In this brilliant mix of political journalism and travel writing, Helen Winternitz and fellow journalist Timothy Phelps witness what few Westerners have: life in the ecologically rich but financially impoverished American-backed dictatorship of Zaire, the former Belgian Congo.

Widely considered a jewel of contemporary travel literature, Equator is Thurston Clarke’s magnificent, witty account of his solo journey along the earth’s torrid midsection—a grueling twenty-five-thousand-mile odyssey that spanned three years and as many continents. His was a perilous trek across an almost surreal landscape—where a first-class hotel appeared smack in the middle of a leper colony and a one-time Pacific island paradise stood as a hideous, bomb-blasted testament to nuclear folly. Along the way Clarke encountered the world’s heaviest rat, the earth’s highest volcano, and the king of a Micronesian island, wearing flip-flops and a novelty T-shirt. Throughout, Clarke’s unflagging sense of humor and wonder make Equator a classic of its kind.

In 1895 Mark Twain conducted a year-long around-the-world lecture tour that formed the basis for Following the Equator. A modern-day journalist recounts Twain's passage through India and offers his own intriguing observations of the same sites a century later.

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 Niño, 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.

In the beginning, in 1973, when a young couple met at a seminary in the city of Boston, during a time of great racial tension over an issue called bussing, they dared to share a dream and the dream was about faith, progress, unity, love and sustainable development in Africa. She trained in education, her Canadian husband schooled in medicine. They would return to the Ugandan paradise island of her youth in Lake Victoria only to discover that beauty hid the beast; that an interracial couple, white and black and their Ancient Orthodox faith would cause a spark which turned verdant fields into flames of conflict. Truths would be told and taboos would be broken. Courage would be unveiled and passions uncovered. This story is about the glue that maintained the vision until time, politics and war wore it away. It is also about survival and rebirth and the ultimate seeds which gave birth to a new crop of hopes. "What are you looking at old man?" the young doctor queried. The elder was looking into a rotten log. "I am seeing the face of God," he smiled standing up, allowing the doctor to see the sun kissed orchid." "The face of God," he said, and so it was, for their five years on Bukasa island uncovered the weaknesses and strengths of this couple and the community around them. That they would fail was inevitable, but that they would survive in a real and mystical way was the hidden treasure....

Visual Astronomy introduces the basics of observational astronomy, a fundamentally limitless opportunity to learn about the universe with your unaided eyes or with tools such as binoculars, telescopes, or cameras. The book explains the essentials of time a