Di shang bei jing

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Jan Abraham Meijn Van Spanbroek

En 1764, Wilem Gerrit Dedel vient d'être nommé ambassadeur des Provinces unies en Turquie et organise son voyage pour rejoindre Constantinople. C'est ce périple entre Utrecht et la capitale de l'empire ottoman que décrit l'auteur de ce manuscrit. C'est aussi un guide touristique avant l'heure, témoignage vivant et coloré, qu'a laissé Meijn van Spanbroek, ce jeune commerçant "gentilhomme d'ambassade".

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Peter Lourie

Lourie completed his trip. It took him three weeks and marked the first time anyone has traveled from the source of the Hudson to the mouth in a single vessel. The Hudson proved to be a very changeable river. It includes seven locks and nine power dams. The northern half is a true river with strong current, but the lower half is tidal, a sunken river from the days of glaciers. In its first 165 miles, it drops more than 4,000 feet to Albany. The second half falls no more than a foot. Lourie's account of his trip is a fresh look at one of America's great and complex waterways, one of the few, in fact, that still contains its historical and biological species of fish. It is also the longest inland estuary in the world. Henry Hudson called it the "great river of the mountains." Nowadays, too often the Hudson is stereotyped as a ruined, polluted industrial river. its glorious past is compared to its present neglect. In River of Mountains, Peter Lourie combines the Hudson's rich history and descriptions of some of the region's most impressive landscape with the residents of its mill towns, the loggers, commercial fishermen, and barge pilots - all of whom are proof that the river is still a thriving, vital waterway.

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as told to Ben East

A rancher, his family, and two companions journey through 300 miles of rough, unsettled country to the land the family will homestead in Canada only to realize they have been trekking in the wrong direction.

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Guido Gozzano

Guido Gozzano (1883-1916), a distinguished Italian poet of the early twentieth century, embarked for India in February 1912, ostensibly to treat the tuberculosis he would die from a few years later. His trip lasted three months; all told he spent six weeks on the subcontinent. Before leaving home he had engaged to send back dispatches to La Stampa; after appearing there, his "letters from India" were collected and issued posthumously as Verso la cuna del mondo (1917), now published in English for the first time. The extent of Gozzano's travels - to Ceylon, Goa, Agra, Jaipur - makes one wonder how the writer was able to visit all or even most of the places he so vividly describes. For factual details Gozzano relied on half a dozen sources, notably Pierre Loti and Paolo Mentegazza. But what counts in his book is what comes to us straight from him: a tale of enchantment. Fabulous India, fabled India - "I did not honestly think I would find so much of it intact," the spellbound traveler repeats to himself before what he must shortly recognize as prodigious evidence of decay.