Review\n"A most engaging account of life among the matrilineal and matriarchal Mosuo tribe in China's Yunnan province, but also a lament to a way of life now threatened by modernity and tourism. Full of detail and telling insights into gender roles, it will appeal to armchair travellers as well as to anthropologists and sociologists." -- (02/02/2017)\n"A refreshing and authentic portrait of a hidden society in patriarchal China. A must read for anyone studying women and alternative societies."-- (02/02/2017)\n"A crisp account by a high powered Singaporean lawyer of how she renounced her former life of fifteen hour working days in a male dominated corporate world to find her feminist soul in the last matriarchal ethnic group remaining in China. Full of insights and touching descriptions, this is one of the most accessible and concrete descriptions of the Mosuo, a group more analysed than understood, putting the humanity of this tribe at the forefront of their identity."-- (01/06/2017)\n"An accessible and sympathetic account...At its heart, this is the story of what that experience did to Choo's attitude to her own culture as she explored the customs, habits and beliefs of her new friends. It is also, sadly, a disturbing and paradoxical story of a traditional community whose unique culture has been violently ruptured by modernity."--Isabel Hilton, The Guardian\n"A fascinating portrait of one of the world's last matriarchal societies, a land without fathers or husbands, without marriage or divorce, written by an international corporate lawyer who ditched her hectic life to embrace this Shangri-la inside deepest China." --Jan Wong, author of Beijing Confidential (02/02/2017)\nIn a mist-shrouded valley on China's invisible border with Tibet is a place known as the "Kingdom of Women," where a small tribe called the Mosuo lives in a cluster of villages that have changed little in centuries.\nIn a mist-shrouded valley on China's invisible border with Tibet is a place known as the "Kingdom of Women," where a small tribe called the Mosuo lives in a cluster of villages that have changed little in centuries. This is one of the last matrilineal societies on earth, where power lies in the hands of women. All decisions and rights related to money, property, land and the children born to them rest with the Mosuo women, who live completely independently of husbands, fathers and brothers, with the grandmother as the head of each family. A unique practice is also enshrined in Mosuo tradition--that of "walking marriage," where women choose their own lovers from men within the tribe but are beholden to none.

The Kingdom of Women: Life, Love and Death in China's Hidden Mountains

Biographies & Memoirs

WaiHong, Choo

Community & Culture

Tauris Parke

The Land Beyond: A Thousand Miles on Foot through the Heart of the Middle East

There are many reasons why it might seem unwise to walk, mostly alone, through the Middle East. That, in part is, is exactly why Leon McCarron did it.\nThere are many reasons why it might seem unwise to walk, mostly alone, through the Middle East. That, in part, is exactly why Leon McCarron did it. From Jerusalem, McCarron followed a series of wild hiking trails that trace ancient trading and pilgrimage routes and traverse some of the most contested landscapes in the world. In the West Bank, he met families struggling to lead normal lives amidst political turmoil and had a surreal encounter with the world's oldest and smallest religious sect. In Jordan, he visited the ruins of Hellenic citadels and trekked through the legendary Wadi Rum. His journey culminated in the vast deserts of the Sinai, home to Bedouin tribes and haunted by the ghosts of Biblical history. The Land Beyond is a journey through time, from the quagmire of current geopolitics to the original ideals of the faithful, through the layers of history, culture and religion that have shaped the Holy Land. But at its heart, it is the story of people, not politics and of the connections that can bridge seemingly insurmountable barriers.

McCarron, Leon

Religion & Spirituality

The Man Who Wasn't There: A Life of Ernest Hemingway

A ground-breaking and intensely revealing examination of the life of the 20th century's most iconic writer. Ernest Hemingway was an involuntary chameleon, who would shift seamlessly from a self-cultivated image of hero, aesthetic radical, and existential non-conformist to a figure made up at various points of selfishness, hypocrisy, self-delusion, narcissism and arbitrary vindictiveness. Richard Bradford shows that Hemingway's work is by parts erratic and unique because it was tied into these unpredictable, bizarre features of his personality. Impressionism and subjectivity always play some part in the making of literary works. Some authors try to subdue them while others treat them as the essentials of creativity but they endure as a ubiquitous element of all literature. They are the writer's private signature, their authorial fingerprint. In this ground-breaking and intensely revealing new biography, including previously unpublished letters from the Hemingway archives, Richard Bradford reveals how Hemingway all but erased his own existence through a lifetime of invention and delusion, and provides the reader with a completely new understanding of the Hemingway oeuvre.

