Here are 100 books that Nothing to Declare fans have personally recommended if you like
Nothing to Declare.
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I am on a self-discovery journey, and each day, I discover more of why I am here on earth. The books I mentioned all have themes related to the human condition. I write to express what I understand. I love writing about characters and their journeys. I love all animals, and dogs are a great comfort. I’d like to see animal abuse come to an end in my lifetime. I write about people who have fallen from great heights and how saving animals and others in need saves them. We need to love more.
Self-discovery after being brokenhearted from a love relationship is what I refer to as the dark night of the soul. We’ve all been there. There is no way out except to go in, which is what the main character did in Eat Pray Love. Eventually, she finds herself and gains self-love.
Miss Pink, my main character, does something similar. Her journey was going from living in a high rise with a great job to losing it all, including a cheating husband and eventually becoming homeless. What does she do? She starts to give to others who are far worse off, like animals about to be euthanized legally. How uncivilized, how cruel, and Miss Pink, the great warrior, comes up with solutions to save almost all of them. Save the four-legged and two-legged, and you save yourself.
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'Eat, Pray, Love has been passed from woman to woman like the secret of life' - Sunday Times
'A defining work of memoir' - Sunday Telegraph
'Engaging, intelligent, and highly entertaining' - Time
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It's 3 a.m. and Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor. She's in her thirties, she has a husband, a house, they're trying for a baby - and she doesn't want any of it.
A bitter divorce and a turbulent love affair later, she emerges battered and bewildered and realises it is time to pursue her own…
I grew up in an era of feminism but did not necessarily see opportunities outside of the traditional female roles. I became a teacher, mother, and now grandmother, and I am more passionate than ever about the challenges of being a woman, especially in this strident time in America. I think it is imperative that women stand up for themselves and fulfill the dreams that some of our ancestors were not able to achieve. We should never move backward in terms of allowing all citizens to strive toward their pursuit of happiness. Consequently, I have gravitated towards books with strong women protagonists in my reading selections.
If there ever lived a strong, persistent woman, it is Jaouad. This is Jaouad’s memoir of fighting and surviving leukemia at age 22. I came to love her as a person as she suffered the broken dreams of her youth and her future.
The insightful writing is from her unique perspective as a young woman who speaks multiple languages and is raised in several countries, including the United States. In her post-treatment year, she completes a road trip around the United States, which brings more revelations.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life—from the author of the Life, Interrupted column in The New York Times
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Rumpus, She Reads, Library Journal, Booklist • “I was immersed for the whole ride and would follow Jaouad anywhere. . . . Her writing restores the moon, lights the way as we learn to endure the unknown.”—Chanel Miller, The New…
My father introduced me to the world as we paged through his old pre-WWII atlas. We traced borders and rivers with our fingers and he spoke names that were magical incantations and invitations to a world more exciting and mysterious than our midwestern home. As a reader, I was drawn to books about travel and as a budding writer, I was inspired by the adventures of “Brenda Starr, Girl Reporter” featured in the Sunday comics of my youth. I packed my bags early and my passport is never out of date. I continue to read traveloirs, and I write in my journal every day. Oh! The places I will go.
This is a dual memoir and each woman is on a quest to redefine herself. Sue Monk Kidd as a writer and her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor as she asks the age-old question: “what to do with my life.”
Written in alternating chapters, mother and daughter write of their experiences and insights as they visit sacred sights in ancient lands, places rich with myth and legend and the sacred feminine. My journey too was as a seeker, a woman thick with an urgency to write as Sue was, and as a single woman exploring “now what?”
While I traveled alone and these women traveled together, each of us was on our own individual journey, exploring, discovering, asking questions, and seeking answers that can often only be found when we travel within.
The New York Times bestselling memoir of pilgrimage and self-discovery by Sue Monk Kidd, the author of The Secret Life of Bees and The Book of Longings, and her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor
Sue Monk Kidd has touched the hearts of millions of readers with her beloved novels and acclaimed nonfiction. Now, in this wise and engrossing dual memoir, she and her daughter, Ann, chronicle their travels together through Greece and France at a time when each was on a quest to redefine herself and rediscover each other.
As Sue struggles to enlarge a vision of swarming bees into a…
My father introduced me to the world as we paged through his old pre-WWII atlas. We traced borders and rivers with our fingers and he spoke names that were magical incantations and invitations to a world more exciting and mysterious than our midwestern home. As a reader, I was drawn to books about travel and as a budding writer, I was inspired by the adventures of “Brenda Starr, Girl Reporter” featured in the Sunday comics of my youth. I packed my bags early and my passport is never out of date. I continue to read traveloirs, and I write in my journal every day. Oh! The places I will go.
While on a summer backpacking trip with her fiancé, twenty-eight-year-old Shannon Fowler’s life was suddenly and irreparably altered when her fiancé was stung and killed by a box jellyfish on the remote shore of an island in Thailand. In an effort to save her own life, to discover how to go on, she turned to traveling the world.
