The Wind Off The Island

The bestselling author of The Journeying Moon explores the history and culture of Sicily in this colorful travel memoir. In his memoir The Journeying Moon, historian Ernle Bradford recounts the call to adventure that brought him and his wife, Janet, to a life on the sea. Continuing their adventures aboard the Mother Goose, Bradford and Janet now voyage around the island of Sicily, where the couple explores the land and learns its captivating history. Home to ancient temple ruins, charming villages, and Mount Etna, the largest active volcano in Europe, Sicily provides the perfect backdrop for this tale of exploration and wonder. In a model travel narrative, Bradford captures the sights, sounds, and flavors of Sicily in his lively portrayal of an excursion across an ancient and extraordinary island, a part of Italy and yet a world unto itself.

The bestselling author of The Journeying Moon explores the history and culture of Sicily in this colorful travel memoir. In his memoir The Journeying Moon, historian Ernle Bradford recounts the call to adventure that brought him and his wife, Janet, to a life on the sea. Continuing their adventures aboard the Mother Goose, Bradford and Janet now voyage around the island of Sicily, where the couple explores the land and learns its captivating history. Home to ancient temple ruins, charming villages, and Mount Etna, the largest active volcano in Europe, Sicily provides the perfect backdrop for this tale of exploration and wonder. In a model travel narrative, Bradford captures the sights, sounds, and flavors of Sicily in his lively portrayal of an excursion across an ancient and extraordinary island, a part of Italy and yet a world unto itself.

In THE WIND OFF THE ISLAND, author Ernle Bradford continues the seafaring adventure he launched in THE JOURNEYING MOON. Bradford fans will remember that In that book he and his wife traded in their land-bound life for a life at sea and took off across the Mediterranean on the ten-ton Dutch cutter Mother Goose. Now voyaging around the island of Sicily, the couple bask in the captivating history of the land. Home to numerous important archeological sites and Mount Etna, the only active volcano in Europe, Sicily provides the perfect backdrop for this tale of exploration and wonder. In a model of travel narrative, Bradford perfectly encapsulates the sights and sounds in his captivating and deeply personal portrayal of an ancient and extraordinary island.

A fifteenth-century portrait painter, grieving the untimely death of his unrequited love, takes refuge at the monastery at Mont Saint-Michel, an island off the coast of France. He haunts the halls until the monks assign him the task of copying manuscripts – though he is illiterate. His work heals him and grows the monastery's library into a beautiful city of books, all under the shadow of the invention of the printing press. Dominique Fortier is an editor and translator living in Montreal. She is the author of five books, including On the Proper Use of Stars and Wonder. Rhonda Mullins is an award-winning translator and writer living in Montreal, Quebec.

During her first visit to the beautiful island of Pohnpei in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, anthropologist Martha Ward discovered people who grew quarter-ton yams in secret and ritually shared a powerful drink called kava. She managed a medical research project, ate dog, became pregnant, and responded to spells placed on her. Thirty years later she returned to Pohnpei to learn what had happened there since her first visit. Were islanders still relaxed and casual about sex? Were they still obsessed with titles and social rank? Was the island still lush and beautiful? Had the inhabitants remained healthy? This second edition of Wards best-selling account is a rare, longitudinal study that tracks people, processes, and a place through decades of change. It is also an intimate record of doing fieldwork that immerses readers in the sights, smells, tastes, sounds, and the sensory richness of Pohnpei. Ward addresses the ageless ethnographic questions about family life, politics, religion, traditional medicine, magic, and death together with contemporary concerns about postcolonial survival, the discontinuities of culture, and adaptation to the demands of a global age. Her insightful discoveries illuminate the evolution of a culture possibly distant from yet important to people living in other parts of the world.

Tells how the people of Danish island of Samso decided to use wind energy to power their lives and became the "Energy Island."