Filters
Results for 'dervla murphy'
-
Wheels within Wheels
The Makings of a TravellerA first-hand account of the life of travel writer Dervla Murphy in which she tells of her early life in Lismore, Co. Waterford, in her rather unusual household. Her father was the county librarian and her mother a chronic invalid. An only child, Dervla was allowed from the age of seven to freely roam on her own. At ten, she cycled ten miles to a local mountain, climbed it, then lost herself on the way down, and was forced to stay out all night - much to the distress of her parents. Living in a house that was crumbling around their ears, she reveals how her family hid a Republican who was later hanged, how she tested herself (with hot water) to increase her pain threshold, how she avoided an insane and shrieking maid, who was convinced that Dervla's parents were fried eggs, and how she helped another maid give birth under the kitchen table. An early love of books and writing, led her to enter a writing competition arranged by a local newspaper, and she won first prize for five weeks in a row.
€ 20,53 -
The Underdog
Joshua Davis had a dream. He dreamt of being the best. It didn't really matter what he was the best at he just wanted to be number one the big enchilada to say that he had made it. This is how it began: Josh was driving through the Mojave Desert one day when he saw a sign for the American arm-wrestling championship - all comers welcome. He decided to enter. He came fourth out of four but this was enough to secure him a place on Team USA and the chance of a show-down with the 'Russian Ripper' at the world championships in Poland (that didn't end very well either).But Josh had tasted the dizzy rush of competition and wanted more. And more turned out to be the most outlandish contests in the world - from bull fighting in Spain and backward running in Italy to sumo wrestling and the World Sauna Championship in Finland.Joshua's quest is by turns hilarious harrowing and a little insane but it is also inspiring - because after all every underdog deserves his day.
€ 23,30 -
Life at Full Tilt
Life at Full Tilt is a whirlwind tour of Dervla Murphy's travels. It begins in Spain in 1956, before her first book, and follows in her tracks for over fifty years, including descriptions of her beloved Afghanistan in 1963, of the Peruvian Andes, of South, West and East Africa and most recently of the troubled territories of Palestine and Israel. Dervla's style of travel, to go somewhere that interested her and see who she met, made for fresh encounters every day, recorded faithfully each evening in her journal. She read hungrily to prepare for her journeys and folded her learning seamlessly into her books. Finally, between these covers, we are able to catch up with her work in its entirety. What shines through is her passionate engagement with the world and its injustices, and her utter independence of mind. Ethel Crowley, an Irish sociologist, has for the first time looked at all Dervla's writing - her journalism and her twenty-four books - selecting half-a-dozen extracts from each. She introduces us to a complex character, hard to pin down, but a role model for women and environmentalists, Irish to her fingertips and a crucial part of the larger English tradition of travel writing.
€ 31,50 -
Wrestling The Dragon
He's master of the PlayStation he listens to rap music he writes poetry and in his eighteen-year-old hands may hold the future of the Tibetan people. He is Ogyen Trinley Dorje a Tibetan lama and the seventeenth incarnation of the Karmapa (third in line to the Dalai Lama). When he was fourteen Ugyen fled Tibet and began his journey into exile - and the Chinese lost the boy they hoped would one day replace the Dalai Lama in the hearts of six million Tibetans. Today he lives under house arrest ostensibly being 'protected' by the Indian Government - which is more likely protecting its relationship with China. So begins the true story of the 17th Karmapa of Tibet a story which has all the elements of a cracking tale: magical portents at his birth a village childhood on the Roof of the World attempted indoctrination by the Chinese-his short life provides a fascinating insight into the Contemporary Tibetan struggle while his future as a religious leader of global significance is already being forecast. To write this story Gaby Naher intends to travel throughout the region and interview key players of the Tibetan Government in Exile as well as religious figures in the area.
€ 23,50 -
Kiwis Might Fly
When Polly Evans read a survey claiming that the last bastion of masculinity the real Kiwi bloke was about to breathe his last she was seized by a sense of foreboding. Abandoning the London winter she took off on a motorbike for the windswept beaches and golden plains of New Zealand hoping to root out some examples of this endangered species for posterity. But her challenges didn't stop at the men. Just weeks after passing her test Polly rode from Auckland's glitzy Viaduct Basin to the vineyards of Hawkes Bay and on to the Southern Alps. She found wild kiwis in the dead of night kayaked among dolphins at dawn and spent an evening on a remote hillside with a sheep-shearing gang. As she travelled Polly reflected on the Maori warriors who carved their enemies' bones into cutlery the pioneer family who lived in a tree and the flamboyant gold miners who lit their pipes with five-pound notes and wondered how their descendents have become pathologically obsessed with helpfulness and Coronation Street. The author of the highly acclaimed It's Not About the Tapas reaches some unexpected conclusions about the new New Zealand man - and finds that evolution has taken some unlikely twists.
