2015, ISBN: 9780375753657

US: CLC Publications, 2015. Very Good. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. S… Mehr…

US: CLC Publications, 2015. Very Good. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Steve Beirn moves the conversation on global missionary sending from the mission agency to the front door of the local church. With a special chapter by George Murray, Well Sent equips local churches in launching missionary sending through scalable guidance, accessible illustrations, and practical action points. More than a how-to manual, Well Sent critically evaluates topics such as sending perception and evaluation of the missionary call. This book will prepare potential missionary candidates for service and support the missional efforts of any church., CLC Publications, 2015, 3, Ember. Very Good. 5.56 x 0.72 x 8.22 inches. Paperback. 2012. 336 pages. <br>Vera's spent her whole life secretly in love with her best friend, Charlie Kahn. And over the years she's kept a lo t of his secrets. Even after he betrayed her. Even after he ruine d everything. So when Charlie dies in dark circumstances, Vera k nows a lot more than anyone--the kids at school, his family, even the police. But will she emerge to clear his name? Does she even want to? Edgy and gripping, Please Ignore Vera Dietz is an unfo rgettable novel: smart, funny, dramatic, and always surprising. Editorial Reviews Review Kirkus Reviews, starred review, Septemb er 15, 2010: A harrowing but ultimately redemptive tale of adoles cent angst gone awry. Vera and Charlie are lifelong buddies whose relationship is sundered by high school and hormones; by the sta rt of their senior year, the once-inseparable pair is estranged. In the aftermath of Charlie's sudden death, Vera is set adrift by grief, guilt and the uncomfortable realization that the people c losest to her are still, in crucial ways, strangers. As with King 's first novel, The Dust of 100 Dogs (2009), this is chilling and challenging stuff, but her prose here is richly detailed and wry ly observant. The story unfolds through authentic dialogue and a nonlinear narrative that shifts fluidly among Vera's present pers pective, flashbacks that illuminate the tragedies she's endured, brief and often humorous interpolations from the dead kid, Vera's father and even the hilltop pagoda that overlooks their dead-end Pennsylvania town. The author depicts the journey to overcome a legacy of poverty, violence, addiction and ignorance as an arduou s one, but Vera's path glimmers with grace and hope. (Fiction. 14 & up) Publishers Weekly, starred review, October 11, 2010: Begi nning with the funeral of Charlie Kahn, high school senior Vera's neighbor and former best friend, this chilling and darkly comedi c novel offers a gradual unfolding of secrets about the troubled teenagers, their families, and their town. Though Charlie's death hangs heavily over Vera, she has the road ahead mapped out: pay her way through community college with her job delivering pizza w hile living cheap in her father's house. But first she has to fac e her fractured relationship with her father, a recovering alcoho lic who worries about her drinking; the absence of her mother, wh o left six years earlier; and the knowledge that she could clear Charlie's suspected guilt in a crime. Vera is the primary narrato r, though her father, Charlie (posthumously), and even the town's landmark pagoda contribute interludes as King (The Dust of 100 D ogs) shows how shame and silence can have risky--sometimes deadly --consequences. The book is deeply suspenseful and profoundly hum an as Vera, haunted by memories of Charlie and how their friendsh ip disintegrated, struggles to find the courage to combat destruc tive forces, save herself, and bring justice to light. Ages 13-up . (Oct.) Booklist, starred review, November 15, 2010: High-schoo l senior Vera never expects her ex-best friend, Charlie, to haunt her after he dies, begging her to clear his name of a horrible a ccusation surrounding his death. But does Vera want to help him a fter what he did to her? Charlie's risky, compulsive behavior and brand-new bad-news pals proved to be his undoing, while Vera's m antra was always Please Ignore Vera Dietz, as she strives, with C harlie's help, to keep a secret about her family private. But whe n Charlie betrays her, it is impossible to fend off her classmate s' cruel attacks or isolate herself any longer. Vera's struggle t o put Charlie and his besmirched name behind her are at the crux of this witty, thought-provoking novel, but nothing compares to t he gorgeous unfurling of Vera's relationship with her father. Cha pters titled A Brief Word from Ken Dietz (Vera's Dad) are surpris ing, heartfelt, and tragic; it's through Ken that readers see how quickly alcohol and compromised decision-making are destroying V era's carefully constructed existence. Father and daughter wade g ingerly through long-concealed emotions about Vera's mother's lea ving the family, which proves to be the most powerful redemption story of the many found in King's arresting tale. Watching charac ters turn into the people they've long fought to avoid becoming i s painful, but seeing them rise above it, reflect, and move on ma kes this title a worthy addition to any YA collection. The Bulle tin of the Center for Childrens Books, review, November 2010: The death of a best friend is hard enough, but for high-school senio r Vera Dietz, her reaction to the death of Charlie Kahn is compli cated by the fact that in the last few months he'd dumped her for the druggie pack at school, especially tough-girl Jenny. Flashba cks and compact commentary from Charlie himself, from Vera's stra itlaced dad, and from an omniscient local landmark interweave wit h Vera's current narration, painting the picture of Vera and Char lie's close friendship and its recent souring and revealing that Vera is the guilty and troubled possessor of many secrets about h er late friend. King offers a perceptive exploration of a particu lar kind of friendship, one where one friend is undergoing agonie s beyond the power of the other to help. Vera's own troubles--her abandonment by her mother, the strictness and emotional evasion of her recovering-alcoholic father--get sympathetic treatment, bu t it's clear that Vera is loved and cared for in a way that Charl ie, stuck in a poisonous, abusive home, simply wasn't. Yet it's V era's life even more than Charlie's that's under scrutiny here, e specially since Vera still has the possibility of making changes, both in her dealing with Charlie's memory and in her ongoing rel ationships. The writing is emotional yet unfussy, and Vera's tend ency to see and perceive Charlie in every place and every thing i s both effective and affecting. It's not uncommon for the dysfunc tion in one friend's life to start sowing seeds of doom for a fri endship, and Vera's poignant take on her double loss will resonat e with many readers. VOYA, review, November 2010: It is hard to describe how deeply affecting this story is. Vera and Charlie are both the victims of extremely bad parenting, but that only scrat ches the surface of the novel. The writing is phenomenal, the cha racters unforgettable. The