Birdseye Views of Far Lands is an interesting, wholesome presentation of something that a keen-eyed, alert traveler with the faculty of making contrasts with all classes of people in all sorts of places, in such a sympathetic way as to win their esteem and confidence, has been able to pick up as he has roamed over the face of the earth for a quarter of a century.The book is not a geography, a history, a treatise on sociology or political economy. It is a Human Interest book which appeals to the reader who would like to go as the writer has gone and to see as the writer has seen the conformations of surface, the phenomena of nature and the human group that make up what we call a "world...

James Marr was a Boy Scout selected to go along with Sir Ernest Shackleton aboard the Quest in 1921 for the Shackleton–Rowett Expedition to Antarctica. This book provides a description of what would be Shackleton's last exploration due to his untimely death en route. - Summary by mleigh

Marcia Copley, an American Heiress, comes to Rome. Typically for the period, she may want to attract an aristocrat. He brings the title, she brings the money to support it. Her adventures in Rome are different than she anticipated. Rich and poor live side by side, and the author does her best to describe both walks of life vividly and truthfully. Jean Webster is the author of Daddy Long Legs and Dear Enemy. This particular novel would also please fans of Henry James and George Gissing. - Summary by Stav Nisser.

We of the Never Never is the second book written by Jeannie Gunn under the name of “Mrs Aeneas Gunn”. It is considered by many as a classic of Australian writing. The book was published as a novel but draws on the author’s own experience in settling on the Elsey Station way out in the "back blocks" of the Katherine region of the Northern Territories of Australia early in the 20th century. The primary concession to fiction was that she fictionalised the names of many of the real-life characters that featured in her life at the time, giving them names like "the Sanguine Scott", "the Fizzer", "the Quiet Stockman" and "the Dandy"...

A possibly fictionalised account by the comic novelist Jerome K. Jerome of a trip to Germany that he undertook with a friend in order to see the famous Passion Play at Oberammergau. The journey takes in London, Dover, Ostend, Cologne, Munich, Oberau, Oberammergau and then back to London via Heidelberg. As one might expect from the author of 'Three Men in a Boat', much goes wrong along the way, including seasickness, strange food, stranger beds, misleading guidebooks, bewildering train timetables, and numerous cultural and linguistic misunderstandings.

A collection of some of the most significant literary work on the English Lake District prior to Thomas West’s A guide to the Lakes . The poet Thomas Gray takes the reader from Brough south to Kendal on his return from a tour in Scotland. An agricultural reformer, Arthur Young, also returning from Scotland, begins his journey in the northern parts of Cumberland with dry descriptions of local farming, but on arriving in Keswick, his account turns to the picturesque scenery around Derwent Water, Ullswater and Windermere...

The author, John Buchan, maintains that "the main lines of the earth's architecture have been determined" during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and all that remains is but "amplifying our knowledge of the groyning and buttresses and stone-work." In this history of exploration, he tells of nine of those momentous final discoveries that placed the earth's last big secrets firmly on the map, from the mysterious "cloud city" of Lhasa, to the slopes--but not yet the summit--of Mount Everest. - Summary by Steven Seitel

John Carne Bidwill came out to Sydney in 1838 to represent his family's mercantile business. Finding that he had time on his hands he decided to make a journey to New Zealand with the intention of penetrating to the high mountains in the interior of the North Island. This is the story of that journey—that of the first white man to climb Mt. Tongariro and the attendant adventures associated with such. Intermixed is commentary on the botany of that part of New Zealand and the language of the Ma̅ori people. - Summary by Beeswaxcandle

The Desert by John Charles Van Dyke, published in 1901, is a lush, poetic description of the natural beauty of the American Southwest. "What land can equal the desert with its wide plains, its grim mountains, and its expanding canopy of sky!" Van Dyke, a cultivated art historian, saw "sublimity" in the desert's "lonely desolation," which previous generations had perceived only as a wasteland, and his book has a conservationist flavor which seems distinctly modern. "The deserts should never be reclaimed," he writes...

