Marco Polo almost single-handedly introduced fourteenth-century Europe to the civilizations of Central Asia and China. Now this stunningly illustrated volume, edited by renowned historian Morris Rossabi, offers the complete text of Polo's travelogue (in the respected Yule-Cordier translation), enhanced with more than 200 images--including illuminated manuscripts, paintings, photographs, and maps. Sidebars and dozens of informative footnotes combine...

Posthumously published in 1864, The Maine Woods depicts Henry David Thoreau's experiences in the forests of Maine, and expands on the author's transcendental theories on the relation of humanity to Nature. On Mount Katahdin, he faces a primal, untamed Nature. Katahdin is a place "not even scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world." In Maine he comes in contact with "rocks, trees, wind and solid earth" as though he...

The captivating landscapes of America's heartland offer an inviting escape from the everyday in Indiana Across the Land. Although a road trip from the shores of Lake Michigan to the Ohio River could be accomplished in only six hours, photographers Lee Mandrell and DeeDee Niederhouse-Mandrell take readers the long way around the Hoosier state, embarking on a breathtaking journey across the seasons, down windswept dunes, through old-growth forests,...

William Dean Howells served as a diplomat in Venice, Italy, a result of which is this delightful travel narrative. In Italian Journeys, Italy comes alive—Howells details a grand adventure as he makes his way around the country by land and sea, and visits such fabled cities as Rome, Naples, and Genoa.

The great American novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937) here gives us her colorful and textured travel memoir "In Morroco" (1920). Still a deeply energized work, Wharton imbues the reader with a sense of wonder that served as the impetus for her travels into this exotic Northern African land. Edith Wharton made her name as a novelist closely associated with the prolific Henry James. Their personal and literary kinship may be seen in much of her long...

The enduring appeal of the desert is strikingly portrayed in this poetic study, which has become a classic of the American Southwest. First published in 1903, it is the work of Mary Austin (1868–1934), a prolific novelist, poet, critic, and playwright, who was also an ardent early feminist and champion of Indians and Spanish-Americans. She is best known today for this enchanting paean to the vast, arid, yet remarkably beautiful lands that lie east...

A television journalist chronicles his travels and memoirs--the people, places, and events encountered in his life.

This is the story those who love to walk the length of lonely beaches, for Thoreau walks alone in this book.

Here Theroux recounts his early adventures on an unusual grand continental tour. Asia's fabled trains -- the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Frontier Mail, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Mandalay Express, the Trans-Siberian Express -- are the stars of a journey that takes him on a loop eastbound from London's Victoria Station to Tokyo Central, then back from Japan on the Trans-Siberian. --From publisher's description.

An often referred to and well-respected account, mainly on Martinique, but also on Trinidad, St. Pierre, St. Kitt's, St. Lucia, Granada, etc. The author is most well-known for his works on Japan. A series of light, amusing and evocative sketches of Martinique at the end of the 19th-century. This tells of the two years the author lived in the West Indies in the late 1880's. An appendix includes some Creole melodies and the illustrations are interesting'....