narrative weaves through the past and present, mostly from Vera's viewpoint but with telling asides fro m other characters. There is so much in here for young people to think about, presented authentically and without filters: drinkin g and its consequences; the social hierarchy of high school; civi c responsibilities; and teens' decisions to accept or reject what their parents pass down to them. It is a gut-wrenching tale abou t family, friendship, destiny, the meaning of words, and self-dis covery. It will glow in the reader for a long time after the read ing, just like the neon red pagoda that watches over Vera and her world. About the Author A.S. King is the award-winning author o f young adult books including Reality Boy, Ask the Passengers, Ev erybody Sees the Ants, and The Dust of 100 Dogs. She has visited hundreds of schools to talk about empowerment, self-reliance and self-awareness. Find more at www.as-king.com. Excerpt. ® Reprint ed by permission. All rights reserved. THE FUNERAL The pastor is saying something about how Charlie was a free spirit. He was and he wasn't. He was free because on the inside he was tied up in k nots. He lived hard because inside he was dying. Charlie made inn er conflict look delicious. The pastor is saying something about Charlie's vivacious and intense personality. I picture Charlie in side the white coffin, McDonald's napkin in one hand, felt-tipped pen in the other, scribbling, Tell that guy to kiss my white viv acious ass. He nevermet me. I picture him crumpling the note and eating it. I picture him reaching for his Zippo lighter and setti ng it alight, right there in the box. I see the congregation, tea ry-eyed, suddenly distracted by the rising smoke seeping through the seams. Is it okay to hate a dead kid? Even if I loved him onc e? Even if he was my best friend? Is it okay to hate him for bein g dead? Dad doesn't want me to see the burying part, but I make h im walk to the cemetery with me, and he holds my hand for the fir st time since I was twelve. The pastor says something about how w e return to the earth the way we came from the earth and I feel t hegrass under my feet grab my ankles and pull me down. I picture Charlie in his coffin, nodding, certain that the Great Hunter mea nt for everything to unfold as it has. I picture him laughing in there as the winch lowers him into the hole. I hear him saying,He y, Veer--it's not every day you get lowered into a hole by a guy with a wart on his nose, right? I look at the guy manning the win ch. I look at the grass gripping my feet. I hear a handful of dir t hit the hollow-sounding coffin, and I bury my face in Dad'sside and cry quietly. I still can't really believe Charlie is dead. T he reception is divided into four factions. First, you have Charl ie's family. Mr. and Mrs. Kahn and their parents (Charlie's grand parents), and Charlie's aunts and uncles and seven cousins. Old f riends of the family and close neighbors are included here,too, s o that's where Dad and I end up. Dad, still awkward at social eve nts without Mom, asks me forty-seven times between the church and the banquet hall if I'm okay. But really, he's worse off than I am. Especially when talking to the Kahns. They know we knowtheir secrets because we live next door. And they know we know they kno w. I'm so sorry, Dad says. Thanks, Ken, Mrs. Kahn answers. It's h ot outside--first day of September--and Mrs. Kahn is wearing long sleeves. They both look at me and I open my mouth to say somethi ng, but nothing comes out. I am so mixed up about what I should b e feeling, I throw myself into Mrs. Kahn's arms and sob for a few seconds. Then I compose myself and wipe my wet cheeks with the b ackof my hands. Dad gives me a tissue from his blazer pocket. Sor ry, I say. It's fine, Vera. You were his best friend. This must b e awful hard on you, Mrs. Kahn says. She has no idea how hard. I haven't been Charlie's best friend since April, when he totally s crewed me over and started hanging out full-time with Jenny Flick and the Detentionhead losers. Let me tell you--if you think your best friend dying is a bitch,try your best friend dying after he screws you over. It's a bitch like no other. To the right of the family corner, there's the community corner. A mix of neighbors, teachers, and kids that had a study hall or two with him. A few kids from his fifth-grade Little League baseball team. Our childh ood babysitter, who Charlie had an endlesscrush on, is here with her new husband. Beyond the community corner is the official-peop le area. Everyone there is in a black suit of some sort. The past or is talking with the school principal, Charlie's family doctor, and two guys I never saw before. After the initial reception stu ff is over,one of the pastor's helpers asks Mrs. Kahn if she need s anything. Mr. Kahn steps in and answers for her, sternly, and t he helper then informs people that the buffet is open. It's a slo w process, but eventually, people find their way to the food. You want anything? Dad asks. I shake my head. You sure? I nod yes. H e gets a plate and slops on some salad and cottage cheese. Across the room is the Detentionhead crowd--Charlie's new best friends. They stay close to the door and go out in groups to smoke. The s toop is littered with butts, even though there's one of those hou rglass-shaped smokeless ashtrays there. For a whilethey were bloc king the door, until the banquet hall manager asked them to move. So they did, and now they're circled around Jenny Flick as if sh e's Charlie's hopeless widow rather than the reason he's dead. An hour later, Dad and I are driving home and he asks, Do you know anything about what happened Sunday night? Nope. A lie. I do. Bec ause if you do, you need to say something. Yeah. I would if I did , but I don't. A lie. I do. I wouldn't if I could. I haven't. I w on't. I can't yet. I take a shower when I get home because I can' t think of anything else to do. I put on my pajamas, even though it's only seven-thirty, and I sit down in the den with Dad, who i s reading the newspaper. But I can't sit still, so I walk to the kitchen andslide the glass door open and close it behind me once I'm on the deck. There are a bunch of catbirds in the yard, squaw king the way they do at dusk. I look into the woods, toward Charl ie's house, and walk back inside again. You going to be okay with school tomorrow? Dad asks. No, I say. But I guess it's the best thing to do, you know? Probably true, he says. But he wasn't ther e last Monday, in the parking lot, when Jenny and the Detentionhe ads, all dressed in black, gathered around her car and smoked. He wasn't there when she wailed. She wailed so loud, I hated her mo re than I alreadyhated her. Charlie's own mother wasn't wailing t hat much. Yeah. It's the first week. It's all review anyway. You know, you could pick up a few more hours at work. That would prob ably keep your mind off things. I think the number one thing to r emember about my dad is that no matter the ailment, he will sugge st working as a possible cure. THREE AND A HALF MONTHS LATER-- A THURSDAY IN DECEMBER I turned eighteen in October and I went f rom pizza maker to pizza deliverer. I also went from twenty hours a week to forty, on top of my schoolwork. Though the only classe s worth studying for are Modern Social Thought and Vocabulary. MS T is easy homework--everyday we discuss a different newspaper art icle. Vocab is ten words a week (with bonus points for additional words students find in their everyday reading), using each in a sentence. Here's me using parsimonious in a sentence. My parsimon ious father doesn't understand that a senior in high school shoul dn't have a full-time job. He doesn't listen when I explain that working as a pizza delivery girl from four until midnight every s chool night isn't very good for my grades. Instead,my parsimoniou s father launches into a ten-minute-long lecture about how workin g for a living is hard and kids today don't get it b, Ember, 2012, 3, Modern Library. Very Good. 