What do you do when your world ends? At twenty-eight years old, Krista Schlyer sold almost everything she owned and packed the rest of it in a station wagon bound for the American wild. Her two best friends joined her—one a grumpy, grieving introvert, the other a feisty dog—and together they sought out every national park, historic site, forest, and wilderness they could get to before their money ran out or their minds gave in. The journey began as a desperate escape from urban isolation, heartbreak, and despair, but became an adventure beyond imagining. Chronicling their colorful escapade, Almost Anywhere explores the courage, cowardice, and heroics that live in all of us, as well as the life of nature and the nature of life. This eloquent and accessible memoir is at once an immersion in the pain of losing someone particularly close and especially young and a healing journey of a broken life given over to the whimsy and humor of living on the road.

Unimpressed with the few packaged tours that she experienced, the author launched upon the research of worldwide independent travel that would ultimately lead to the publication of How to Go Almost Anywhere for Nothing and to a new career as a writer on travel, consumer and women’s issues. She has traveled extensively in Asia, Europe, North Africa and America. --from the Introduction I began a quest for information on REALLY cheap travel. I researched an extraordinary amount of published material and then embarked upon many years of travel and research in the United States and abroad. I have now traveled extensively and at very little expense in Asia, North America, Europe and a bit in Africa. The scope of this particular volume will necessarily focus on areas with which I have the greatest familiarity. Southeast Asia remains a favorite because of the low ground costs, and the most detailed information will cover Asian ports of call such as Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore, with some reference to specific destinations within Europe and the United States. My latest major trip was to Morocco, and that country is covered in this edition. In the United States, the largest port of entry cities will get the most attention, not only because three of my favorite cities fall into this category, but for the benefit of visitors from other lands. The principles outlined herein should pertain to travel almost everywhere and you will be able to apply them with just a little bit of courage and imagination.

This updated edition of a month-long backcountry trip on the John Muir Trail is part memoir, part nature writing, and part travelogue.

In an academy squeezed hard by formidable pressures, what is the future of the faculty? Over the past 70 years, the American university has become the global gold standard of excellence in research and graduate education. The unprecedented surge of federal research support of the postWorld War II American university paralleled the steady strengthening of the American academic profession itself, which managed to attract the best and brightest educators from around the world while expanding the influence of the "faculty factor" throughout the academic realm. But in the past two decades, escalating costs and intensifying demands for efficiency have resulted in a wholesale reshaping of the academic workforce, one marked by skyrocketing numbers of contingent faculty members. Extending Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein's richly detailed classic The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers, this important book documents the transformation of the American faculty—historically the leading global source of Nobel laureates and innovation—into a diversified and internally stratified professional workforce. Drawing on heretofore unpublished data, the book provides the most comprehensive contemporary depiction of the changing nature of academic work and what it means to be a college or university faculty member in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The rare higher education study to incorporate multinational perspectives by comparing the status and prospects of American faculty to teachers in the major developing economies of Europe and East Asia, The Faculty Factor also explores the redistribution of academic work and the ever-more diverse pathways for entering into, maneuvering through, and exiting from academic careers. Using the tools of sociology, anthropology, and demography, the book charts the impact of waves of technological change, mass globalization, and the severe financial constraints of the last decade to show the impact on the lives and careers of those who teach in higher education. The authors propose strategic policy recommendations to extend the strengths of American higher education to retain leadership in the global economy. Written for professors, adjuncts, graduate students, and academic, political, business, and not-for-profit leaders, this data-rich study offers a balanced assessment of the risks and opportunities posed for the American faculty by economic, market-driven forces beyond their control.

More than three billion people in the world live on less than two-and-a-half U.S. dollars per person per day. In this book, Gary Fields explains how the poor work, how they have improved their self-employment earning opportunities, how poor-country governments can stimulate more inclusive economic growth, and how they can be aided.