Bradford, Richard

Arts & Literature

In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure

Isaiah Berlin was one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century - a man who set ideas on fire. His defence of liberty and plurality was passionate and persuasive and inspired a generation. His ideas - especially his reasoned rejection of excessive certainty and political despotism - have become even more prescient and vital today. 
But who was the man behind such influential views? In Search of Isaiah Berlin tells the compelling story of a decades-long collaboration between Berlin and his editor, Henry Hardy, who made it his vocation to bring Berlin's huge body of work into print. Hardy discovered that Berlin had written far more than people thought, much of it unpublished. As he describes his struggles with Berlin, who was almost on principle unwilling to have his work published, an intimate and revealing picture of the self-deprecating philosopher emerges. This is a unique portrait of a man who gave us a new way of thinking about the human predicament, and whose work had for most of his life remained largely out of view.

Hardy, Henry

History

Paris is the crowning jewel of France, and this literary guide fortravellers explores its 20th century history, from 1900-1950. The myth of Paris as a romantic city survives - Paris, the city of exiles, artists, writers, princes and thieves. The early-twentieth century idea was that the French capital was a place for indulgence 'lacapitale de l'amour'. By the beginning of the twentieth century the many artists, writers and thinkers visiting Paris had a different idea of fun; they went there to enjoy the beauty of the city which had become Europe's cultural center, as well as to experience the general sense of excitement and freedom it offered. Twentieth Century Paris: A Literary Guide for Travellers takes the literary-minded traveller (either in person or in an armchair) on a vivid and illuminating journey, retracing the footsteps of writers who have lived and worked in, or been inspired by, the history and cityscape of Paris from James Joyce, George Orwell, Ezra Pound, Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys to Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway and many others. It also includes writers and thinkers such as Amedeo Modigliani and Leon Trotsky. Marie-José Gransard illuminates one of the most influential centuries in the city's flamboyant literary and cultural history.

Twentieth Century Paris: 1900-1950: A Literary Guide for Travellers (Literary Guides for Travellers)

Literature & Fiction

Gransard, Marie-José

History & Criticism

Professionals & Academics

Winston the pig drops on to Uncle Peter's head and kills him dead. Unwilling to be left alone in her house Aunt Zita, a faded Austrian aristocrat, hijacks her nephew and, together with Winston, sets out on one last ride. The Berlin Wall has fallen and Zita is determined to reach across the reopened borders and rediscover her east European family. In Rory MacLean's groundbreaking debut travel book, Winston the pig drops on to Uncle Peter's head and kills him dead. Unwilling to be left alone in her house Aunt Zita, a faded Austrian aristocrat and a vivacious eccentric, hijacks her nephew and, together with Winston, sets out on one last ride. The Berlin Wall has fallen only weeks before and Zita is determined to reach across the reopened borders and rediscover her remarkable east European family.In a rattling Trabant the unlikely trio puff and wheeze across the changing continent, following the threads of memory. Zita's relations - the angel of Prague, the Hungarian grave digger who buried Stalin's nose, a dying Romanian propagandist - help tie together the loose ends of her life. They picnic at Auschwitz. They meet Lenin's embalmer. They carry a long-lost corpse over the Carpathian mountains. Through war and revolution, decay and regeneration, Stalin's Nose is a surreal and darkly comic ride and a portrait of Europe like no other.