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches. Paperback. 1999. 336 pages. <br>Squeezed between a vast ocean and the longest moun tain range on earth, Chile is 2,600 miles long and never more tha n 110 miles wide--not a country that lends itself to maps, as Sar a Wheeler discovered when she traveled alone from the top to the bottom, from the driest desert in the world to the sepulchral was tes of Antarctica. Eloquent, astute, nimble with history and deft ly amusing, Travels in a Thin Country established Sara Wheeler as one of the very best travel writers in the world. Editorial Rev iews Review Notably well written, perceptive, lively and sympath etic. Sara Wheeler is very well worth reading. --Daily Telegraph She is a marvelous writer--funny, elegant and observant. As a tr aveling companion, Sara Wheeler is shrewd and amusing and likeabl e and well informed . . . not just a good but an outstanding trav el writer. --The Oldie Always lively and informative, sketching in the history with a light but sure touch . . . she admirably co nveys the mood of contemporary Chile. --The New Statesman A gift ed writer with a knack for discovering the unexpected . . . Ms. W heeler is a writer with attitude. --The Hindu From the Inside Fl ap Squeezed between a vast ocean and the longest mountain range o n earth, Chile is 2,600 miles long and never more than 110 miles wide--not a country that lends itself to maps, as Sara Wheeler di scovered when she traveled alone from the top to the bottom, from the driest desert in the world to the sepulchral wastes of Antar ctica. Eloquent, astute, nimble with history and deftly amusing, Travels in a Thin Country established Sara Wheeler as one of the very best travel writers in the world. From the Back Cover ween a vast ocean and the longest mountain range on earth, Chile is 2, 600 miles long and never more than 110 miles wide--not a country that lends itself to maps, as Sara Wheeler discovered when she tr aveled alone from the top to the bottom, from the driest desert i n the world to the sepulchral wastes of Antarctica. Eloquent, ast ute, nimble with history and deftly amusing, Travels in a Thin Co untry established Sara Wheeler as one of the very best travel wri ters in the world. About the Author Sara Wheeler is the author o f many books of biography and travel, including Access All Areas: Selected Writings 1990-2011 and Travels in a Thin Country: A Jou rney Through Chile. Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica was an international bestseller that The New York Times described as gr ipping, emotional and compelling, and The Magnetic North: Notes f rom the Arctic Circle was chosen as Book of the Year by Michael P alin and Will Self, among others. Wheeler lives in London. Excer pt. ® Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Noche, nieve y arena hacen la forma de mi delgada patria, todo el silencio está en su larga línea Night, snow, and sand make up th e form of my thin country all silence lies in its long line Pablo Neruda, from 'Descubridores de Chile' ('Discoverers of Chile'), 1950 I was sitting on the cracked flagstones of our lido and squ inting at the Hockney blue water, a novel with an uncreased spine at my side. It was an ordinary August afternoon in north London. A man with dark curly hair, toasted skin and only one front toot h laid his towel next to mine, and after a few minutes he asked m e if the water was as cold as usual. Later, the novel still unope ned, I learnt that he was Chilean, and that he had left not in th e political upheavals of the 1970s when everyone else had left, b ut in 1990; he had felt compelled to stay during the dictatorship , to do what he could, but once it was over he wanted space to br eathe. He came from the Azapa valley, one of the hottest places o n earth, yet he said he felt a bond as strong as iron with every Chilean he had ever met, even those from the brutally cold settle ments around the Beagle Channel over 2500 miles to the south. I told him that I had just finished writing a book about a Greek is land - I had posted the typescript off two days previously. I exp lained that I had lived in Greece, that I had studied ancient and modern Greek, and all that. The next day, at the lido, Salvador said: 'Why don't you write a book about my country now? I had wanted to go back to South America ever since I paddled a canoe u p the Amazon in 1985. The shape of the emaciated strip of land we st of the Andes in particular had caught my imagination, and I of ten found myself looking at it on the globe on my desk, tracing m y finger (it was thinner and longer than my finger) from an inch above the red line marking the Tropic of Capricorn down almost to the cold steel rod at the bottom axis. Chile took in the driest desert in the world, a glaciated archipelago of a thousand island s and most of the things you can imagine in between. After Salva dor had planted his idea, I sought out people who knew about the thin country. 'In Chile,' a Bolivian doctor told me, 'they used to have a saying, En Chile no pasa nada - nothing happens in Chil e.' He paused, and bit a fingernail. 'But I haven't heard it fo r a few years.' I went to the Chilean Embassy in Devonshire Stre et and looked at thousands of transparencies through a light box. The Andes were in every picture, from the brittle landscape of t he Atacama desert to the sepulchral wastes of Tierra del Fuego. I took a slow train to Cambridge and watched footage of Chilean An tarctica in the offices of the British Antarctic Survey; the pilo ts, who came home during austral winters, told me stories about l eave in what they described as 'the Patagonian Wild West'. I was utterly beguiled by the shape of Chile (Jung would have said it was because I wanted to be long and thin myself). I wondered how a country twenty-five times longer than it is wide could possibly function. When I conducted a survey among friends and acquaintan ces I discovered that hardly anyone knew anything about Chile. Pi nochet always came up first ('Is he gone, or what?'), then they u sually groped around their memories and alighted on Costa-Gavras' film Missing. The third thing they thought of was wine; they all liked the wine. Most people knew it was a Spanish-speaking count ry. That was about it. Our collective ignorance appealed to my cu riosity. I told Salvador that my Spanish had gone rusty, and tha t anyway it was the Spanish spoken in Spain. 