Slow Train to Switzerland

Slow Train to Switzerland PDF Author: Diccon Bewes
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1857889762
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
A travel diary from 1863 inspires author Diccon Bewes to retrace Thomas Cook's historic train trip that revolutionized tourism forever.

Slow Train to Switzerland

Slow Train to Switzerland PDF Author: Diccon Bewes
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1857889762
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
A travel diary from 1863 inspires author Diccon Bewes to retrace Thomas Cook's historic train trip that revolutionized tourism forever.

Swiss Watching

Swiss Watching PDF Author: Diccon Bewes
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1857889916
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
A Financial Times Book of the Year and international bestseller.

The Gilded Chalet

The Gilded Chalet PDF Author: Padraig Rooney
Publisher: Nicholas Brealey
ISBN: 1473645026
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
Part detective work, part treasure chest, full of history and scandal, The Gilded Chalet takes you on a grand tour of two centuries of great writing by both Swiss and foreign authors and shows how Switzerland has always been at the center of literary Europe. Two centuries after the Romantics went there to invent Gothic horror, the lure of Switzerland hasn't left us. Writers from the Fitzgeralds to Fleming, Highsmith to Hemingway, Conan Doyle to le Carré, came to escape world wars, political persecution, tuberculosis. They came for sanctuary (from oppression or the tax man), for fresh air and nude sunbathing, for scenery resembling, as Rooney puts it, 'Mother Nature on steroids.' Patricia Highsmith spent her last years in a granite home in Ticino with a fridge containing little but peanut butter and vodka. Hermann Hesse had himself buried to the neck as a cure for alcoholism. Nabokov chased butterflies and played tennis on the hotel courts. When it comes to literature, it seems all roads lead to Switzerland. Padraig Rooney peers through the chalet windows and discovers how Switzerland has influenced some of the greatest authors and characters of literature.

Night Trains

Night Trains PDF Author: Andrew Martin
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1782832122
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Night trains have long fascinated us with the possibilities of their private sleeping compartments, gilded dining cars, champagne bars and wealthy travellers. Authors from Agatha Christie to Graham Greene have used night trains to tell tales of romance, intrigue and decadence against a rolling background of dramatic landscapes. The reality could often be as thrilling: early British travellers on the Orient Express were advised to carry a revolver (as well as a teapot). In Night Trains, Andrew Martin attempts to relive the golden age of the great European sleeper trains by using their modern-day equivalents. This is no simple matter. The night trains have fallen on hard times, and the services are disappearing one by one. But if the Orient Express experience can only be recreated by taking three separate sleepers, the intriguing characters and exotic atmospheres have survived. Whether the backdrop is 3am at a Turkish customs post, the sun rising over the Riviera, or the constant twilight of a Norwegian summer night, Martin rediscovers the pleasures of a continent connected by rail. By tracing the history of the sleeper trains, he reveals much of the recent history of Europe itself. The original sleepers helped break down national barriers and unify the continent. Martin uncovers modern instances of European unity - and otherwise - as he traverses the continent during 'interesting times', with Brexit looming. Against this tumultuous backdrop, he experiences his own smaller dramas, as he fails to find crucial connecting stations, ponders the mystery of the compartment dog, and becomes embroiled in his very own night train whodunit.

Switzerland: A Village History

Switzerland: A Village History PDF Author: D. Birmingham
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780333800140
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Switzerland is a remarkable country half of whose territory lies in the Alps. The raising of cattle and the making of cheese eventually brought a modest wealth to the peasants but the destructive Napoleonic invasion brought revolution and poverty. The democratic unification of Switzerland created a common market and a single currency. This history of one alpine village illustrates a one-thousand-year struggle for survival on the edge of this white wilderness.

The Alps: A Human History from Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond

The Alps: A Human History from Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond PDF Author: Stephen O'Shea
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393634191
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
“An entertaining, turbocharged race among the high mountain passes of six alpine countries.” —Liesl Schillinger, New York Times Book Review For centuries the Alps have been witness to the march of armies, the flow of pilgrims and Crusaders, the feats of mountaineers, and the dreams of engineers. In The Alps, Stephen O’Shea ("a graceful and passionate writer"—Washington Post) takes readers up and down these majestic mountains. Journeying through their 500-mile arc across France, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Germany, Austria, and Slovenia, he explores the reality behind historic events and reveals how the Alps have profoundly influenced culture and society.

Swiss Watching, 3rd Edition

Swiss Watching, 3rd Edition PDF Author: Diccon Bewes
Publisher: Nicholas Brealey
ISBN: 147369972X
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
New updated edition of the international bestseller, featuring new statistics and a new epilogue, as well as new sections on the Swiss elections, the Swiss citizenship test and how Brexit has affected Switzerland "A great subject for a cultural anthropologist and Bewes is a perfect guide." Financial Times, Book of the Year One country, four languages, 26 cantons, and 7.5 million people (but only 75% of them Swiss): there's nowhere else in Europe like it. Switzerland may be hundreds of miles away from the nearest drop of seawater, but it is an island at the center of Europe. Welcome to the landlocked island. Swiss Watching is a fascinating journey around Europe's most individual and misunderstood country. From seeking Heidi and finding the best chocolate to reliving a bloody past and exploring an uncertain future, Diccon Bewes proves that there's more to Switzerland than banks and skis, francs and cheese. This book dispels the myths and unravels the true meaning of Swissness.

Coming Out Swiss

Coming Out Swiss PDF Author: Anne Herrmann
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299298434
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Anne Herrmann, a dual citizen born in New York to Swiss parents, offers in Coming Out Swiss a witty, profound, and ultimately universal exploration of identity and community. “Swissness”—even on its native soil a loose confederacy, divided by multiple languages, nationalities, religion, and alpen geography—becomes in the diaspora both nowhere (except in the minds of immigrants and their children) and everywhere, reflected in pervasive clichés. In a work that is part memoir, part history and travelogue, Herrmann explores all our Swiss clichés (chocolate, secret bank accounts, Heidi, Nazi gold, neutrality, mountains, Swiss Family Robinson) and also scrutinizes topics that may surprise (the “invention” of the Alps, the English Colony in Davos, Switzerland’s role during World War II, women students at the University of Zurich in the 1870s). She ponders, as well, marks of Swissness that have lost their identity in the diaspora (Sutter Home, Helvetica, Dadaism) and the enduring Swiss American community of New Glarus, Wisconsin. Coming Out Swiss will appeal not just to the Swiss diaspora but also to those drawn to multi-genre writing that blurs boundaries between the personal and the historical.

Overland

Overland PDF Author: Ewen Levick
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780646805207
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
From the scorching deserts of Western Australia to the harsh vastness of Mongolia, Overland is the true story of a journey from Sydney to Switzerland without flying. It is a funny and honest account of rewarding successes and frustrating failures. It is also a vivid illustration of modern Asia and the people who live there: young Indonesian fishermen, backpackers and a slow train through southern Burma; eating grubs in Thailand and an armed confrontation in Laos; lullabies from middle-aged Chinese businessmen and a cold night on the Great Wall of China; encounters with wolves and reindeer herders in Mongolia; thieves, nomads, Russian scientists; and one ancient, stubborn motorcycle travelling through the world's wild places.

Swisscellany

Swisscellany PDF Author: Diccon Bewes
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783905252248
Category : Switzerland
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
A treasure-trove of serious and not-so-serious facts about Switzerland that will amuse and enlighten you with statistics and details you never dreamed you'd enjoy knowing.