An amazing adventure recounting two journeys through the monasteries and shrines of the Middle East 1,400 years apart.
Dalrymple, an experienced journalist and traveler, conducted his incredible recreation at a time of turmoil and religious strife, making his feat almost beyond description for the hardships and risks he took.
The stories he presents of the two Byzantine monks in whose footsteps he followed provide us with both a historical and modern context filled with humorous anecdotes and strange characters from their individual narratives.
The pathos of his own journey reveals the desperation, anger, suffering, and perseverance of those surviving early Christian communities he was able to revisit centuries later, who continue to face many of the same obstacles their distant ancestors once endured.
In the spring of A.D. 587, John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist embarked on a remarkable expedition across the entire Byzantine world, traveling from the shores of Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. Using Moschos’s writings as his guide and inspiration, the acclaimed travel writer William Dalrymple retraces the footsteps of these two monks, providing along the way a moving elegy to the slowly dying civilization of Eastern Christianity and to the people who are struggling to keep its flame alive. The result is Dalrymple’s unsurpassed masterpiece: a beautifully written travelogue, at once rich and scholarly, moving…
This book came out at a time when I was working on a Zoom class on great river explorations and also contemplating my own trip to Egypt to sail on the Nile.
I love this author and her other work; this book is equally enthralling.
Historians and casual readers seem to hold no middle ground on the two protagonists, Burton and Speke, and their memorable adventure to find the source of the Nile. Millard gives us both sides of this debate, which has raged for over a century, about these two legendary explorers, presenting the odd lives of both men with a balanced perspective that allows her readers to arrive at their own rational conclusions.
This is a story of “the life and times of …” that is told with the excitement of an adventure novel, romance, and tale of endless controversy, which will grab any reader interested in exploration, history, or personalities that continue to fascinate us on a grand scale.
'This complex, compelling tale is told with simplicity and grace' - The Times
A story of courage and adventure, set against the backdrop of the race to exploit Africa by the colonial powers.
For millennia the location of the Nile River's headwaters was shrouded in mystery. In the mid-19th century, Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke were sent by the Royal Geographical Society to claim the prize for Britain. Burton spoke twenty-nine languages, and was a decorated soldier. He was also mercurial, subtle, and an iconoclastic atheist. Speke was a young aristocrat and Army officer determined to make his mark,…
The author has spent considerable time pursuing and following in the footsteps of Alexander von Humboldt, and we are all the better for it as readers of her wonderful biography and historical account.
This fascinating and influential, but often forgotten, man influenced the great scientists and scholars of the 19th Cent. like no other. Without Humboldt, there would have been no Darwin, by his own admission, and countless other major figures owed their famous predecessor this same debt.
His resurgence in recent years as the Father of Ecology has brought his name to the forefront once more. Wulf’s detailed and unvarnished account of his often turbulent but always impactful life has been an eye-opener for many readers. Humboldt was a true “rock star” of science at a time when new “ologies” were emerging throughout the natural and physical sciences.
His indelible fingerprints remain on much of our modern-day world and in ways that we need such a remarkable account as Wulf’s terrific book to remind us.
WINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2016
'A thrilling adventure story' Bill Bryson
'Dazzling' Literary Review
'Brilliant' Sunday Express
'Extraordinary and gripping' New Scientist
'A superb biography' The Economist
'An exhilarating armchair voyage' GILES MILTON, Mail on Sunday
Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) is the great lost scientist - more things are named after him than anyone else. There are towns, rivers, mountain ranges, the ocean current that runs along the South American coast, there's a penguin, a giant squid - even the Mare Humboldtianum on the moon.
The Artist of Aveyron is a story about time and place. Set in southern France, it covers several thousand years in time. It is the tale of a family and its connection to an ancestral past told in four novella-length, stories. This is a locale which frequently found itself at the epicenter of larger historical events and important people, seen through the eyes of four different artists.
The interplay between religion and art is explored from its cave art origins to the modern era. From the paleolithic cave painter; to the Roman potter; to the Cathar wood carver, and lastly the Parisian dancer and protégé of a famous regional artist, the importance of local history and forgotten individual families is explored in a unique fashion.
