I'm a writer, lecturer, biologist, ecologist, and two-time Fulbright Scholar (to India and Malaysia). I'm now a fiction writer, but basically I’ve always been a storyteller who writes in a historical framework. While I feel an almost compulsive obligation to keep faith with the facts, my main objective is to tell a story—as dramatically and suspensefully and entertainingly as I can. My first non-fiction book, Papyrus: the Plant that Changed the World, tells the story of a plant that still evokes the mysteries of the ancient world while holding the key to the world’s wetlands and atmospheric stability. It changed the world as did all five of the plants on my list below.
Potatoes began as a main food staple in the Andes then spread to the rest of the world and especially Ireland where the dependence of the people on it created havoc that lasted generations, and served humanity as an example never to be forgotten.
This book explains how the potato brought about changes good and bad until today it is difficult to imagine life without it. A Big Mac with no fries is like a latte with no milk. It was introduced into China in the 1600s and by 2006 China’s potato production at 74 million tons is the largest in the world. The Chinese now consume 88 lb (40 kg) per person annually.
As to its eatability, what more proof do we need than the movie, Martianin which Matt Damon shows us how he happily survived months on it in space. And he did all that without leaving…
From its obscure Pre-Columbian beginnings in South America to its global popularity today, the story of the potato is one of rags to riches. In Potato, esteemed culinary historian Andrew F. Smith reveals the captivating story of a once lowly vegetable that has changed - and continues to change - the world. First domesticated by prehistoric people in the Andes, the potato has since been adopted by cultures all over the globe. After its discovery by Europeans, goverments and monarchs encouraged the people to farm it because it was so nutritious and easy to grow, but its new position as…
I’m a writer, living in southwest France since 1995, and previously in Kenya for 20 years. Travel has always been my passion. I’ve written about hiking across France in Best Foot Forward, touring the perimeter by camping car in Travels with Tinkerbelle, cycling through the Marne Valley in The Valley of Heaven and Hell, and a Kenyan safari in Safari Ants, Baggy Pants and Elephants. Recently, due to COVID and with an elderly dog that suffers from separation anxiety, I couldn't leave for any length of time; I satisfy my wanderlust by reading other people’s adventures. My taste is for tales that include plenty of humour, and I’ve selected five which I have particularly enjoyed.
A vivid, amusing account of the author and her friend cycling and sleeping in the wild from Bolivia to Argentina. It is a story of determination and endurance as they push themselves to the extreme, always taking the hardest, highest route. Exhaustion, frustration, and sickness put their friendship to the test.
As somebody who is the polar opposite, always seeking the easiest way, I was fascinated by this couple’s approach to adventure, and awed by their achievements.
**WINNER of the 2020 Amazon Kindle Storyteller Literary Award**
"Llama Drama is simply hilarious. If anyone wants something witty and moving at the same time. Also, something empowering, then this is the one for them. I literally inhaled it." - Claudia Winkleman, TV Presenter and Author
What Amazon readers are saying about Llama Drama:
★★★★★ “Loved every minute of it!”
★★★★★ “An antidote for the madness of 2020”
★★★★★ “Truly inspiring”
★★★★★ “A brilliant book for anyone interested in travel, conquering their fears, cycling, adventure, South America”
I am an Australian writer living in Europe. Returning to my hometown on the East Coast of Australia post-COVID, I confronted relentless rain and king tides threatening the beach promenade cafes. Witnessing the potential demise of these familiar spots sparked the idea for my novel. Opening with a dystopian scene of future tourists exploring submerged coastal cafes with snorkels, my work delves into the realm of "cli-fi" (climate fiction). Against the backdrop of imminent climate danger, my characters, a lovable yet obstinate Australian ensemble, navigate a world profoundly altered by the impacts of climate change. I hope what I have written is an exaggeration. I fear it may not be.
I first heard about this story of extraordinary heroism while listening to a podcast interview with one of the survivors of a plane crash in 1972.
The plane was carrying an entire football team and their families between Uruguay and Chile. A search party could not find them in the icy ridges of the Andes, and it came down to two of the survivors who, despite malnutrition and the extreme weather and terrain, made a days-long trek to find help. Thanks to them, the remaining survivors could be located and rescued.
While many readers might shudder at the lengths the group went to in order to survive (cannibalism), what shone for me was the selflessness of the two survivors who trekked for days to find help.
On October 12, 1972, a plane carrying a team of young rugby players crashed into the remote, snow-peaked Andes. Out of the forty-five original passengers and crew, only sixteen made it off the mountain alive. For ten excruciating weeks they suffered deprivations beyond imagining, confronting nature head-on at its most furious and inhospitable. And to survive, they were forced to do what would have once been unthinkable ...
