500 Walks With Writers Artists And Musicians

Explore the diverse cultural and historical legacy of the world's greatest writers, artists and composers on foot. This unique trans-continental culture trip around the world presents a series of inspiring walks, treks, and hikes that vary between easy one-hour strolls, half day trails, and multi-day expeditions for people who love a walking holiday and are looking for a more immersive experience. The book includes walks in easy to reach countryside areas, national parks, the wild, and the great cities of the world. From an urban Street Art Walking Tour of East London to a traverse through the Georgian melting pot city of Tbilisi to a literary-themed Millennium Tour of Stieg Larsson’s Stockholm, Discover the World in 500 Walks with Writers, Artists & Musicians has all the inspiration and information you need to plan your next walking adventure.

"This carefully researched collection of 500 walking routes, accompanied by full-color photography and illustrated maps, will help you explore the diverse legacy of the world's greatest artists, writers, and musicians. Take a transcontinental culture trip via a series of inspiring strolls, treks, and hikes in accessible countrysides, national parks, remore wildernesses, and the great cities of the world. Kath Stathers has curated this fascinating collection of 500 inspiring walks, ranging from casual strolls for day-trippers to multiday hikes for those looking for a more challenging experience. Whether it's wandering the streets of Rome with Raphael, hiking the Yorkshire Moors with the Brontèe sisters, or following the Mississippi with Mark Twain, The Artist's Path in 500 Walks has all the inspiration and infromation you need to plan your next walking adventure."--Back of cover.

How we walk, where we walk, why we walk tells the world who and what we are. Whether it's once a day to the car, or for long weekend hikes, or as competition, or as art, walking is a profoundly universal aspect of what makes us humans, social creatures, and engaged with the world. Cultural commentator, Whitbread Prize winner, and author of Sex Collectors Geoff Nicholson offers his fascinating, definitive, and personal ruminations on the literature, science, philosophy, art, and history of walking. Nicholson finds people who walk only at night, or naked, or in the shape of a cross or a circle, or for thousands of miles at a time, in costume, for causes, or for no reason whatsoever. He examines the history and traditions of walking and its role as inspiration to artists, musicians, and writers like Bob Dylan, Charles Dickens, and Buster Keaton. In The Lost Art of Walking, he brings curiosity, imagination, and genuine insight to a subject that often strides, shuffles, struts, or lopes right by us.

From prehistory to the present day, take a grand tour of world events at eye-level perspective with accounts that combine knowledgeable commentary with practical detail. You may even be inspired to lace up your own boots! From geologic upheavals and mad kings to trade routes and saints' ways, this book relates the tales behind the top 500 walks that have shaped our society. It's easy to imagine travelling back in time as you read about convicts and conquistadors, silk traders and Buddhists who have hiked along routes for purposes as varied as the terrain they covered.

Tour the world's national parks via five hundred walks and hikes through preserved natural beauty.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE The original bestseller from the beloved author of UNDERLAND, LANDMARKS and THE LOST WORDS - Robert Macfarlane travels Britain's ancient paths and discovers the secrets of our beautiful, underappreciated landscape 'The Old Ways confirms Macfarlane's reputation as one of the most eloquent and observant of contemporary writers about nature' Scotland on Sunday Following the tracks, holloways, drove-roads and sea paths that form part of a vast ancient network of routes criss-crossing the British Isles and beyond, Robert Macfarlane discovers a lost world - a landscape of the feet and the mind, of pilgrimage and ritual, of stories and ghosts; above all of the places and journeys which inspire and inhabit our imaginations. 'Sublime . . . It sets the imagination tingling, laying an irresistible trail for readers to follow' Sunday Times 'Read this and it will be impossible to take an unremarkable walk again' Metro 'He has a rare physical intelligence and affords total immersion in place, elements and the passage of time: wonderful' Antony Gormley

A moving story of father-son reconciliation told by a charismatic aboriginal star When his father was given a diagnosis of terminal cancer, Winnipeg broadcaster and musician Wab Kinew decided to spend a year reconnecting with the accomplished but distant aboriginal man who’d raised him. The Reason You Walk spans that 2012 year, chronicling painful moments in the past and celebrating renewed hopes and dreams for the future. As Kinew revisits his own childhood in Winnipeg and on a reserve in Northern Ontario, he learns more about his father's traumatic childhood at residential school. An intriguing doubleness marks The Reason You Walk, itself a reference to an Anishinaabe ceremonial song. Born to an Anishinaabe father and a non-native mother, he has a foot in both cultures. He is a Sundancer, an academic, a former rapper, a hereditary chief and an urban activist. His father, Tobasonakwut, was both a beloved traditional chief and a respected elected leader who engaged directly with Ottawa. Internally divided, his father embraced both traditional native religion and Catholicism, the religion that was inculcated into him at the residential school where he was physically and sexually abused. In a grand gesture of reconciliation, Kinew's father invited the Roman Catholic bishop of Winnipeg to a Sundance ceremony in which he adopted him as his brother. Kinew writes affectingly of his own struggles in his twenties to find the right path, eventually giving up a self-destructive lifestyle to passionately pursue music and martial arts. From his unique vantage point, he offers an inside view of what it means to be an educated aboriginal living in a country that is just beginning to wake up to its aboriginal history and living presence. Invoking hope, healing and forgiveness, The Reason You Walk is a poignant story of a towering but damaged father and his son as they embark on a journey to repair their family bond. By turns lighthearted and solemn, Kinew gives us an inspiring vision for family and cross-cultural reconciliation, and for a wider conversation about the future of aboriginal peoples.

This “passionate affirmation of the simple life” explores how walking has influenced history’s greatest thinkers—from Henry David Thoreau and John Muir to Gandhi and Nietzsche (Observer) “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.” —Nietzsche In this French bestseller, leading thinker and philosopher Frédéric Gros charts the many different ways we get from A to B—the pilgrimage, the promenade, the protest march, the nature ramble—and reveals what they say about us. Gros draws attention to other thinkers who also saw walking as something central to their practice. On his travels he ponders Thoreau’s eager seclusion in Walden Woods; the reason Rimbaud walked in a fury, while Nerval rambled to cure his melancholy. He shows us how Rousseau walked in order to think, while Nietzsche wandered the mountainside to write. In contrast, Kant marched through his hometown every day, exactly at the same hour, to escape the compulsion of thought. Brilliant and erudite, A Philosophy of Walking is an entertaining and insightful manifesto for putting one foot in front of the other.