'Well, you must lea rn a new Spanish! Do you want everything to be easy?' Duly chast ened, I persuaded Linguaphone to sponsor the project by donating a Latin American Spanish course and shut myself away with it for three hours a day for the first month. One afternoon, at the lido , I surprised Salvador with it. You have to go and see for yours elf now,' he said. I left three months later, to the day. I was anxious that the trip should be a natural progression from one en d of the country to the other, but I was obliged to fly to Santia go, the capital, which was unhelpfully situated in the middle. ' Make it your base camp!' said an enthusiastic adviser, so I did. I had been invited, via a mutual friend in London, to stay with Simon Milner and Rowena Brown of the British Council. They met me at the airport, she sitting on the barrier and smiling, holding a sign with my name on, and as we walked together through the har shly lit hall and the automatic glass doors and into the soft, wa rm air, fragrant with bougainvillea, she put her arm around my sh oulder and her face close to mine and she said: Your Chile begin s here. Welcome.' Simon and Rowena were about my age, and had be en in Santiago for a year, living in a penthouse on the thirteent h floor of a well-kept block of flats set among manicured lawns a nd acacia trees in the north of the city. It wasn't really their style - I had the idea that they thought it was quite a joke - bu t it was clear that they loved their Chilean posting, and their e nthusiasm steadied my wobbling courage. I nurtured a sense of arr ival for a day or two, contemplating the Andes on one side and th e urban maw on the other from their spacious and safe balconies. When I did venture out I found a city discharging the usual inter national urban effluents - exhaust fumes to McDonald's hamburgers - though it had a delightful insouciance about it which was quin tessentially South American, and it was impossible to imagine I w as in Rome or Amsterdam or Chicago. I badly wanted to explore, bu t I was too impatient for the journey to begin; the city would wa it. I was going to save Santiago until its proper place, half-wa y down the country, so after two indolent days I bought a bus tic ket to the far north. The plan was to travel up to the Peruvian b order straightaway, in one leap, and then work my way south, leav ing the continent right at the bottom and crossing over to the sl ice of Antarctica claimed by Chile - though I had no idea how I w as going to do that. I was also determined to visit the small Chi lean archipelago called Juan Fernández, half-way down, four hundr ed miles out in the Pacific and the prison-home of the original R obinson Crusoe. I had two arrangements to meet up with people fro m London, one in the north, which would coincide with Christmas, and one in the south, and these I saw as punctuation marks on the journey. The only big decision I had made - to leave Santiago i mmediately - was almost instantly overturned. A South African pho tographer called Rhonda telephoned to say that she was working on a feature about a sex hotel for a London magazine and had been l et down by the journalist doing the words: could I step in? The s ubject was irresistible, though a bizarre introduction to the com plex and apparently paradoxical Catholic moral code, so I changed my ticket and stayed an extra day. Alongside the shifting sands of Santiago's public and private lives stands an institution of such permanence that it is difficult to imagine the city without it. Inscrutable and silent, its patrons anonymous but its service s widely appreciated, the Hotel Valdivia is the example par excel lence of what is inaccurately known as a love hotel, a concept in ured in Japan but perfected west of the Andes. Rhonda had made an appointment with the manager of the Valdivia at ten the next mor ning, and she told me that I would have to pose as her assistant, as the man had specified photographs only; he didn't want anybod y writing anything. She had only wheedled her way that far round him by promising she would never sell the pictures to any paper o r magazine within Chile. The hotel was disguised as a discreet p rivate mansion, and I was obliged to ask a man in a kiosk for dir ections. He winked at me, and leered a spooky leer. I met Rhonda in the street outside the hotel. She was about my age, was wearin g army fatigues, and she gave me an affectionate slap on the back . At ten o'clock exactly a young woman scuttled out of the hotel, sideways, like a cockroach, and hustled us in. 'We don't like p eople waiting in the street,' she said. 'It attracts attention.' She showed us into a small, windowless office where a man in his mid-thirties wearing a dark suit and a herbaceous tie stood up t o shake our hands and introduce himself as Señor Flores. He didn' t look like a sleazebag at all; I was disappointed. His hair was neatly parted, and he had frilled the edge of a silk hanky half a n inch above the lip of his breast pocket. He reminded me of an i nsurance salesman who used to live next door to us in Bristol. Th ere were two photographs of brightly dressed children and a smili ng wife on his desk, and four enthusiastically executed oil paint ings of rural scenes hanging behind him which I feared were his o wn work. A VDU stood on one side of the desk, and neatly stacked piles of paper on the other. ., Modern Library, 1999, 3<

2011, ISBN: 9780375753657

Gebundene Ausgabe

Bantam Books. Good. 6.93 x 1.54 x 4.29 inches. Paperback. 1993. 346 pages. Cover worn. <br>A very funny book... no character is m inor: they're all hilarious. --Houston Chronicl… Mehr…

Bantam Books. Good. 6.93 x 1.54 x 4.29 inches. Paperback. 1993. 346 pages. Cover worn. <br>A very funny book... no character is m inor: they're all hilarious. --Houston Chronicle. In The Road T o Gandolfo, Robert Ludlum introduced us to the outrageous General MacKenzie Hawkins and his legal wizard, Sam Devereaux, whose plo t to kidnap the Pope spun wildly out of control into sheer hilari ty. Now Ludlum's two wayward heroes return with a diabolical sche me to right a very old wrong -- and wreak vengeance on the (exple tive deleted) who drummed the hawk out of the military. Their out raged opposition will be no less than the White House. Byzantine Treachery. Discovering a long-buried 1878 treaty with an obscure Indian tribe, the hawk -- a.k.a. Chief Thunder Head -- hatches a brilliant plot that will ultimately bring him and his reluctant l awyer Sam before the Supreme Court. Their goal: to reclaim a choi ce piece of American real estate -- the state of Nebraska. Which just happened to the headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Air Comma nd! Will they succeed against the powers that be? Will the Wopota mi tribe ever have their day in the Supreme Court? From the Oval Office to the Pentagon, all the president's men are outfitted, un til it rests with CIA Director Vincent Vinnie the Bam-Bam Mangeca vallo to cut Sam and Hawk off at the pass. And only one thing is certain: Robert Ludlum will keep us in nonstop suspense and side- splitting laughter-through the very last page. From the Paperbac k edition. Editorial Reviews Review Praise for Robert Ludlum an d The Road to Omaha A very funny book . . . No character is mino r: They're all hilarious.