Tripping The World Fantastic

A fascinating journey through the world’s musical cultures. Every culture on Earth has music. Every culture that’s ever existed has had it, but we don’t exactly know why. Music is not like food, shelter, or having opposable thumbs. We don’t need it to live, and yet we can’t seem to live without it. Glenn Dixon travels the globe exploring how and why people make music. From a tour of Bob Marley’s house to sitar lessons in India, he experiences music around the world and infuses the stories with the latest in brain research, genetics, and evolutionary psychology. Why does music give us chills down the backs of our necks? What exactly are the whales singing about and why does some music stick in our minds like chewing gum? Through his adventures, Dixon uncovers the real reasons why music has such a powerful hold on us – and the answers just might surprise you.

Every culture on Earth has music. Every culture that's ever existed has had it – but we don't exactly know why. Music is not like food, shelter, or having opposable thumbs. We don't need it to live and yet we can't seem to live without it. Glenn Dixon travels the globe exploring how, and why, people make music.

Every culture on Earth has music. Every culture that's ever existed has had it, but we don't exactly know why. Music is not like food, shelter, or having opposable thumbs. We don't need it to live, and yet we can't seem to live without it. Glenn Dixon travels the globe exploring how and why people make music. From a tour of Bob Marley's house to sitar lessons in India, he experiences music around the world and infuses the stories with the latest in brain research, genetics, and evolutionary psychology. Why does music give us chills down the backs of our necks? What exactly are the whales singing about and why does some music stick in our minds like chewing gum? Through his adventures, Dixon uncovers the real reasons why music has such a powerful hold on us? and the answers just might surprise you.

Nabbing flights for less than a fiver, Andrew Fraser took off on a month long jaunt around ten European cities for £144. In this entertaining account of his trip, he not only describes what he saw, but also how he did it, coaching aspiring travellers in how to create their own dream travel itineraries on flights which cost less than an airport latte. Join him on a bargain journey to some of Europe's weirdest, least visited backwaters, while also learning how to plan a ten-city adventure of your own. Andrew Fraser travelled 6,928 miles at an average cost of 2p per mile. Now you can, too.This unique title - the only one available that explains how to travel so far for so little - takes in some of Europe's least discovered cities, including Skopje, Girona, Thessaloniki, Gdansk, Warsaw and Wroclaw, as well as giving an entertaining overview of some more familiar places, such as Barcelona, Rome and Brussels. It tells you how to book secret five star hotels for three star prices with no mystery about where you are going to stay, how to travel the world cheaply from your local airport, and how to save a fortune and create an adventure by abandoning the notion of the linear return flight. Uncovering the little known travel gems which you can fly to for under a tenner, it is also an often surreal, idiosyncratic and funny account of one man's adventures on the move, from attending an octopus autopsy in Barcelona to unearthing uncomfortable secrets in Europe's new Capital of Culture and discovering hip Warsovian apartments which straddle the worlds of Molotov and Madonna. What's more, it's a journey in search of culture, gastronomy and history and - on occasions - the seamier side of life in some of Europe's most thrilling but least known cities.Andrew Fraser is former Travel Editor and Deputy Editor of Attitude magazine, and former Chief Writer of OK! Magazine. He has had a love of the obscure, a love of bargains, and a love of travel since he was a strange eight year-old-boy locked in his bedroom obsessing over maps of Narnia-esque towns, cities and regions on the red side of the European map, which he was told he would never be able to visit. When the Berlin wall fell in 1989, he rushed to Prague, Bratislava and Budapest where he enjoyed the greatest adventure of his life so far, costing little more than pennies. Now the internet and low cost airlines, have brought back those halcyon days of cheap travel bliss and Andrew Fraser's mission in life is to transport you to places beyond your wildest dreams for less than the cost of your airport latte. Come join him.

In Charles M. Gross's Tripping The Light Fantasic, he tells the story of a Jewish counterfieter and a 'Jewban' woman brought together by their Rabbi. They travel and dance through adventurous crime and the recovery of Nazi loot.

With a contribution from Betsy DevineThe fantastic reality that is modern physics is open for your exploration, guided by one of its primary architects and interpreters, Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek.Some jokes, some poems, and extracts from wife Betsy Devine's sparkling chronicle of what it's like to live through a Nobel Prize provide easy entertainment. There's also some history, some philosophy, some exposition of frontier science, and some frontier science, for your lasting edification.49 pieces, including many from Wilczek's award-winning Reference Frame columns in Physics Today, and some never before published, are gathered by style and subject into a dozen chapters, each with a revealing, witty introduction.Profound ideas, presented with style: What could be better? Enjoy.

This is a formal ball, and you'll be dancing with us all: your companion is a Soho New York zombie artist. The Prom King is the Vampire Dracula, dressed formally and very grim; music will be courtesy of an avante garde rock band as old as the stones upon the hills.

'Darkness isn't the opposite of light, it is simply its absence . . . what was radiating from the book was the light that lies on the far side of darkness, the light fantastic.' The Discworld is in danger, heading towards a seemingly inevitable collision with a malevolent red star, its magic fading. It needs a hero, and fast. What it doesn't need is Rincewind, an inept and cowardly wizard who is still recovering from the trauma of falling off the edge of the world. Or Twoflower, the well-meaning tourist whose luggage has a mind (and legs) of its own. Which is a shame, because that's all there is . . . 'His spectacular inventiveness makes the Discworld series one of the perennial joys of modern fiction' Mail on Sunday 'Incredibly funny, compulsively readable' The Times The Light Fantastic is the second book in the Wizards series, but you can read the Discworld novels in any order.