Author: Melissa Shales Publisher: ISBN: 9780906273722 Category : Alps Languages : en Pages : 358
Book Description
This book provides travellers with handy hints on how to make the most of the extensive rail network throughout the Alps, enabling them to see the most spectacular sights on offer.
Author: Jonathan Arlan Publisher: Skyhorse ISBN: 1510709762 Category : Travel Languages : en Pages : 251
Book Description
A New York Times best summer travel book recommendation A nonfiction debut about an American’s solo, month-long, 400-mile walk from Lake Geneva to Nice. In the summer of 2015, Jonathan Arlan was nearing thirty. Restless, bored, and daydreaming of adventure, he comes across an image on the Internet one day: a map of the southeast corner of France with a single red line snaking south from Lake Geneva, through the jagged brown and white peaks of the Alps to the Mediterranean sea—a route more than four hundred miles long. He decides then and there to walk the whole trail solo. Lacking any outdoor experience, completely ignorant of mountains, sorely out of shape, and fighting last-minute nerves and bad weather, things get off to a rocky start. But Arlan eventually finds his mountain legs—along with a staggering variety of aches and pains—as he tramps a narrow thread of grass, dirt, and rock between cloud-collared, ice-capped peaks in the High Alps, through ancient hamlets built into hillsides, across sheep-dotted mountain pastures, and over countless cols on his way to the sea. In time, this simple, repetitive act of walking for hours each day in the remote beauty of the mountains becomes as exhilarating as it is exhausting. Mountain Lines is the stirring account of a month-long journey on foot through the French Alps and a passionate and intimate book laced with humor, wonder, and curiosity. In the tradition of trekking classics like A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, The Snow Leopard, and Tracks, the book is a meditation on movement, solitude, adventure, and the magnetic power of the natural world.
Author: Kev Reynolds Publisher: Cicerone Press Limited ISBN: 1849654387 Category : Travel Languages : en Pages : 516
Book Description
The second edition of this classic guidebook by Kev Reynolds on walking and trekking in the Alps. This book is a definitive guide to the many thousands of possible routes, with a geographical span that ranges from the Maritime Alps of southern France to the Julians of Slovenia, from Italy's Gran Paradiso to the little-known Türnitzer Alps of eastern Austria, and from the ice-bound giants of the Bernese Oberland to the green rolling Kitzbüheler Alps and the bizarre towers of the Dolomites of South Tirol, showing the amazing diversity of this wonderful mountain chain. There are walks to suit every taste: gentle and undemanding, long and tough, and everything in between. Written by Britain's most respected authority on the Alps, this is a fully updated edition of this important book.
Author: Stephen O'Shea Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0393634191 Category : Travel Languages : en Pages : 332
Book Description
“An entertaining, turbocharged race among the high mountain passes of six alpine countries.” —Liesl Schillinger, New York Times Book Review For centuries the Alps have been witness to the march of armies, the flow of pilgrims and Crusaders, the feats of mountaineers, and the dreams of engineers. In The Alps, Stephen O’Shea ("a graceful and passionate writer"—Washington Post) takes readers up and down these majestic mountains. Journeying through their 500-mile arc across France, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Germany, Austria, and Slovenia, he explores the reality behind historic events and reveals how the Alps have profoundly influenced culture and society.
Author: Andrew Beattie Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0195309553 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 263
Book Description
The Alps are Europe's highest mountain range: their broad arc stretches right across the center of the continent, encompassing a wide range of traditions and cultures. Andrew Beattie explores the turbulent past and vibrant present of this landscape, where early pioneers of tourism, mountaineering, and scientific research, along with the enduring legacies of historical regimes from the Romans to the Nazis, have all left their mark.
Author: Diccon Bewes Publisher: Hachette UK ISBN: 1857889762 Category : Travel Languages : en Pages : 243
Book Description
A travel diary from 1863 inspires author Diccon Bewes to retrace Thomas Cook's historic train trip that revolutionized tourism forever.
