The hero recalls an unfruitful pilgrimage to the East during his youth and begins to realize its hidden spiritual meanings

Shares the influential architect's account of a 1911 trip through central and eastern Europe and includes sketches he made along the way.

There’s popping out for a quick pint, and then there’s this – a gloriously preposterous 27,000 mile journey across 25 countries to grab a beer in pubs (bars) at opposite ends of the world. We’re talking an epic adventure, from an abandoned Soviet mine 700 miles from the North Pole, to a remote pub at South America’s southernmost tip. A journey undertaken in a TVR sports car, a car that many might consider untrustworthy just to drive to the shops. The journey packed a lot into its eight months. From braving the sheer drops of Bolivia’s Death Road, to drag racing the locals in Texas. From roaring across flooded salt flats, to sailing the straits of Magellan. From the highs of the planet’s best driving roads, to the lows of life in No-Man’s-Land, trapped between borders by red tape and bureaucracy. And from looking out for Polar Bears in the High Arctic, to dodging penguins in Tierra del Fuego. The story of the Pub2Pub Expedition is an inspirational account of where your dreams can take you if only you believe in them. Chronicling the epic journey made by Ben Coombs in his TVR Chimaera, this book is both an exciting adventure and a fascinating snapshot of the life and culture of the countries that he drove through.

The East in the West reassesses Western views of Asia. Traditionally many European historians and theorists have seen the societies of the East as 'static' or 'backward'. Jack Goody challenges these assumptions, beginning with the notion of a special Western rationality which enabled 'us' and not 'them' to modernise. He then turns to book-keeping, which several social and economic historians have seen as intrinsic to capitalism, arguing that there was in fact little difference between East and West in terms of mercantile activity. Other factors said to inhibit the East's development, such as the family and forms of labour, have also been greatly exaggerated. This Eurocentrism both fails to explain the current achievements of the East, and misunderstands Western history. The East in the West starts to redress the balance, and so marks a fundamental shift in our view of Western and Eastern history and society.

Journey to the East wires the remote past, the present, and the not-so-distant futures of East and West into a tumbleweed that the writers roll along the track of time. The universal truth of love guides the reader all the way to the end.

Baird Spalding's description on travel to the Far East offered the Western world innovative resolutions that conceptually yet conventionally transcend spiritual and intellectual knowledge paradigm.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1843.