Follow the history of maps from the early explorers’ maps and the awe-inspiring medieval Mappa Mundi to Google Maps and the satellite renderings on our smartphones, Garfield explores the unique way that maps relate and realign our history—and reflect the best and worst of what makes us human.   Featuring a foreword by Dava Sobel and packed with fascinating tales of cartographic intrigue, outsize personalities, and amusing “pocket maps” on an array of subjects from how to fold a map to the strangest maps on the Internet, On the Map is a rich historical tapestry infused with Garfield’s signature narrative flair. Map-obsessives and everyone who loved Just My Type will be lining up to join Garfield on his audacious journey through time and around the globe.