This is their story -- one of the most astonishing true adventures of the twentieth century.
I've been making messes with paint, string, and words, as well as in love, mothering, and in virtually every other way imaginable my whole life. Eventually, an expertise began to grow, and the confusion in my life began to make sense through my creations, while at the same time, the seemingly irrelevant words and textures I was making started to tell me something about my life. Eventually, my lived experience and training in the Expressive Arts Therapies have led me to the roles of teacher, educator, and contemplative artist. If we pay attention to what we express and how we express things, we can find our way through any mess we find ourselves in.
A great insight in my life has been realizing that the Western world has tricked us into believing there is only one way to know and understand the world.
What do stories of ancient cultures from across the world have to do with creativity and healing? Wade Davis has spent his life living intimately with other cultures and plants; the lessons captured in this book require us to take pause and realize everything we have taken for granted about what we know and how we know it.
As Davis says, "rediscovering the diversity of the human spirit" requires us to unshackle ourselves from our biases and recognize that some things can’t be explained or understood through the narrow lens of the Western world.
Creativity and the imagination are fundamental to being human; this book caused me to question what I was missing by not fully recognizing them as a way…
Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? In The Wayfinders, renowned anthropologist, winner of the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize, and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis leads us on a thrilling journey to celebrate the wisdom of the world's indigenous cultures.
In Polynesia we set sail with navigators whose ancestors settled the Pacific ten centuries before Christ. In the Amazon we meet the descendants of a true lost civilization, the Peoples of the Anaconda. In the Andes we discover that the earth really is alive, while in Australia we…
My connection with the Andean highlands of southern Peru stretches back to 1975 when I spent about a year in a small community of Quechua-speaking potato farmers and llama herders. I have returned there many times over the years, most recently in 2019. Its people, their way of life, and vision of the world are dear to my heart and are the subject of The Hold Life Hasas well as a play, creative nonfiction, and, more recently, poetry. I love the way anthropology forces me to think outside the box and experience the world with different eyes, something I aim to convey in my work.
This was a foundational book for me as I completed my first fieldwork and wrote my dissertation. Isbell draws the reader into life in a highland village in the Ayacucho region of Peru shortly before it was upended by guerilla warfare, describing strategies villagers used to relate to, and maintain independence from, outside social forces. With vivid examples she provides in-depth analyses of social organization and ritual life, as well as a chapter on urban migration and a postscript about impending violence.
The result of ten years of studying the Quechua peasants of Chuschi in south-central Peru, this work is a structuralist attempt to uncover the mechanisms whereby the people of this Andean society struggle to protect the social and economic independence of their community from the outside world. The ethnographic strength of the book is a careful and insightful discussion of kinship and marriage as well as descriptions and interpretations of hydraulic, harvest, and fertility rites. Introductory notes by the author discuss guerrilla activities in the community that said, "To defend ourselves is to defend our traditions."
I became fascinated by the science, technology, and social landscape of mining during my time teaching English in the Cerro Colorado copper mine in the north of Chile. Listening to miners and their families speak to each other gave me a small sense of the knowledge embedded in the language of mining communities. The experience showed me just how little I knew about metals and how much they shape our world, from the copper wiring in phone chargers to expressions like “mina” (mine/woman). That curiosity led me to a PhD program and to write my first book, Mining Language.
In this methodologically creative approach, Rossana Barragán narrates the history of colonial Andean silver through images. The slim, 90-page book is organized around 12 images and their global movements. Barragán expertly analyzes scenes of underground mining that other European empires used to justify their own violence, depictions of the Cerro Rico that appealed to Ottoman sensibilities, and the architecture of the mint of Antwerp, the city responsible for coining much of Potosí’s silver and printing many of the books and images that shaped early modern understandings of the Andes. Readers looking for an accessible history of the global consequences of Potosí will be well-served by Barragán’s work.
My connection with the Andean highlands of southern Peru stretches back to 1975 when I spent about a year in a small community of Quechua-speaking potato farmers and llama herders. I have returned there many times over the years, most recently in 2019. Its people, their way of life, and vision of the world are dear to my heart and are the subject of The Hold Life Hasas well as a play, creative nonfiction, and, more recently, poetry. I love the way anthropology forces me to think outside the box and experience the world with different eyes, something I aim to convey in my work.
This was a groundbreaking book when it came out in Peru in the 1970s. It’s the life stories of a street porter in the city of Cuzco and his wife, a market vendor, as they were told to a pair of Peruvian anthropologists. Monolingual in Quechua and living on the street, Gregorio and Asunta were at the very bottom of the social ladder, yet they recount their hard lives with such eloquence, humor, and grace that their words leap from the page. This is essential reading for anyone interested in Andean people, and a book you’ll never forget.
