Product Description: "The Ends of the Earth" is an elegant boxed set of two hardcover books featuring a selection of the greatest writing about the Arctic and the Antarctic. Contributors include: Roald Amundsen, Beryl Bainbridge, Andrea Barrett, James Buchan, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Jenny Diski, Tim Flannery, Jon Krakauer, Haldor Laxness, Ursula LeGuin, Jack London, H...read more

Product Description: "The Antarctic" features an international mix of classic first-person accounts of exploration, literary travelogues and works of cultural history, natural science and fiction about the South Pole. Contributors include British, American, Australian, Scandinavian, Japanese and Russian explorers such as Ernest Shackleton, Apsely Cherry-Garrard, Robert Falcon Scott, Roald Amundsen, Richard Byrd and Fouglas Mawson; novelists such as H...read more

The author offers a sensitive, loving tribute to reading, arguing that his favorite books have created his identity, from The Wind in the Willows to the Narnia Chronicles and The Little House on the Prairie. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

A cultural history of a national obsession with polar exploration and mountaineering, and a study of how the poles have been perceived, dreamed of, even desired. The text sets out to show how Captain Scott's death was the culmination of a long-running national enchantment with perilous journeys.

The author offers a sensitive, loving tribute to reading, arguing that his favorite books have created his identity, from The Wind in the Willows to the Narnia Chronicles. 12,500 first printing. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Travel is no longer a luxury and not always an entertainment. Many journeys need to be made‹to get home or away from an enemy, to work, to find a last resting place, or because someone has told you to go. This issue of Granta is about such journeys; you might call it necessary travel writing, with Decca Aitkenhead: looking for cheap sex and drugs; Manuel Bauer: a child¹s escape over the Himalayas; Isabel Hilton: what have they done to Beijing?; Ian Jack: the train crash that stopped Britain; Ryszrd Kapuscinski: in the forests of Cameroon; Ian McEwan: on the retreat to Dunkirk, 1940; John Ryle: the last Emperor makes his last journey; Dayanita Singh: inside a sanctuary for girls in Benares; Simon Winchester: how Britain and the US made a people homeless; plus the untold story of how the FBI pursued James Baldwin at home, revealed by James Campbell...read more

Product Description: With contributions from both sides of the science/humanities divide, this is a quirky collection of essays on science and the imagination. It springs from the Science Museum's construction of Charles Babbage's "difference engine", the mechanical computer which he designed in the 1830s but never built...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)