Back Over The Mountains

A narrative with a deep philosophical insights hidden in every nook and corner of every sentence… Back Over the Mountains is the true story of unexpected friendship between a Buddhist monk seeking to establish himself far from his homeland, and a writer clinging to the remnants of fading borderland culture. When she unexpectedly meets exiled Tibetan Buddhist monk Kushok Lobsang Dhamchoe, she begins a journey that not only leads her to remote corners of the Himalayas, but into the realm of memory, loss, and acceptance. From the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet to the secret valley of Tsum, Nepal, Marshall first follows in the footsteps of her teacher before finding the courage to seek out her own spiritual path. While trying to mend Kushok’s broken past, she discovers she’s healing her own, too. Jane Marshall has created a beautiful narrative with deep philosophical insights hidden in every nook and corner of every sentence. Mountain pebbles, people, wind, and longing are all carefully knitted together to form an inspirational memoir of her travels to Nepal in search for inner peace. This book comes across as transparent, emotional, and enlightening. It is bound to resonate and act as a brightly lit pathway for the ever-searching, travelling soul.

An exploration of the health and wellbeing benefits of spending time at altitude. Mountains have forever been steeped in poetry, symbolism and mystery, inspiring everyone from the explorers who wish to scale every peak to those who are more interested in the journey or the view. These rooftops of the world encourage determination, resilience, fitness of the body, ingenuity, creativity and awe - all of which are, in their own ways, "good for us". As the world's populations become increasingly urbanised, the need for a healthy relationship with nature is becoming more and more important, both from a psychological wellbeing and physical health point of view. In the Mountains is an awe-inspiring book that takes us on a journey to reveal the health and wellbeing benefits of spending time at altitude, and also teaches how we can be inspired by the research to bring elements of a mountain lifestyle into our everyday, increasingly urbanized, lives.

With Their Backs to the Mountains is the history of a stateless people, the Carpatho-Rusyns, and their historic homeland, Carpathian Rus’, located in the heart of central Europe. A little over 100,000 Carpatho-Rusyns are registered in official censuses but their number could be as high as 1,000,000, the greater part living in Ukraine and Slovakia. The majority of the diaspora—nearly 600,000—lives in the US. At present, when it is fashionable to speak of nationalities as “imagined communities” created by intellectuals or elites who may or may not live in the historic homeland, Carpatho-Rusyns provide an ideal example of a people made—or some would say still being made—before our very eyes. The book traces the evolution of Carpathian Rus’ from earliest prehistoric times to the present, and the complex manner in which a distinct Carpatho-Rusyn people, since the mid-nineteenth century, came into being, disappeared, and then re-appeared in the wake of the revolutions of 1989 and the collapse of Communist rule in central and eastern Europe. To help guide the reader further there are 39 text inserts, 34 detailed maps, plus an annotated discussion of relevant books, chapters, and journal articles.

As a park warden in the national parks of Canada's Rocky Mountains, Sid Marty came to know that beautiful and treacherous landscape as few men or women do. He was a mountain climber, rescue team member, firefighter, wildlife custodian, and adviser to tourists, adventurers, and people passing through. At all times, he was an acute observer of human and animal behaviour. In these pages he records with wry wit and bitter insight true stories of heroism and folly drawn from life in the high country. Marty writes vividly about a land and a way of life that are increasingly endangered. The visceral energy of his prose compels attention. This is a compulsive, alarming, and often hilarious read.

AS SEEN ON BBC’S WINTERWATCH WITH CHRIS PACKHAM AND MICHAELA STRACHAN 'The finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain' Guardian In this masterpiece of nature writing, Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. There she encounters a world that can be breathtakingly beautiful at times and shockingly harsh at others. Her intense, poetic prose explores and records the rocks, rivers, creatures and hidden aspects of this remarkable landscape. Shepherd spent a lifetime in search of the 'essential nature' of the Cairngorms; her quest led her to write this classic meditation on the magnificence of mountains, and on our imaginative relationship with the wild world around us. Composed during the Second World War, the manuscript of The Living Mountain lay untouched for more than thirty years before it was finally published.

WINNER OF THE GUARDIAN FIRST BOOK AWARD Once we thought monsters lived there. In the Enlightenment we scaled them to commune with the sublime. Soon, we were racing to conquer their summits in the name of national pride. In this ground-breaking, classic work, Robert Macfarlane takes us up into the mountains: to experience their shattering beauty, the fear and risk of adventure, and to explore the strange impulses that have for centuries lead us to the world's highest places.

When Dr Ben Givens left his Seattle home he never intended to return. It was to be a journey past snow-covered mountains to a place of canyons, sagelands and orchards, where, on the verges of the Columbia River, Ben had entered the world and would now take his leave of it.