Gregorio Condori Mamani and Asunta Quispe Huaman were runakuna, a Quechua word that means "people" and refers to the millions of indigenous inhabitants neglected, reviled, and silenced by the dominant society in Peru and other Andean countries. For Gregorio and Asunta, however, that silence was broken when Peruvian anthropologists Ricardo Valderrama Fernandez and Carmen Escalante Gutierrez recorded their life stories. The resulting Spanish-Quechua narrative, published in the mid-1970s and since translated into many languages, has become a classic introduction to the lives and struggles of the "people" of the Andes.
Andean Lives is the first English translation of this important…
Some thirty years ago, on a frozen waterfall near an old logging town in Montana, my life changed forever. A friend took me climbing. Almost instantly, upon leaving the ground, the mountains became my singular passion. I lived in run-down shacks and worked dead-end jobs, freeing myself to travel and to climb. Along the way I stumbled into an editorial job with the American Alpine Journal, where I worked for twelve years, deepening my knowledge of mountains, including the incomparable Cerro Torre. I know that climbing is overtly pointless. What we gain from it, however—what it demands and what we give in return—has immeasurable power.
I love how this book captures the spirit and obsession of climbing in Patagonia; the characters, the landscape, the majesty of the peaks, and our struggles to climb them. Crouch took me there years before I ever went. His devotion to climbing and his depth of experiences, from the harrowing to the mundane (in the endless boredom of waiting for good weather he declares himself “the Muhammad Ali of killing time”) shine in his writing. The book speaks to the obsessed, by the obsessed. It’s a cult classic among Patagonia alpine climbers for good reason.
Patagonia is a strange and terrifying place, a vast tract of land shared by Argentina and Chile where the violent weather spawned over the southern Pacific charges through the Andes with gale-force winds, roaring clouds, and stinging snow. Squarely athwart the latitudes known to sailors as the roaring forties and furious fifties, Patagonia is a land trapped between angry torrents of sea and sky, a place that has fascinated explorers and writers for centuries. Magellan discovered the strait that bears his name during the first circumnavigation. Charles Darwin traveled Patagonia's windy steppes and explored the fjords of Tierra del Fuego…
I’ve been a published romance author since 2010, but even before I published my first romance novel, I was an avid reader of the genre. In fact, I started at the very young age of eleven, checking out romance novels from my local public library. Over the years, I’ve read hundreds of books and found the ones that I enjoy the most have the most intriguing heroes who fall hard for the heroine.
Diego is so very bad, which makes him swoon-worthy good. This book is a combination of two books which I read years ago (Mi Cariño and Mi Cariña), long before dark romance was an official subgenre in romance.
Diego is wealthy, uber-alpha, and obsessed with Marcella. He’s so obsessed he kidnaps her and won’t let her go. Despite his outrageous behavior, he’s good to her and wants to build a life with her.
I set aside my reservations about his behavior, which I’d never tolerate in real life, and allowed myself to be entertained by a story with a hero who will stop at nothing to hold on to the woman he loves.
Mi Cariño – Book One He's not the man she thinks he is. However, Marcella Garcia is willing to take a chance. Why? Her new lovers desires take her on a passionate and sexual awakening beyond her dreams. Marcella initially convinces herself that sex with no strings is enough. It's a gamble. When her desires bloom to love the risk becomes a costly mistake.
Mi Cariña – Book Two Marcella wants to start again. She has reason too. She carries a secret that grounds her and makes every new decision regarding her heart and her life profoundly meaningful. Still she's…
As a geologist, I met and shared meals – occasionally under the stars – with individuals with strikingly different backgrounds. In time I realized that, whatever their DNA, they all shared certain beliefs, that the happy dead eventually go upward, for example, even if they start by going down or out to the horizon. Eventually, I concluded that the entire human adventure began in a single moment the day one of our forebears asked another "What shall we do about death?" and was understood. Humans have a single genetic heritage; we also have a single cultural heritage.
My personal background and fieldwork have been in North America, Africa, and Europe. Sullivan's book opened the world of ancient South America for me. The Incas lived in a Sacred Kingship, an institution in which Church and State were one, invented in ancient Mesopotamia and diffused as far as the Andes, carrying with it a promise of eternity. In Sacred Kingships, the King was to funnel the essence of the undying Heavens into the ways of Earthbound mortals. Sullivan shows how this all went dreadfully wrong for the Incas when they began to treat mythological notions as literally true, applying the technical language of myth to the real world.
Step by step, Sullivan pieces together the hidden esoteric tradition of the Andes to uncover the tragic secret of the Incas, a tribe who believed that, if events in the heavens could influence those on earth, perhaps the reverse could be true. Anyone who reads this book will never look at the ruins of the Incas, or at the night sky, the same way again. Illustrations.