In rich detail, heart-breakingly honest prose, and deeply intimate story-telling, Shannon takes us along as she journeys to some of the most grief-stricken and tragic sites in the world. It’s through her travels, her interactions with strangers, her explorations that she begins to heal.
This story and Shannon’s unflinching telling gave me courage as I wrote my memoir—courage to open my heart not just to my own grief but to my personal connection to the ceaseless grief in our world.
'A cross between H is for Hawk and Wild' Stylist 'A courageous memoir of love and loss . . . compelling' Sunday Express 'Intimate and inspiring' Observer 'Rich and absorbing' Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of The Last Act of Love 'A brave and necessary record of love, as beautiful as it is heartbreaking' Ann Patchett, author of Commonwealth
On a warm evening on a beautiful beach in Thailand, Shannon Leone Fowler's life was shattered when a box jellyfish - the most venomous animal in the world - wrapped itself around her fiance Sean's legs, stinging and killing him in minutes.
I started my scientific career as an Astrophysicist. However, I have always been interested in Archaeology. This finally led me to conjugate the two passions when I started working in Archaeoastronomy, in 2003. Working in Archaeoastronomy first means having a direct experience of the sites (preferably, of every single stone, although in places like Giza they count in the millions…). So I have made fieldworks in Italy, Egypt, Cambodia, and, recently, on Chinese imperial necropolises. I currently teach Archaeoastronomy as a professor at the Politecnico of Milan. I have always been interested also in scientific communication on TV and social media, and my introductive Archaeoastronomy course is available for free on the Coursera platform.
Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico, although a bit dated on some arguments, is a must-read book on the Archaeoastronomy of the Meso-American people. It includes a fascinating description of the role of astronomical alignments in places like Teotihuacan and the Aztec capital (modern Mexico City), as well as an in-depth exploration of Maya astronomy and of the Maya astronomically-driven architecture.
Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico helped establish the field of archaeoastronomy, and it remains the standard introduction to this subject. Combining basic astronomy with archaeological and ethnological data, it presented a readable and entertaining synthesis of all that was known of ancient astronomy in the western hemisphere as of 1980.
In this revised edition, Anthony Aveni draws on his own and others' discoveries of the past twenty years to bring the Skywatchers story up to the present. He offers new data and interpretations in many areas, including:
The study of Mesoamerican time and calendrical systems and their unprecedented continuity in contemporary…
I grew up in Valladolid, a semi-rural city of Yucatan. My parents loved the history and archaeology of the Yucatan peninsula, which not long ago was a single cultural and linguistic entity. I grew up dreaming of becoming an archaeologist. With time, I became fascinated with people and sociality within and beyond Yucatan, so I became an anthropologist. I trained as an anthropologist in Mexico and Canada, and have done research in Canada, Italy, Mexico, and Spain. I live and work in Yucatan, as a professor of anthropology. Good ethnographies are what anthropology is about, and those I write about here are some of the best.
In the 1970s, my parents took me and my siblings to the Camino Real, one of the first hotels ever built in Cancun.
We sat on canvas chairs on the beach and my dad played the guitar. Fiddler crabs walked around us, the stars shone brightly, and we enjoyed the music and the sound of crashing waves. Tourism and its evils, however, soon became a nightmare for peninsular Yucatecans.
Through the city of Cancun, the natural reserve Calakmul, the village of Tekit and the hotels in former sisal haciendas, this ethnography shows how, even when living standards improved, local people have become geographically immobilized and resource-impoverished.
The tourist industry is predatory. It destroys natural resources, transforms places into what the rich think of as paradise, and displaces and disempowers local people.
Tourism has become one of the most powerful forces organizing the predatory geographies of late capitalism. It creates entangled futures of exploitation and dependence, extracting resources and labor, and eclipsing other ways of doing, living, and imagining life. And yet, tourism also creates jobs, encourages infrastructure development, and in many places inspires the only possibility of hope and well-being. Stuck with Tourism explores the ambivalent nature of tourism by drawing on ethnographic evidence from the Mexican Yucatan Peninsula, a region voraciously transformed by tourism development over the past forty years. Contrasting labor and lived experiences at the beach resorts of…
I love history that is about people. The discoveries they made or the adventures they had (or endured) are thrilling and fascinating, but it’s the people who make it compelling. From Ernest Shackleton dumping handfuls of gold on the ice to show his stranded men he was committed to getting them out of Antarctica alive, to a fussy young William Travis writing desperately for help that would never come, and being of the first to die during the attack on the Alamo…the best books make those events, the times, and the stakes very very real. And the very best histories give you the humanity of the choices and decisions that led them there.