€ 23,60 -
Between River and Sea
Dervla Murphy describes with passionate honesty the experience of her most recent journeys into Israel and Palestine. In cramped Haifa high-rises, in homes in the settlements, and in a refugee camp on the West Bank, she talks with whomever she meets, trying to understand them and their attitudes with her customary curiosity, her acute ear and mind, her empathy, her openness to the experience, and her moral seriousness.
€ 24,00 -
In Trouble Again
In 1986 Redmond O'Hanlon decided to undertake a four-month trip through Venezuala up the Orinoco River and across the Amazon Basin. The trip involved the risk of contracting dysentery rabies and river blindness encountering jaguars vipers anacondas 640-volt electric eels and giant catfish known to bite off human feet. He struggled to find a willing travelling companion.In Trouble Again is the gripping hilarious and unpredictable account of that trip as one intrepid ornithologist and his unsuspecting Oxford chum stumble from one catastrophe to the next.
€ 23,70 -
A Place Apart
At the height of The Troubles, Dervla Murphy bicycled to Northern Ireland to try to understand the situation by speaking to people on either side of the divide. She also sought to interrogate her own opinions and emotions. As an Irishwoman and traveller who had only ever spent thirty-six hours of her forty- four years over the border to the north, why had she been so reluctant to engage with the issues? Despite her own family connections to the IRA, she travelled north largely unfettered by sectarian loyalties. Armed instead with an indefatigable curiosity, a fine ear for anecdote, an ability to stand her own at the bar and a penetrating intelligence, she navigated her way through horrifying situations, and sometimes found herself among people stiff with hate and grief. But equally, she discovered an unquenchable thirst for life and peace, a spirit that refused to die.
€ 25,40 -
A Month by the Sea
Over the Summer of 2011, Dervla Murphy spent a month in the Gaza Strip. She met liberals and Islamists, Hamas and Fatah supporters, rich and poor. Through reported conversations she creates a vivid picture of life in this coastal fragment of self-governing Palestine. Bombed and cut-off from normal contact with the rest of the world, life in Gaza is beset with structural, medical, and mental health problems, yet it is also bursting with political engagement and underwritten by an intense enjoyment of family life. During her month by the sea, Dervla develops an acute eye for the way in which isolation has shaped this society. "The light she sheds on one of the world's greatest humanitarian crises is as moving as it is invaluable."--Booklist Sept. 15, 2013
€ 43,00 -
Extra Confessions of a Working Girl
Miss S continues her revealing memoirs in Extra Confessions of a Working Girl.Having left behind the sauna where she was top girl Miss S moves to London to start work as a stripper. But after one of the other dancers burns her in the back with a cigarette she decides to try her hand at something new. It's in an escort agency that Miss S finds her true vocation and where she encounters a colourful cavalcade of clients including Mr Fingers and Mr Slimeball to name just two. Packed with yet more eye-opening and true stories of what really goes on behind the scenes in the sex industry including fetish clubs and swinging parties Extra Confessions of a Working Girl is another addictive read written by one honest feisty and fiercely independent lady - the illusive Miss S. Miss S started working as a paid companion when she was a student working in a brothel. Witty intelligent and ambitious Miss S knows how to achieve what she wants in a job that she loves... and that she's very very good at. She now works independently in London.
€ 23,30 -
In Etiopia con un mulo
Insieme al suo mulo Jock, Devla Murphy intraprende un pericoloso trekking nelle regioni più remote ed ostili dell'Etiopia. Ispirata dalle storie del Prete Gianni e della regina di Saba, parte alla ricerca della bellezza, del pericolo, della solitudine e del mistero, ma nei territori impervi del paese si trova ad affrontare la stanchezza, la malattia e il disordine degli affari interni dell'Etiopia. Grazie allo stretto contatto con la gente del posto e alla crescente familiarità con il loro stile di vita, l'autrice riesce a penetrare in profondità nella mentalità degli etiopi, regalandoci quadri di splendori naturalistici e spaccati di vita etiope. Das Urheberrecht an bibliographischen und produktbeschreibenden Daten und an den bereitgestellten Bildern liegt bei Informazioni Editoriali, I.E. S.r.l., oder beim Herausgeber oder demjenigen, der die Genehmigung erteilt hat. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.
€ 26,50 -
Full Tilt
When Dervla Murphy was ten, she was given a bicycle and an atlas, and within days she was planning a trip to India. At the age of thirty-one, in 1963, she finally set off and this book is based on the diary she kept while riding through Persia, Afghanistan and over the Himalayas to Pakistan and India.A lone woman on a bicycle (with a revolver in her trouser pocket) was an almost unknown occurence and a focus of enormous interest wherever she went. Undaunted by snow in alarming quantites, and using her .25 pistol on starving wolves in Bulgaria and to scare lecherous Kurds in Persia, her resourcefulness and the blind eye she turned to personal danger and extreme discomfort were remarkable.Twenty-five books later, she continued to travel in much the same style well into her eighties, it is a plea- sure to encounter the young Dervla just setting out onher travelling life.
€ 22,60