It extends 24,000 miles, farther and longer than any other measure on earth. Yet the equator is a wholly imaginary construct, a human idea that has fascinated and challenged explorers for three thousand years—from the ancient Egyptian spice traders in search of the legendary land of Punt, to the fifteenth-century Portuguese who sought a route to the Indies, to the expeditions of Victorian naturalist Charles Darwin in the Galapagos Islands, off the Pacific coast of South America, at latitude zero. The equator—its location not only on the globe but also in the minds and exploits of navigators, travelers, poets, and dreamers since the dawn of civilization—is the magical thread on which the eminent Italian historian Gianni Guadalupi strings some of humankind’s most intriguing lore and most amazing adventures in this original and riveting intellectual history. The mysterious source of the Nile and the enigma of the Congo’s swell, the perils of the Doldrums (“the living death in life” in Coleridge’s phrase) and the vicissitudes of El Nino, the quest for the lost Eden and the search for Eldorado, all fall within the compass of Guadalupi’s extraordinary volume. So do the names of Columbus, Magellan, Don Lope de Aguirre, Sinbad the Sailor, Henry Stanley, Charles-Marie de la Condamine, and Dante Alighieri, who placed Purgatory on an island athwart the equator.

Latitude Zero: Tales of the Equator

History

Gianni Guadalupi

Antony Shugaar

Americas

Carroll&Graf

A provocative new study of the political ideals that should guide a republic At the beginning of a new century, there is renewed interest in the traditions and ideas that have inspired political republicanism. Maurizio Viroli, who has written extensively on democracy and nationalism, stresses that republicanism is a political ideal for citizens everywhere who are committed to the work of sustaining civic virtue. He explores republicanism's commitment to a rule of law administered on behalf of all citizens equally, to liberty, and to the repudiation of monarchy, aristocracy, and all discriminatory state formations. Viroli traces the story of political republicanism from its origins with Aristotle and in classical Rome to its renaissance with Machiavelli, then to its great flowering in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with Locke, Kant, Rousseau, Tom Paine, and the Founding Fathers. He concludes with an impassioned evocation of the power of the republican ideal in our own time. We can derive from it, he suggests, a form of wisdom and strength that protects civic democracy and enriches private life.

Republicanism

Politics & Social Sciences

Maurizio Viroli

Politics & Government

Hill & Wang Pub

The Equator has no tangible existence beyond maps, but yet it lives, a hugely significant symbol in the minds and hearts of navigators, travellers, poets, madmen and dreamers of all eras. It is the world's girdle, its 24,000 miles or 38,640 kilometres passing through the Ecuadorian Andes and the mist-shrouded Ruwenzori Mountains, running along the courses of both the Amazon and the Congo rivers, and cutting through Africa's vast Lake Victoria, and the coral atolls and volcanic hulk of Krakatoa, in the Indian Ocean. The eminent Italian historian Gianni Guadalupi, and writer Antony Shugaar, have put together this inspirational collection of amazing equatorial adventures. Many have responded to the challenge of the Line, setting out to discover the mysterious source of the Nile, the perils of the Doldrums ('the living death in life' Coleridge called it') or the powerful force of El Nio, the quest for a lost Eden and for El Dorado. Others have sought a new life, like Elisa the 'nude Baroness' of the Galapagos, or Robert Louis Stevenson, for whom the fearsome King Tembinok built at Latitude Zero in the Gilbert Islands, an enclave named Equator City. So many grand expeditions and projects, so many great explorers and eccentrics, make this anthology a joyous voyage of discovery.

Travel

Travel Writing

Robinson

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Books by Antony Shugaar