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From the author of The Last Mughal, an enlightening book that explores with remarkable compassion and expansive insight nine varieties of religious devotion in India today.In portraits of people we might otherwise never know William Dalrymple distills his twenty-five years of travel in India to explore the challenges faced by practitioners of traditional forms of faith in contemporary India. For two months a year, a man in Kerala divides his time between jobs as a prison warden and a well-builder and his calling as an incarnate deity. A temple prostitute watches her two daughters die from AIDS after entering a trade she regards as a sacred calling. A Jain nun recalls the pain of watching her closest friend ritually starve herself to death.Together, these tales reveal the resilience of individuals in the face of the relentless onslaught of modernity, the enduring legacy of tradition, and the hope and honor that can be found even in the most unlikely places.

In the 1950s, a series of dams was proposed along the Brazos River in north-central Texas. For John Graves, this project meant that if the stream's regimen was thus changed, the beautiful and sometimes brutal surrounding countryside would also change, as would the lives of the people whose rugged ancestors had eked out an existence there. Graves therefore decided to visit that stretch of the river, which he had known intimately as a youth.Goodbye to a River is his account of that farewell canoe voyage. As he braves rapids and fatigue and the fickle autumn weather, he muses upon old blood feuds of the region and violent skirmishes with native tribes, and retells wild stories of courage and cowardice and deceit that shaped both the river's people and the land during frontier times and later. Nearly half a century after its initial publication, Goodbye to a River is a true American classic, a vivid narrative about an exciting journey and a powerful tribute to a vanishing way of life and its ever-changing natural environment.

Peter Mayle offers us another funny and beautiful book about life in Provence. Here is a heart-warming portrait of a place where, if you can't quite "get away from it all," you can surely have the best of times trying.

The author of Video Night in Kathmandu ups the ante on himself in this sublimely evocative and acerbically funny tour through the world's loneliest and most eccentric places. From Iceland to Bhutan to Argentina, Iyer remains both uncannily observant and hilarious.

Haven to Nazis, smugglers' paradise, home to some of the earth's oddest wildlife and most baroquely awful dictatorships, Paraguay is a nation waiting for the right chronicler. In John Gimlette, at last it has one. With an adventurer's sang-froid, a historian's erudition, and a sense of irony so keen you could cut a finger on it, Gimlette celebrates the beauty, horror and-yes-charm of South America's obscure and remote "island surrounded by land.”He takes readers from genteel drawing rooms in Asuncion-where ladies still gossip about the nineteenth-century Irish adventuress who became Paraguay's Empress to the "Green Hell” of the Chaco, a vast, inhospitable tract populated by aging Mennonites and discouraged Indians. Replete with eccentrics and scoundrels, ecologically minded cannibals and utopians from every corner of the earth, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig is a madly entertaining book.

The author of A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg and Pecked to Death by Ducks gives new meaning to the words "going to extremes" in this exhilarating--and frequently hilarious--collection of adventure travel writing. "Cahill . . . (writes) with the precision ofJohn McPhee and Joan Didion tempered by a Monty Pythonesque sense of the absurd."--San Diego Union-Tribune.

Mohawk hair-cuts in Bali, yuppies in Hong Kong and Rambo rip-offs in the movie houses of Bombay are just a few of the jarring images that Iyer brings back from the Far East.

More than a decade after the publication of Inside the Sky, Aloft is a completely revised, expanded, and updated edition of this classic text, which is widely regarded as the most lyrical and incisive book on flying. In these essays, William Langewiesche considers how flying has altered not only how we move about the earth, but also how we view our world and our place in it. With vivid descriptions of the aesthetics and excitement of flight, he also writes of the risks that go with this beauty: the perils of air traffic control, and the dangers of nervous passengers and bad weather. Full of spare and elegant prose, Aloft is a fascinating journey into the sky.