One of the real contagions of contemporary life (for anyone in any time, I suspect) is the way one can become complacent about the existence we are experiencing: we can take “what everyone knows” for granted. Like the Ferris Wheel, which was invented for the Chicago World’s Fair to outshine the previous Fair’s Effiel Tower. Now, any carnival midway or small circus has one. The same with many “ancient ruins.” Cruise ships stop at Minos or the Mexican pyramids for organized tours. But these places had been lost for millennia until they were re-discovered in the last 200 – 300 years. In Jungles ofStone, the initial discovery was almost an accident. Seen as an opportunity by Stephens and Catherwood, the magnificence and majesty of what they find converts their commercial enterprise into something more like a crusade. While the book recounts their arduous efforts to uncover the lost…
New York Times Bestseller (Expeditions) * THE "MASTERFUL CHRONICLE"* OF THE DISCOVERY OF THE LEGENDARY LOST CIVILIZATION OF THE MAYA--AN "ADVENTURE TALE THAT MAKES INDIANA JONES LOOK TAME"* In 1839, rumors of extraordinary yet baffling stone ruins buried within the unmapped jungles of Central America reached two of the world's most intrepid travelers. Seized by the reports, American diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood-both already celebrated for their adventures in Egypt, the Holy Land, Greece, and Rome-sailed together out of New York Harbor on an expedition into the forbidding rainforests of present-day Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. What…
I was lucky enough to have been taught Latin at school, and I remember my first teacher telling the class that a tandem bicycle was so called because Latin tandem means ‘at length’. That was the beginning with my fascination for words, etymologies, and languages. At University I was able to specialise in Greek, Latin, and Indo-European languages and then for my PhD I learnt Armenian (which has an alphabet to die for: 36 letters each of which has four different varieties, not counting ligatures!). I am now Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Cambridge.
I remember reading this when it first came out and being unable to put it down. The Mayan decipherment is still ongoing, and Michael Coe wrote with the knowledge and expertise of someone on the front line of researchers. The decipherments of Hieroglyphic Egyptian and Linear B are usually told as ‘hero-narratives’, in which one individual’s genius was able to make the breakthrough. This book reminds us that all decipherments are made incrementally, and gives due space to the many different contributions made to a decipherment.
The Third Edition of this classic account of the inside story of one of the major intellectual breakthroughs of our time - the last great decipherment of an ancient script - revised and brought right up to date with the latest developments. 113 illustrations bring to life the people and texts that have enabled us to read the Maya script. The original edition, which sold over 40,000 copies in English, was hailed as 'a masterpiece that transcends the boundaries between academic and popular writing'. 'Coe's thrilling account of the cracking of Mayan is like a detective story ... great stuff'…
Ryan Murdock is Editor-at-Large (Europe) for Outpost, Canada’s national travel magazine, and a weekly columnist for The Shift, an independent Maltese news portal. His feature articles have taken him across a remote stretch of Canada’s Northwest Territories on foot, into the Central Sahara in search of prehistoric rock art, and around Wales with a drug squad detective hunting for the real King Arthur.
Far from being an extinct people swallowed by the jungle-like their famous temples, the Maya make up a significant percentage of the population of southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, with vibrant ancient languages that are still spoken today. This beautifully written account of contemporary Maya culture will help you understand a remarkable people who explored the world through arithmetic and time.
"Cut Stones and Crossroads" and "On Fiji Island" are previous books by Ronald Wright, author of this book concerned with the Maya, who in the first millennium AD, created the most intellectually and artistically advanced civilization native to the Americas. Despite a mysterious collapse in the ninth century and Spanish invasion in the 16th century, some five million people throughout Guatemala, Belize and south-eastern Mexico still speak Maya languages and preserve a Maya identity today. Ronald Wright set out to discover the roots of the Maya and the extent of their survival after centuries of invasion and a recent civil…
As a lover of nature and travel, I’ve long been interested in how communities worldwide protect their environments. While living and traveling in Latin America, I learned how Indigenous knowledge and practices make our planet healthier for everyone. Several of my ten children’s books deal with these issues, including my novel Tree of Dreams, inspired by my time in the Amazon rain forest with a Huaorani community whose home was threatened by oil operations. This led me to collaborate with the Kichwa leader, Patricia Gualinga, on the picture book,Stand as Tall as the Trees: How an Amazonian Community Protected the Rain Forest, available in English and Spanish in July, 2023.
Sea turtles fascinate me. I’ve had the joy of learning about them on trips to Central America and Mexico, and I was thrilled to discover this fabulous middle-grade novel on the topic. Twelve-year-old Olivia is on summer vacation in Florida, struggling to deal with her parents’ recent separation. When she realizes that the local sea turtle population is in danger, she feels called to act. She must find courage to defend the sea turtles while facing her own personal pain in the process. This is a wonderfully written story, accessible and relatable. It offers incredible information about sea turtles while providing a model for how kids can make a difference in protecting endangered species.
An inspiring and timely story of friendship, courage, and the magic that can happen when we stand up for what's right.
Normally, Olivia spends all year looking forward to her family's summer vacation in Florida. But not this year. Not when her parents have recently separated, and her father has to stay behind in Colorado. Olivia doesn't know what she'll do all summer without him. They've always been a pair, and she's never felt the same bond with her mother or younger sister. So Olivia plans to spend the summer laying low, and trying to ignore the hurt gnawing at…