Author: Sam Apple Publisher: Ballantine Books ISBN: 0307490521 Category : Travel Languages : en Pages : 306
Book Description
Hans Breuer, Austria’s only wandering shepherd, is also a Yiddish folksinger. He walks the Alps, shepherd’s stick in hand, singing lullabies to his 625 sheep. Sometimes he even gives concerts in historically anti-Semitic towns, showing slides of the flock as he belts out Yiddish ditties. When New York-based writer Sam Apple hears about this one-of-a-kind eccentric, he flies overseas and signs on as a shepherd’s apprentice. For thoroughly urban, slightly neurotic Sam, stumbling along in borrowed boots and burdened with a lot more baggage than his backpack, the task is far from a walk in Central Park. Demonstrating no immediate natural talent for shepherding, he tries to earn the respect of Breuer’s sheep, while keeping a safe distance from the shepherd’s fierce herding dogs. As this strange and hilarious adventure unfolds, the unlikely duo of Sam and Hans meander through a paradise of woods and high meadows toward awkward encounters with Austrians of many stripes. Apple is determined to find out if there are really as many anti-Semites in Austria as he fears and to understand how Hans, who grew up fighting the lingering Nazism in Vienna, became a wandering shepherd. What Apple discovers turns out to be far more fascinating than he had imagined. With this odd and wonderful book, Sam Apple joins the august tradition of Tony Horwitz and Bill Bryson. Schlepping Through the Alps is as funny as it is moving.
Author: Judith Schueler Publisher: Amsterdam University Press ISBN: 9052603022 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 201
Book Description
Since 1882, the Gotthard Railway, with its fifteen-kilometerlong tunnel under the Gotthard Mountains, has provided a crucialinternational link through the Swiss Alps, between North-WesternEurope and Italy. Its symbolic meaning has never sunk into oblivion.In Swiss society today, references to the railway evoke images of atechnological railway project, with allusions to Swiss history, alpinenature, and national identity. Reading this book helps us understandcontemporary discussions about the future of the Gotthard Railway,the region in which it lies, and the Swiss national identity.To illustrate to what extent historical actors co-constructedthe railway and Swiss identity, the book starts with an engineeringdiscussion about tunneling methods. Then it examinesreactions in Switerland to the inauguration of the railway line.Subsequently, it describes how the railway line was portrayedin travel guides of the belle poque. The last chapter capturesthe glory days of the Gotthard myth, before and during the SecondWorld War, with a focus on novels and plays in which theGotthard Tunnel construction occurs. This historical overviewoffers insight into the multiple roles that technology plays in theconstruction of a sense of national identity.
Author: Ronald Clark Publisher: A&C Black ISBN: 1448206227 Category : Travel Languages : en Pages : 302
Book Description
The unrivalled scenery of the Alps attracts increasing numbers of visitors every year, while for those who seek the more active and dangerous pursuits of climbing and skiing, the region offers unique opportunities. Ronald Clark, a distinguished historian of mountaineering, who knows the Alps from end to end, describes the history of the mountains and their most famous peaks. The heroic story of their exploration, first by scientists, then by such early mountaineers as Whymper, Coolidge, Miss Brevoort and their guides, is related with extensive quotations from letters, diaries and contemporary records. With the mountaineers came the pioneer photographers whose cumbersome but fragile equipment had to be manhandled up ice-slopes and across glaciers to enable them to take their photographs, a procedure which necessitated hours of intricate manoeuvring, in freezing weather, to obtain one successful shot. Other chapters discuss the development of the Alps as a mountain health centre, the coming of roads and railways and the growth of the winter sports industry and Mr Clark warns that the mountains, like a Highland deer forest, can carry only a certain number of living creatures without facing disaster.
Author: Melissa Shales
Author: Jonathan Arlan
Author: Kev Reynolds
Author: Stephen O'Shea
Author: Andrew Beattie
Author: Tim Parks
Author: Diccon Bewes
Author: Sam Apple
Author: Judith Schueler
Author: Ronald Clark