--Houston Chronicle Don't ever begin a Ludlum novel if you have to go to work the next day.--Chicago Sun -Times --This text refers to the hardcover edition. From the Pub lisher A very funny book... no character is minor: they're all hi larious. --Houston Chronicle. In The Road To Gandolfo, Robert L udlum introduced us to the outrageous General MacKenzie Hawkins a nd his legal wizard, Sam Devereaux, whose plot to kidnap the Pope spun wildly out of control into sheer hilarity. Now Ludlum's two wayward heroes return with a diabolical scheme to right a very o ld wrong -- and wreak vengeance on the (expletive deleted) who dr ummed the hawk out of the military. Their outraged opposition wil l be no less than the White House. Byzantine Treachery. Discoveri ng a long-buried 1878 treaty with an obscure Indian tribe, the ha wk -- a.k.a. Chief Thunder Head -- hatches a brilliant plot that will ultimately bring him and his reluctant lawyer Sam before the Supreme Court. Their goal: to reclaim a choice piece of American real estate -- the state of Nebraska. Which just happened to the headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Air Command! Will they succee d against the powers that be? Will the Wopotami tribe ever have t heir day in the Supreme Court? From the Oval Office to the Pentag on, all the president's men are outfitted, until it rests with CI A Director Vincent Vinnie the Bam-Bam Mangecavallo to cut Sam and Hawk off at the pass. And only one thing is certain: Robert Ludl um will keep us in nonstop suspense and side-splitting laughter-t hrough the very last page. --This text refers to the hardcover ed ition. About the Author Robert Ludlum was the author of twenty-o ne novels, each a New York Times bestseller. There are more than 210 million of his books in print, and they have been translated into thirty-two languages. In addition to the Jason Bourne series -The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, and The Bourne Ultima tum-he was the author of The Scarlatti Inheritance, The Chancello r Manuscript, and The Apocalypse Watch, among many others. Mr. Lu dlum passed away in March, 2001. From the Paperback edition. --T his text refers to the hardcover edition. From the Inside Flap f unny book... no character is minor:  they're all hilarious. --Hou ston  Chronicle. In The Road To  Gandolfo, Robert Ludlum introd uced us to the  outrageous General MacKenzie Hawkins and his lega l  wizard, Sam Devereaux, whose plot to kidnap the  Pope spun wil dly out of control into sheer hilarity.  Now Ludlum's two wayward heroes return with a  diabolical scheme to right a very old wron g -- and  wreak vengeance on the (expletive deleted) who  drummed the hawk out of the military. Their outraged  opposition will be no less than the White House.  Byzantine Treachery. Discovering a long-buried 1878  treaty with an obscure Indian tribe, the hawk --  a.k.a. Chief Thunder Head -- hatches a brilliant plot  that will ultimately bring him and his reluctant  lawyer Sam before th e Supreme Court. Their goal: t --This text refers to the hardcove r edition. Excerpt. ? Reprinted by permission. All rights reserv ed. 1 The small, decrepit office on the top floor of the govern ment building was from another era, which was to say nobody but t he present occupant had used it in sixty-four years and eight mon ths. It was not that there were dark secrets in its walls or male volent ghosts from the past hovering below the shabby ceiling; qu ite simply, nobody wanted to use it. And another point should be made clear. It was not actually on the top floor, it was above th e top floor, reached by a narrow wooden staircase, the kind the w ives of New Bedford whalers climbed to prowl the balconies, hopin g--most of the time--for familiar ships that signaled the return of their own particular Ahabs from the angry ocean. In summer mo nths the office was suffocating, as there was only one small wind ow. During the winter it was freezing, as its wooden shell had no insulation and the window rattled incessantly, impervious to cau lking, permitting the cold winds to whip inside as though invited . In essence, this room, this antiquated upper chamber with its s parse furniture purchased around the turn of the century, was the Siberia of the government agency in which it was housed. The las t formal employee who toiled there was a discredited American Ind ian who had the temerity to learn to read English and suggested t o his superiors, who themselves could barely read English, that c ertain restrictions placed on a reservation of the Navajo nation were too severe. It is said the man died in that upper office in the cold January of 1927 and was not discovered until the followi ng May, when the weather was warm and the air suddenly scented. T he government agency was, of course, the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs. For the current occupant, however, the foregoing was not a deterrent but rather an incentive. The lone figure in the nondescript gray suit huddled over the rolltop desk, which wa sn't much of a desk, as all its little drawers had been removed a nd the rolling top was stuck at half-mast, was General Mac?Ken?zi e Hawkins, military legend, hero in three wars and twice winner o f the Congressional Medal of Honor. This giant of a man, his lean muscular figure belying his elderly years, his steely eyes and t anned leather-lined face perhaps confirming a number of them, had once again gone into combat. However, for the first time in his life, he was not at war with the enemies of his beloved United St ates of America but with the government of the United States itse lf. Over something that took place a hundred and twelve years ago . It didn't much matter when, he thought, as he squeaked around in his ancient swivel chair and propelled himself to an adjacent table piled high with old leather-bound ledgers and maps. They we re the same pricky-shits who had screwed him, stripped him of his uniform, and put him out to military pasture! They were all the goddamned same, whether in their frilly frock coats of a hundred years ago or their piss-elegant, tight-assed pinstripes of today. They were all pricky-shits. Time did not matter, nailing them di d! The general pulled down the chain of a green-shaded, goosenec ked lamp--circa early twenties--and studied a map, in his right h and a large magnifying glass. He then spun around to his dilapida ted desk and reread the paragraph he had underlined in the ledger whose binding had split with age. His perpetually squinting eyes suddenly were wide and bright with excitement. He reached for th e only instrument of communication he had at his disposal, since the installation of a telephone might reveal his more than schola rly presence at the Bureau. It was a small cone attached to a tub e; he blew into it twice, the signal of emergency. He waited for a reply; it came over the primitive instrument thirty-eight secon ds later. Mac? said the rasping voice over the antediluvian conn ection. Heseltine, I've got it! For Christ's sake, blow into th is