Anthropology Travel

"My God. These people really are Neanderthals!" At an archeological dig in Gibraltar, science journalist Tom Cook’s hopes and dreams are shattered in an instant by a mysterious explosion—his pregnant fiancée is missing. During the search, things go from bad to worse when Tom plunges through a time portal and into the strange and dangerous era of the Neanderthals. Can he get back, or is he stuck in the past forever? On top of figuring out how to return to the present, Tom must use his modern-day wits to fight for survival in the world of 40,000 years ago. And contend with a group of ...

“A crisp, confident, and convincing new account of the place and its chroniclers" — The New Yorker “A definitive history of the mysteries of Easter Island...compelling...[a] magisterial history.” — New York Times “Revelatory…fascinating… wholly convincing” — Daily Mail (UK) A...

Finding from my own personal experience how troublesome it is to hunt through piles of dusty old volumes, I have decided to make a small selection of these papers which I consider are not only rare and very interesting, but which also give an insight into the varied activities and achievements of Burton’s crowded life. It will, I think, be realized that such a volume as this will not be superfluous, for, apart from saving people an enormous amount of trouble, it will give them further insight into the life-work of one of the greatest men of the Victorian era.

The founder of Scott’s Cheap Flights explains why we’re searching for airfare all wrong, shares the strategies that have saved his two million newsletter subscribers a collective $500 million on airfare, and presents a bold new approach for how to see the world while never overpaying for...

Eliot Stein has traveled the globe in search of remarkable people who are preserving some of our most extraordinary cultural rites. In Custodians of Wonder, Stein introduces listeners to a man saving the secret ingredient in Japan's 700-year-old original soy sauce recipe. In Italy, he learns how to make the world's rarest pasta from one of the only women alive who knows how to make it. And in India, he discovers a family rumored to make a mysterious metal mirror believed to reveal your truest self.

In 1963 Colin Fletcher became the first man to walk the length of Grand canyon, below the Rim. It began with a dream, when he and a friend detoured from a cross-country trip to take a hurried look at the great natural wonder. Standing on the Rim, surrounded by the profound and almost mystical silence, Fletcher knew that something had happened to the way he looked at things. He also knew that the Canyon, with its depths and distances, cliffs, buttes, and hanging terraces, beckoned to him, calling him on a journey that would challenge both his body and his mind.

Daniel Everett, then a Christian missionary, arrived among the Pirahã in 1977 - with his wife and three young children - intending to convert them. What he found was a language that defies all existing linguistic theories and reflects a way of life that evades contemporary understanding. The Pirahã have no counting system and no fixed terms for color. They have no concept of war or of personal property.

“Strikingly dramatic, yet simple and unrestrained . . . an unusual and intensely interesting book richly packed with strange information.” —New York Times Book Review Based on Zora Neale Hurston’s personal experiences in Haiti and Jamaica, where she participated as an initiate rather...

Winner of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario's 2016 Young Authors Award Winner of the 2017 Louise de Kiriline Award for Nonfiction The age of exploration is not over. When Adam Shoalts ventured into the largest unexplored wilderness on the planet, he hoped to set foot where no one had ever...

The acclaimed, New York Times-bestselling chronicle of the discovery of the legendary lost civilization of the Maya In 1839, rumors of extraordinary yet baffling stone ruins buried within the unmapped jungles of Central America reached two of the world’s most intrepid travelers. Seized by the...

At once intimate and wide-ranging, and as enthralling, surprising, and vivid as the place itself, this is a uniquely eye-opening tour of one of the great metropolises of the world, and its largest Spanish-speaking city. Horizontal Vertigo: The title refers to the fear of ever-impending...

"What kind of world is this?" It’s five years later, and Tom Cook is living a “normal” life with his Neanderthal family 40,000 years ago. But when a life-threatening crisis strikes his daughter, Tom decides to carry her to the future for the medical help she desperately needs. And in the process, he’s entangled in a modern world very different from the one he left behind. Now, caught up in a secret plan to exploit his daughter’s unique Neanderthal DNA, Tom must find a way to save everything he loves and cherishes. If you're a fan of the time travel novels of Jack Finney (Time and ...

“Can I save my daughter . . . and them?” Time traveler Tom Cook has settled into his prehistoric life among the Neanderthals, but it’s not without its challenges that include a burning desire to see his future-dwelling daughter, Pook, again. When a growing threat from hostile neighbors turns into an attack, an old contact from another world comes to the rescue and leads both Tom and his Neanderthal wife, Brassy, back to that future through an increasingly unstable time portal. Now, after traveling to and from two different worlds, Tom must find a way to defeat his enemies in both, ...

In this compelling narrative, O'Connor seeks out neuroscientists, anthropologists and master navigators to understand how navigation ultimately gave us our humanity. Biologists have been trying to solve the mystery of how organisms have the ability to migrate and orient with such precision - especially since our own adventurous ancestors spread across the world without maps or instruments. O'Connor goes to the Arctic, the Australian bush and the South Pacific to talk to masters of their environment who seek to preserve their traditions at a time when anyone can use a GPS to navigate.

There is the Cornwall Lamorna Ash knew as a child – the idyllic, folklore-rich place where she spent her summer holidays. Then there is the Cornwall she discovers when, feeling increasingly dislocated in London, she moves to Newlyn, a fishing town near Land’s End. This Cornwall is messier and harder; it doesn’t seem like a place that would welcome strangers. Before long, however, Lamorna finds herself on a week-long trawler trip with a crew of local fishermen, afforded a rare glimpse into their world, their warmth and their humour.

Andrew Zimmern, the host of The Travel Channel’s hit series Bizarre Foods, has an extraordinarily well-earned reputation for traveling far and wide to seek out and sample anything and everything that’s consumed as food globally, from cow vein stew in Bolivia and giant flying ants in Uganda...

An award-winning scholar explores the sixty-thousand-year history of the Pacific islands in this dazzling, deeply researched account. One of the Best Books of 2021 — Wall Street JournalThe islands of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia stretch across a huge expanse of ocean and encompass a...

Brought to you by Penguin. No sex. No kids. No future? When Tom Feiling moved to Tokyo as a student in the early nineties, Japan was a beacon of the future: a rising superpower, a technology giant, and a global symbol of prosperity, civility and success. When he returned twenty-four years later...

Wishing Shelf Book Awards Red Ribbon (2025) — Global Book Awards Silver Medal (2025) Moonchild Irene Slade has nothing left to lose — not family, not home, not even the solace of blame. Alpha Centauri is far from no one she loves. When a disenfranchised pilot, kept at the margins of the mission’s briefings, has an encounter with an intelligent alien species, the result is catastrophic. Lives are lost. Truth is buried. And guilt becomes Irene's legacy. Among the dead was a friend... A sister... An aunt... So Irene bends protocol and invokes her override—bringing two young women into ...

For readers of On Trails, this is an incisive, utterly engaging exploration of walking: how it is fundamental to our being human, how we've designed it out of our lives, and how it is essential that we reembrace it. "I'm going for a walk." How often has this phrase been uttered by someone with a...