Stalin's Nose: Across the Face of Europe

MacLean, Rory

Russia

'I had been commissioned to go anywhere in the world I wished and write whatever pleased me. My only orders were to move fast, visit strange places, to meet whomever was interesting - and to start at once,' Richard Halliburton's fifth and last book, Seven League boots illustrates how he followed these orders with passion and abandon. America's favorite adventurer dined with Haile Selassie and rode the Rhinoceros Express in Ethiopia; he had an audience with King Ibn Saud outside the gates of Mecca (which he had tried to sneak into) and finally rode an elephant over the Alps in the tracks of another great adventurer, Hannibal. This is Halliburton at his best: reckless and romantic. It is also the last chapter of a life that had, at its end, grown tragic. Nearing forty, physically exhausted, and in financial trouble, Halliburton thought to roll the dice once again, hoping that the charm which had always saved him in the past would materialize one more time. But it was not to be. His last journey was fatal. Soon after finishing this book, he attempted to sail a junk across the Pacific, but never returned.

Seven League Boots: Adventures Across the World from Arabia to Abyssinia

Halliburton, Richard

Middle East

The sunlight and calm of the French Riviera have been a magnet for writers since the fourteenth century. The Cote d'Azur has provided the inspiration and setting for some of the greatest literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. "The French Riviera: A Literary Guide for Travellers" is a reader's journey along this fabled coast, from Hyeres and St. Tropez in the west to the Italian border in the east, introducing the lives and work of writers who passed this way, from distinguished Nobel laureates to new authors who found their voices there. Ted Jones's encyclopaedic work covers them all: writers such as Graham Greene and W. Somerset Maugham, who spent much of their lives there; F. Scott Fitzgerald and Guy de Maupassant, whose work it dominates; and the countless writers who simply lingered there, including Louisa M. Alcott, Hans Christian Anderson, J. G. Ballard, Samuel Beckett, Arnold Bennett, William Boyd, Bertholt Brecht, Anthony Burgess, Albert Camus, Bruce Chatwin, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, Ian Fleming, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, A. A.Milne, Vladimir Nabokov, Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath, Jean-Paul Sartre, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson, Anton Tchekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Evelyn Waugh, H. 
G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, P. G. Wodehouse, Virginia Woolf and W. B. Yeats - and many others.

The French Riviera: A Literary Guide for Travellers (Literary Guides for Travellers)

Jones, Ted

Essays & Correspondence

Health, Hedonism and Hypochondria looks below the surface and probes the more hidden aspects of the history of spas and their secret sides. A spa nowadays can be anything from a hot tub in the back garden to an exotic beach resort offering mindfulness and yoga. New spas are opening around the world at a rate of 8,000 a year and there are now over 150,000 'spa locations' and contributing $120 billion annually to the $4.2 trillion global wellness economy. This book is about the historic, traditional spas of Europe. They include such well known resorts as the original Spa in Belgium; Bath, Buxton and Harrogate in Britain; Baden-Baden, Bad Ems and Wiesbaden in Germany; Vichy and Aix-les-Bains in France and many more. Health, Hedonism and Hypochondria looks below the surface and probes the more hidden aspects of the history of spas and their secret sides. Not only were they always sanctuaries of relaxation, but also places to treat melancholia and hypochondria, entertain mistresses and 'cure' sterility.

Health, Hedonism and Hypochondria: The Hidden History of Spas

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Bradley, Ian

Alternative Medicine

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Tauris Parke publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Tauris Parke

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Tauris Parke publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Kingdom of Women: Life, Love and Death in China's Hidden Mountains

The Land Beyond: A Thousand Miles on Foot through the Heart of the Middle East

The Man Who Wasn't There: A Life of Ernest Hemingway

In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure

Twentieth Century Paris: 1900-1950: A Literary Guide for Travellers (Literary Guides for Travellers)

The Kingdom of Women: Life, Love and Death in China's Hidden Mountains

Stalin's Nose: Across the Face of Europe

Seven League Boots: Adventures Across the World from Arabia to Abyssinia

The French Riviera: A Literary Guide for Travellers (Literary Guides for Travellers)

Health, Hedonism and Hypochondria: The Hidden History of Spas