This book is part history and part travelogue, an account of a brief visit by a wealthy, white U.S. politician during a lamentable time in Haiti’s history of its invasion and occupation by the U.S. military. Dryden offers his views of elements of Haitian culture such as education, religion and commerce, with some optimism but with the shallow understanding of a casual observer who has not been immersed in the culture enough to provide truly insightful understanding. One chapter is an account of his duck hunting expedition. This is, nonetheless, valuable in helping us understand how many understood the Haitian situation in the early twentieth century. Summary by Larry Wilson.

Cambridge County Geographies was a 75 volume series covering the counties of England, Scotland and Wales. Separate volumes were produced for Lancashire north and south of the River Ribble. J. E. Marr's volume on North Lancashire covers a geographically diverse region, including Furness and the Lake District west of Lake Windermere that now spans Lancashire and Cumbria. As much a history, guidebook and gazetteer as it is a geography, Marr's volume paints a rich and in places idyllic picture of the northern parts of the county in the years before the first world war. - Summary by Phil Benson

"It has long been a desideratum to have in English the early narratives, of the discovery and exploration of the Mississippi. Marquette's map and voyage have indeed appeared, but the narrative varies in no small degree from the authentic manuscript, and the map is not at all a copy of that still preserved, as it came from the hand of the great explorer. These published from original manuscripts, and accompanied by the narratives of the missionaries in La Salle's expedition, are now first presented in an accessible shape, and complete the annals of the exploration...

In 1898, during the construction of river-crossing bridge for the Uganda Railway at the Tsavo River, as many as 135 railway workers were attacked at night, dragged into the wilderness, and devoured by two male lions. The Man-Eaters of Tsavo is the autobiographical account of Royal Engineer Lt. Col. J.H. Patterson's African adventures. Among them, his hunt for the two man-eaters.This book was the basis for the 1996 film The Ghost and the Darkness.

The author has discovered for us in this volume the present stopping place of that famous raconteur of dear comic memory, the late Hieronymous Carl Friederich, sometime Baron Munchausen, and he transmits to us some further adventures of this traveler and veracious relator of merry tales. There are about a dozen of these tales, and, judging by Mr. Bangs' recital of them, the Baron's adventures on this mundane sphere were no more exciting than those he has encountered since taking the ferry across the Styx...

John Leland's 'Itinerary' was the product of several journeys around England and Wales undertaken between 1538 and 1543. The manuscript is made up of Leland's notebooks, which were first published in the 18th century, and later in a ten-part, five-volume edition published by Lucy Toulmin (1906-10). Part IX of the manuscript begins in the south of England and gradually meanders its way, county by county, through central and northern England up to the borders of Scotland. Leland did not prepare the manuscript for publication and it is sometimes difficult to follow, with occasional geographically-misplaced sections, lists of headings with content yet to be added, and the odd lapse into Latin...

The year is 1838. The scene is the dense Honduran forest along the Copán River. Two men, John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, are about to rediscover Mayan civilization. Their guide, slashing through the rampant growth with his machete, leads them to a structure with steps up the side, shaped like a pyramid. Next they see a stone column, fourteen feet high, sculptured on the front with a portrait of a man, “solemn, stern and well fitted to excite terror,” covered on the sides with hieroglyphics, and with workmanship “equal to the finest monuments of the Egyptians...

The year is 1838. The scene is the dense Honduran forest along the Copán River. Two men, John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, are about to rediscover Mayan civilization. Their guide, slashing through the rampant growth with his machete, leads them to a stone column, fourteen feet high, sculptured on the front with a portrait of a man, “solemn, stern and well fitted to excite terror,” covered on the sides with hieroglyphics, and with workmanship “equal to the finest monuments of the Egyptians...

In 1879 John Muir went to Alaska for the first time. Its stupendous living glaciers aroused his unbounded interest, for they enabled him to verify his theories of glacial action. Again and again he returned to this continental laboratory of landscapes. The greatest of the tide-water glaciers appropriately commemorates his name. Upon this book of Alaska travels, all but finished before his unforeseen departure, John Muir expended the last months of his life.

A collection of Muir's previously unpublished essays, released shortly after his death. "This volume will meet, in every way, the high expectations of Muir's readers. The recital of his experiences during a stormy night on the summit of Mount Shasta will take rank among the most thrilling of his records of adventure. His observations on the dead towns of Nevada, and on the Indians gathering their harvest of pine nuts, recall a phase of Western life that has left few traces in American literature...