Extremes Along the Silk Road: Adventures Off the World's Oldest Superhighway - Rilegato

Middleton, Nick

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 071956719X ISBN 13: 9780719567193

Casa editrice: John Murray Publishers Ltd, 2005

Riassunto

The Silk Road is the fabled route that cuts through one of the most extraordinary tracts of land on this planet. A vast region separating China from the Mediterranean, it rates as one of the least hospitable on Earth -- a succession of hostile deserts and towering mountain ranges, a harsh terrain of howling winds, searing heat and blistering cold. No stranger to unforgiving territory, Nick Middleton follows in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and Marco Polo overland from China to Istanbul, surviving as they did the life-sapping Gobi desert, the icy passes of high altitude Tibet, and the great Steppes of Turkmenistan, and encounters those who eke out existences there today.Nick's great gift as an adventure writer is to weave together the personal experience of ridiculous endurance - from sleeping on steaming rocks in the middle of a sub-zero desert to eating the most dubiously-cooked local delicacies - with the bigger picture of our planet and its peoples.

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Recensione

An insightful and entertaining exploration of the relationships between people and nature. Middleton combines a traveller's passion with a geographer's knowledge and insight (Geographical Magazine)

Middleton shares his passion for the terrain, the wildlife and the human interaction . . . His visit to the man-made ecological disaster of the Aral Sea and its sinister island provokeshis most heartfelt arguments. (Waterstone's Books Quarterly)

This affable Oxford don has evolved his own brand of "extreme travel" . . . one of the joys of reading Middleton is to see him confronting his phobias and fears . . . credit must go to both author and publisher for creating something far more worthy than the average TV tie-in. (Wanderlust)

Nick Middleton, part Oxford don, part Indiana Jones, enjoys travelling to extremes (Traveller magazine)

A generous handful of often hilarious and always self-deprecating anecdotes . . . hugely gripping, sometimes moving, and bursting with a myriad of extraordinary and barely believable facts, Extremes Along the Silk Road is written proof of why we all wish Nick Middleton had been our geography teacher at school. (Global magazine)

A magnificent insight into life in the extremes (Good Book Guide)

His travel books are wonderfully descriptive and evocative (Daily Express)

He succeeds brilliantly . . . Middleton has good stories to tell, and tells them very well. (Focus (Bristol))

'Each [essay] is an admirable work in its own right. . . an informative, enjoyable book' (Adventure Travel Magazine)

According to convention, explorers are tall, rugged, firm-jawed and taciturn. Think Captain Scott. Alternatively, they are ebullient and impossible to shut up, like Ray 'how to make dinner and a canoe out of three coconuts and some monkey dung' Mears. As an Oxford Don, explorer Nick Middleton is more a vague approximation of the Indiana Jones, academic adventurer type. He is 5ft 6in tall and wears specs, which are the bane of his life because they melt in the heat, snap in the cold or get eaten by insects... He is as surprised, wrong-footed or even disgusted as you or I would be when confronted by creepy-crawlies, mud or rotting seal. His travel books are wonderfully descriptive and evocative but they retain a strong tone of the Ordinary Joe; of Everyman discovering strange and amazing things and trying to have a laugh with the locals. (Daily Express)

Descrizione del libro

Groundbreaking geographer, broadcaster and travel writer brings together eyewitness experience, history and survival on the thread that links East and West

Su questa edizione

• Editore: John Murray Publishers Ltd
• Data di pubblicazione: 2005
• ISBN 10: 071956719X
• ISBN 13: 9780719567193
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 304