In the summer of 1981 Will Traverse set out to walk across the city of Brisbane; a journey that took him from an Aboriginal bora ground in the Samford valley west of the city, through the city centre, and on to a midden on Stradbroke Island. At that time Brisbane, a small city under the yoke of an ultra-conservative state government, was transitioning from what many called that great big country town into what would become the two-hundred-kilometre city. Wills journey, through time and space, maps a unique portrait of a city and its people during this time of change. Along the way he met many characters, including the last Samford dairy farmer and his dog, a woman who told him things shed held secret for too long, and an American soldier whod been stationed in Brisbane during the Pacific Campaign. There were many strange encounters, including a drunken game of racing peanuts, a conversation with six cane toads, and monsters in the night. As he walked Will sometimes recalled events from his own past. Sometimes these memories were pleasant, some bitter-sweet, but there was one, concerning a visit to a place of evil, that haunted him.

The 344 days of combat of the 88th Infantry Division were part of the bitterly contested struggle for supremacy in Italy during the Second World War. Here is the gripping story of the first selective service division committed to battle in the European Theater, seen from the unique vantage point of a battalion physician. Using notes hastily scribbled on the backs of maps and finished out whenever he was rotated to rear areas for rest, Dr. Klaus Huebner captured in his diary the frustration, fear, boredom, devotion, and anger that were the daily portion of combat infantrymen. The result is a remarkably sustained exposition of combat life. Dr. Huebner traces the 88th’s activities from final staging preparations at Fort Sam Houston to North Africa and on up the Italian peninsula to the Brenner Pass in Austria, just fifty-five miles south of the Bavarian hamlet where he was born. Combat began for the Division just north of Naples, Italy. During combat, the medical aid station was set up in any available farmhouse, barn, cave, or clump of trees that offered some protection for treating the wounded. There the battalion surgeon and his aides did what they could under adverse circumstances, gave by their presence alone moral support to the casualties, and came to know well the miseries, emotions, and human drama of infantry soldiers in combat. Dr. Huebner writes: “I walked with the men who carried guns and slugged it out on foot. I treated the wounded where they fell.” His story is terse and often tense, a memorable view of battle and the men who tried to heal its wounds right in the field

The New York Times bestseller A Long Walk to Water begins as two stories, told in alternating sections, about two eleven-year-olds in Sudan, a girl in 2008 and a boy in 1985. The girl, Nya, is fetching water from a pond that is two hours' walk from her home: she makes two trips to the pond every day. The boy, Salva, becomes one of the "lost boys" of Sudan, refugees who cover the African continent on foot as they search for their families and for a safe place to stay. Enduring every hardship from loneliness to attack by armed rebels to contact with killer lions and crocodiles, Salva is a survivor, and his story goes on to intersect with Nya's in an astonishing and moving way.

God only knows what possessed Bill Bryson, a reluctant adventurer if ever there was one, to undertake a gruelling hike along the world's longest continuous footpath—The Appalachian Trail. The 2,000-plus-mile trail winds through 14 states, stretching along the east coast of the United States, from Georgia to Maine. It snakes through some of the wildest and most spectacular landscapes in North America, as well as through some of its most poverty-stricken and primitive backwoods areas. With his offbeat sensibility, his eye for the absurd, and his laugh-out-loud sense of humour, Bryson recounts his confrontations with nature at its most uncompromising over his five-month journey. An instant classic, riotously funny, A Walk in the Woods will add a whole new audience to the legions of Bill Bryson fans.

Essays discuss Greek and Chineese art, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Dutch genre painting, Rubens, Rembrandt, art collecting, museums, and Freud's aesthetics

Making use of the formerly secret archives of the Soviet government, interviews, and first-hand personal experiences, Nathaniel Davis describes how the Russian Orthodox Church hung on the brink of institutional extinction twice in the past sixty-five years. In 1939, only a few score widely scattered priests were still functioning openly. Ironically, Hitler's invasion and Stalin's reaction to it rescued the church -- and parishes reopened, new clergy and bishops were consecrated, a patriarch was elected, and seminaries and convents were reinstituted. However, after Stalin's death, Khrushchev resumed the onslaught against religion. Davis reveals that the erosion of church strength between 1948 and 1988 was greater than previously known and it was none too soon when the Soviet government changed policy in anticipation of the millennium of Russia's conversion to Christianity. More recently, the collapse of communism has created a mixture of dizzying opportunity and daunting trouble for Russian Orthodoxy. The newly revised and updated edition addresses the tumultuous events of recent years, including schisms in Ukraine, Estonia, and Moldova, and confrontations between church traditionalists, conservatives and reformers. The author also covers battles against Greek-Catholics, Roman Catholics, Protestant evangelists, and pagans in the south and east, the canonization of the last Czar, the church's financial crisis, and hard data on the slowing Russian orthodox recovery and growth. Institutional rebuilding and moral leadership now beckon between promise and possibility.

Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom is an entertaining and engaging guide to global economic history told for the first time from an African perspective. In thirty-five short chapters Johan Fourie tells the story of 100,000 years of human history spanning humankind's migration out of Africa to the Covid-19 pandemic. His unique account reveals just how much we can learn by asking unexpected questions such as 'How could a movie embarrass Stalin?', 'Why do the Japanese play rugby?' and 'What do an Indonesian volcano, Frankenstein and Shaka Zulu have in common?'. The book sheds new light on urgent debates about the roots and reasons for prosperity, the march of opportunity versus the crushing boot of exploitation, and why it is the builders of society – rather than the burglars –who ultimately win out.