thing a little easier, will you? My secretary was here and I t hink she thought my dentures were whistling. She's out? She's o ut, confirmed Heseltine Broke?michael, director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. What is it? I just told you, I've got it! Got w hat? The biggest con job the pricky-shits ever pulled, the same pricky-shits who made us wear civvies, old buddy! Oh, I'd love t o get those bastards. Where did it happen and when? In Nebraska. A hundred and twelve years ago. Silence. Then: Mac, we weren't around then! Not even you! It doesn't matter, Heseltine. It's t he same horseshit. The same bastards who did it to them did it to you and me a hundred years later. Who's 'them'? An offshoot of the Mohawks called the Wopotami tribe. They migrated to the Nebr aska territories in the middle 1800s. So? It's time for the sea led archives, General Broke?michael. Don't say that! Nobody can do that! You can, General. I need final confirmation, just a few loose ends to clear up. For what? Why? Because the Wopotamis m ay still legally own all the land and air rights in and around Om aha, Nebraska. You're crazy, Mac! That's the Strategic Air Comma nd! Only a couple of missing items, buried fragments, and the fa cts are there.&#8200;.&#8200;.&#8200;. I'll meet you in the cella rs, at the vault to the archives, General Broke?michael.&#8200;.& #8200;.&#8200;. Or should I call you co-chairman of the Joint Chi efs of Staff, along with me, Heseltine? If I'm right, and I know damn well I am, we've got the White House-Pentagon axis in such a bind, their collective tails won't be able to evacuate until we tell 'em to. Silence. Then: I'll let you in, Mac, but then I fa de until you tell me I've got my uniform back. Fair enough. Inci dentally, I'm packing everything I've got here and taking it back to my place in Arlington. That poor son of a bitch who died up i n this rat's nest and wasn't found until the perfume drifted down didn't die in vain! The two generals stalked through the metal shelves of the musty sealed archives, the dull, webbed lights so dim they relied on their flashlights. In the seventh aisle, Mac?K en?zie Hawkins stopped, his beam on an ancient volume whose leath er binding was cracked. I think this is it, Heseltine. Good, and you can't take it out of here! I understand that, General, so I 'll merely take a few photographs and return it. Hawkins removed a tiny spy camera with 110 film from his gray suit. How many rol ls have you got? asked former General Heseltine Broke?michael as Mac?Ken?zie carried the huge book to a steel table at the end of the aisle. Eight, replied Hawkins, opening the yellow-paged volu me to the pages he needed. I have a couple of others, if you nee d them, said Heseltine. Not that I'm so all fired-up by what you think you may have found, but if there's any way to get back at E thelred, I'll take it! I thought you two had made up, broke in M ac?Ken?zie, while turning pages and snapping pictures. Never! I t wasn't Ethelred's fault, it was that rotten lawyer in the Inspe ctor General's office, a half-assed kid from Harvard named Devere aux, Sam Devereaux. He made the mistake, not Brokey the Deuce. Tw o Broke?michaels; he got 'em mixed up, that's all. Horseshit! Br okey-Two put the finger on me! I think you're wrong, but that's not what I'm here for and neither are you.&#8200;.&#8200;.&#8200; . Brokey, I need the volume next to or near this one. It should s ay CXII on the binding. Get it for me, will you? As the head of I ndian Affairs walked back into the metal stacks, the Hawk took a single-edged razor out of his pocket and sliced out fifteen succe ssive pages of the archival ledger. Without folding the precious papers, he slipped them under his suit coat. I can't find it, sa id Broke?michael. Never mind, I've got what I need. What now, M ac? A long time, Heseltine, maybe a long, long time, perhaps a y ear or so, but I've got to make it right--so right there's no hol es, no holes at all. In what? In a suit I'm going to file again st the government of the United States, replied Hawkins, pulling a mutilated cigar out of his pocket and lighting it with a World War II Zippo. You wait, Brokey-One, and you watch. Good God, for what?&#8200;.&#8200;.&#8200;. Don't smoke! You're not supposed t o smoke in here! Oh, Brokey, you and your cousin, Ethelred, alwa ys went too much by the book, and when the book didn't match the action, you looked for more books. It's not in the books, Heselti ne, not the ones you can read. It's in your stomach, in your gut. Some things are right and some things are wrong, it's as simple as that. The gut tells you. What the hell are you talking about? Your gut tells you to look for books you're not supposed to rea d. In places where they keep secrets, like right in here. Mac, y ou're not making sense! Give me a year, maybe two, Brokey, and t hen you'll understand. I've got to do it right. Real right. Gener al Mac?Ken?zie Hawkins strode out between the metal racks of the archives to the exit. Goddamn, he said to himself. Now I really g o to work. Get ready for me, you magnificent Wopotamis. I'm yours ! Twenty-one months passed, and nobody was ready for Thunder Hea d, chief of the Wopotamis. 2 The President of the United States , his jaw firm, his angry eyes steady and penetrating, accelerate d his pace along the steel-gray corridor in the underground compl ex of the, Bantam Books, 1993, 2.5, Modern Library. Very Good. 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches. Paperback. 1999. 336 pages. <br>Squeezed between a vast ocean and the longest moun tain range on earth, Chile is 2,600 miles long and never more tha n 110 miles wide--not a country that lends itself to maps, as Sar a Wheeler discovered when she traveled alone from the top to the bottom, from the driest desert in the world to the sepulchral was tes of Antarctica. Eloquent, astute, nimble with history and deft ly amusing, Travels in a Thin Country established Sara Wheeler as one of the very best travel writers in the world. Editorial Rev iews Review Notably well written, perceptive, lively and sympath etic. Sara Wheeler is very well worth reading. --Daily Telegraph She is a marvelous writer--funny, elegant and observant. As a tr aveling companion, Sara Wheeler is shrewd and amusing and likeabl e and well informed . . . not just a good but an outstanding trav el writer. --The Oldie Always lively and informative, sketching in the history with a light but sure touch . . . she admirably co nveys the mood of contemporary Chile. --The New Statesman A gift ed writer with a knack for discovering the unexpected . . . Ms. W heeler is a writer with attitude. --The Hindu From the Inside Fl ap Squeezed between a vast ocean and the longest mountain range o n earth, Chile is 2,600 miles long and never more than 110 miles wide--not a country that lends itself to maps, as Sara Wheeler di scovered when she traveled alone from the top to the bottom, from the driest desert in the world to the sepulchral wastes of Antar ctica. Eloquent, astute, nimble with history and deftly amusing, Travels in a Thin Country established Sara Wheeler as one of the very best travel writers in the world. From the Back Cover ween a vast ocean and the longest mountain range on earth, Chile is 2, 600 miles long and never more than 110 miles wide--not a country that lends itself to maps, as Sara Wheeler discovered when she tr aveled alone from the top to the bottom, from the driest desert i n the world to the sepulchral wastes of Antarctica. Eloquent, ast ute, nimble with history and deftly amusing, Travels in a Thin Co untry established Sara Wheeler as one of the very best travel wri ters in the world. About the Author Sara Wheeler is the author o f many books of biography and travel, including Access All Areas: Selected Writings 1990-2011 and Travels in a Thin Country: A Jou rney Through Chile. Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica was an international bestseller that The New York Times described as gr ipping, emotional and compelling, and The Magnetic North: Notes f rom the Arctic Circle was chosen as Book of the Year by Michael P alin and Will Self, among others. Wheeler lives in London. Excer pt. ® Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Noche, nieve y arena hacen la forma de mi delgada patria, todo el silencio está en su larga línea Night, snow, and sand make up th e form of my thin country all silence lies in its long line Pablo Neruda, from 'Descubridores de Chile' ('Discoverers of Chile'), 1950 I was sitting on the cracked flagstones of our lido and squ inting at the Hockney blue water, a novel with an uncreased spine at my side. It was an ordinary August afternoon in north London. A man with dark curly hair, toasted skin and only one front toot h laid his towel next to mine, and after a few minutes he asked m e if the water was as cold as usual. Later, the novel still unope ned, I learnt that he was Chilean, and that he had left not in th e political upheavals of the 1970s when everyone else had left, b ut in 1990; he had felt compelled to stay during the dictatorship , to do what he could, but once it was over he wanted space to br eathe. He came from the Azapa valley, one of the hottest places o n earth, yet he said he felt a bond as strong as iron with every Chilean he had ever met, even those from the brutally cold settle ments around the Beagle Channel over 2500 miles to the south. I told him that I had just finished writing a book about a Greek is land - I had posted the typescript off two days previously. I exp lained that I had lived in Greece, that I had studied ancient and modern Greek, and all that. The next day, at the lido, Salvador said: 'Why don't you write a book about my country now? I had wanted to go back to South America ever since I paddled a canoe u p the Amazon in 1985. The shape of the emaciated strip of land we st of the Andes in particular had caught my imagination, and I of ten found myself looking at it on the globe on my desk, tracing m y finger (it was thinner and longer than my finger) from an inch above the red line marking the Tropic of Capricorn down almost to the cold steel rod at the bottom axis. Chile took in the driest desert in the world, a glaciated archipelago of a thousand island s and most of the things you can imagine in between. After Salva dor had planted his idea, I sought out people who knew about the thin country. 'In Chile,' a Bolivian doctor told me, 'they used to have a saying, En Chile no pasa nada - nothing happens in Chil e.' He paused, and bit a fingernail. 'But I haven't heard it fo r a few years.' I went to the Chilean Embassy in Devonshire Stre et and looked at thousands of transparencies through a light box. The Andes were in every picture, from the brittle landscape of t he Atacama desert to the sepulchral wastes of Tierra del Fuego. I took a slow train to Cambridge and watched footage of Chilean An tarctica in the offices of the British Antarctic Survey; the pilo ts, who came home during austral winters, told me stories about l eave in what they described as 'the Patagonian Wild West'. I was utterly beguiled by the shape of Chile (Jung would have said it was because I wanted to be long and thin myself). I wondered how a country twenty-five times longer than it is wide could possibly function. When I conducted a survey among friends and acquaintan ces I discovered that hardly anyone knew anything about Chile. Pi nochet always came up first ('Is he gone, or what?'), then they u sually groped around their memories and alighted on Costa-Gavras' film Missing. The third thing they thought of was wine; they all liked the wine. Most people knew it was a Spanish-speaking count ry. That was about it. Our collective ignorance appealed to my cu riosity. I told Salvador that my Spanish had gone rusty, and tha t anyway it was the Spanish spoken in Spain. 'Well, you must lea rn a new Spanish! Do you want everything to be easy?' Duly chast ened, I persuaded Linguaphone to sponsor the project by donating a Latin American Spanish course and shut myself away with it for three hours a day for the first month. One afternoon, at the lido , I surprised Salvador with it. You have to go and see for yours elf now,' he said. I left three months later, to the day. I was anxious that the trip should be a natural progression from one en d of the country to the other, but I was obliged to fly to Santia go, the capital, which was unhelpfully situated in the middle. ' Make it your base camp!' said an enthusiastic adviser, so I did. I had been invited, via a mutual friend in London, to stay with Simon Milner and Rowena Brown of the British Council. They met me at the airport, she sitting on the barrier and smiling, holding a sign with my name on, and as we walked together through the har shly lit hall and the automatic glass doors and into the soft, wa rm air, fragrant with bougainvillea, she put her arm around my sh oulder and her face close to mine and she said: Your Chile begin s here. Welcome.' Simon and Rowena were about my age, and had be en in Santiago for a year, living in a penthouse on the thirteent h floor of a well-kept block of flats set among manicured lawns a nd acacia trees in the north of the city. It wasn't really their style - I had the idea that they thought it was quite a joke - bu t it was clear that they loved their Chilean posting, and their e nthusiasm steadied my wobbling courage. I nurtured a sense of arr ival for a day or two, contemplating the Andes on one side and th e urban maw on the other from their spacious and safe balconies. When I did venture out I found a city discharging the usual inter national urban effluents - exhaust fumes to McDonald's hamburgers - though it had a delightful insouciance about it which was quin tessentially South American, and it was impossible to imagine I w as in Rome or Amsterdam or Chicago. I badly wanted to explore, bu t I was too impatient for the journey to begin; the city would wa it. I was going to save Santiago until its proper place, half-wa y down the country, so after two indolent days I bought a bus tic ket to the far north. The plan was to travel up to the Peruvian b order straightaway, in one leap, and then work my way south, leav ing the continent right at the bottom and crossing over to the sl ice of Antarctica claimed by Chile - though I had no idea how I w as going to do that. I was also determined