Books » Asia Travel Books

Here is a fresh perspective on the last tumultuous years of the Soviet Union and an exquisitely poetic travelogue.  With a keen grasp of Russia's history, a deep appreciation for its architecture and iconography, and an inexhaustible enthusiasm for its people and its culture, Colin Thubron is the perfect guide to a country most of us will never get to know firsthand.  Here, we can walk down western Russia's country roads, rest in its villages, and explore some of the most engaging cities in the world.  Beautifully written and infinitely insightful, Among the Russians is vivid, compelling travel writing that will also appeal to readers of history and current events--and to anyone captivated by the shape and texture of one of the world's most enigmatic culture.

Far and away the most useful analysis of characters for beginner, intermediate student. 1,000 most important characters analyzed according to primitives, phonetics, historical development. Traditional method offers mnemonic aid to student of Chinese, Japanese.

This is the first guide to introduce nearly 500 buildings of this region.

A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darknessis Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul's profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India.
Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man and a deluded American religious seeker. An Area of Darkness also abounds with Naipaul's strikingly original responses to India's paralyzing caste system, its apparently serene acceptance of poverty and squalor, and the conflict between its desire for self-determination and its nostalgia for the British raj. The result may be the most elegant and passionate book ever written about the subcontinent.

From its conversion to Christianity to the Genocide during World War I, from the Soviet occupation to its recent independence, Armenia has seen a long and often turbulent history. In the magnificent Armenia: A Historical Atlas, Robert H. Hewsen traces Armenia's rich past from ancient times to the present day through more than two hundred full-color maps packed with information about physical geography, demography, and sociopolitical, religious, cultural, and linguistic history.

Hewsen has divided the maps into five sections, each of which begins with a chronology of important dates and a historical introduction to the period. Specialized maps include Ptolemy's second-century map of Armenia, as well as maps of Roman, Cilician, Ottoman, tsarist, and Soviet Armenia. Other maps show the Persian khanate of Erevan, the Caucasian campaigns of World War I, the Armenian Genocide, the Armenian monuments in Turkey and Transcaucasia, the worldwide diaspora, ground plans of selected cities, and plans of the great monastery of Echmiadzin in 1660, 1890, and 1990. The atlas concludes with maps portraying the Karabagh war and the new Armenian Republic, and an extensive bibliography compiles references to the vast historical, ethnological, and travel literature on the region.

The first comprehensive and authoritative atlas of any of the former Soviet republics, this book does not treat Armenia in isolation, but instead sets it within the context of Caucasia as a whole, providing detailed information on neighboring regions such as Georgia and Azerbaijan. Armenia: A Historical Atlas will be an essential reference and an important teaching tool for generations to come.

During his travels in Japan with Henry Adams in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the doyen of American impressionist painters, La Farge, wrote with amazing sensitivity his observations about the whole of Japanese society at the time. John La Farge was born in New York in 1835 to a wealthy and artistic family of French descent. He studied art in Paris and then with William Hunt at Newport, Rhode Island. However, he had a unique and complex mind capable of immense subtlety. He studied Japanese wash painting and mastered Mandarin Chinese. He also invented the process later known as Tiffany Glass.

Pages: 317, Paperback, Wolfenden

This atlas of Laos is the first of its kind to appear in English. Statistics were gathered in the late 1990s and cover the 20 years since the founding of the Lao People's Democratic Republic. Change is visualized in a series of 299 full color maps.