to visit the small Chi lean archipelago called Juan Fernández, half-way down, four hundr ed miles out in the Pacific and the prison-home of the original R obinson Crusoe. I had two arrangements to meet up with people fro m London, one in the north, which would coincide with Christmas, and one in the south, and these I saw as punctuation marks on the journey. The only big decision I had made - to leave Santiago i mmediately - was almost instantly overturned. A South African pho tographer called Rhonda telephoned to say that she was working on a feature about a sex hotel for a London magazine and had been l et down by the journalist doing the words: could I step in? The s ubject was irresistible, though a bizarre introduction to the com plex and apparently paradoxical Catholic moral code, so I changed my ticket and stayed an extra day. Alongside the shifting sands of Santiago's public and private lives stands an institution of such permanence that it is difficult to imagine the city without it. Inscrutable and silent, its patrons anonymous but its service s widely appreciated, the Hotel Valdivia is the example par excel lence of what is inaccurately known as a love hotel, a concept in ured in Japan but perfected west of the Andes. Rhonda had made an appointment with the manager of the Valdivia at ten the next mor ning, and she told me that I would have to pose as her assistant, as the man had specified photographs only; he didn't want anybod y writing anything. She had only wheedled her way that far round him by promising she would never sell the pictures to any paper o r magazine within Chile. The hotel was disguised as a discreet p rivate mansion, and I was obliged to ask a man in a kiosk for dir ections. He winked at me, and leered a spooky leer. I met Rhonda in the street outside the hotel. She was about my age, was wearin g army fatigues, and she gave me an affectionate slap on the back . At ten o'clock exactly a young woman scuttled out of the hotel, sideways, like a cockroach, and hustled us in. 'We don't like p eople waiting in the street,' she said. 'It attracts attention.' She showed us into a small, windowless office where a man in his mid-thirties wearing a dark suit and a herbaceous tie stood up t o shake our hands and introduce himself as Señor Flores. He didn' t look like a sleazebag at all; I was disappointed. His hair was neatly parted, and he had frilled the edge of a silk hanky half a n inch above the lip of his breast pocket. He reminded me of an i nsurance salesman who used to live next door to us in Bristol. Th ere were two photographs of brightly dressed children and a smili ng wife on his desk, and four enthusiastically executed oil paint ings of rural scenes hanging behind him which I feared were his o wn work. A VDU stood on one side of the desk, and neatly stacked piles of paper on the other. ., Modern Library, 1999, 3<

2015, ISBN: 9780375753657

US: CLC Publications, 2015. Very Good. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. S… Mehr…

US: CLC Publications, 2015. Very Good. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Steve Beirn moves the conversation on global missionary sending from the mission agency to the front door of the local church. With a special chapter by George Murray, Well Sent equips local churches in launching missionary sending through scalable guidance, accessible illustrations, and practical action points. More than a how-to manual, Well Sent critically evaluates topics such as sending perception and evaluation of the missionary call. This book will prepare potential missionary candidates for service and support the missional efforts of any church., CLC Publications, 2015, 3, Modern Library. Very Good. 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches. Paperback. 1999. 336 pages. <br>Squeezed between a vast ocean and the longest moun tain range on earth, Chile is 2,600 miles long and never more tha n 110 miles wide--not a country that lends itself to maps, as Sar a Wheeler discovered when she traveled alone from the top to the bottom, from the driest desert in the world to the sepulchral was tes of Antarctica. Eloquent, astute, nimble with history and deft ly amusing, Travels in a Thin Country established Sara Wheeler as one of the very best travel writers in the world. Editorial Rev iews Review Notably well written, perceptive, lively and sympath etic. Sara Wheeler is very well worth reading. --Daily Telegraph She is a marvelous writer--funny, elegant and observant. As a tr aveling companion, Sara Wheeler is shrewd and amusing and likeabl e and well informed . . . not just a good but an outstanding trav el writer. --The Oldie Always lively and informative, sketching in the history with a light but sure touch . . . she admirably co nveys the mood of contemporary Chile. --The New Statesman A gift ed writer with a knack for discovering the unexpected . . . Ms. W heeler is a writer with attitude. --The Hindu From the Inside Fl ap Squeezed between a vast ocean and the longest mountain range o n earth, Chile is 2,600 miles long and never more than 110 miles wide--not a country that lends itself to maps, as Sara Wheeler di scovered when she traveled alone from the top to the bottom, from the driest desert in the world to the sepulchral wastes of Antar ctica. Eloquent, astute, nimble with history and deftly amusing, Travels in a Thin Country established Sara Wheeler as one of the very best travel writers in the world. From the Back Cover ween a vast ocean and the longest mountain range on earth, Chile is 2, 600 miles long and never more than 110 miles wide--not a country that lends itself to maps, as Sara Wheeler discovered when she tr aveled alone from the top to the bottom, from the driest desert i n the world to the sepulchral wastes of Antarctica. Eloquent, ast ute, nimble with history and deftly amusing, Travels in a Thin Co untry established Sara Wheeler as one of the very best travel wri ters in the world. About the Author Sara Wheeler is the author o f many books of biography and travel, including Access All Areas: Selected Writings 1990-2011 and Travels in a Thin Country: A Jou rney Through Chile. Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica was an international bestseller that The New York Times described as gr ipping, emotional and compelling, and The Magnetic North: Notes f rom the Arctic Circle was chosen as Book of the Year by Michael P alin and Will Self, among others. Wheeler lives in London. Excer pt. ® Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Noche, nieve y arena hacen la forma de mi delgada patria, todo el silencio está en su larga línea Night, snow, and sand make up th e form of my thin country all silence lies in its long line Pablo Neruda, from 'Descubridores de Chile' ('Discoverers of Chile'), 1950 I was sitting on the cracked flagstones of our lido and squ inting at the Hockney blue water, a novel with an uncreased spine at my side. It was an ordinary August afternoon in north London. A man with dark curly hair, toasted skin and only one front toot h laid his towel next to mine, and after a few minutes he asked m e if the water was as cold as usual. Later, the novel still unope ned, I learnt that he was Chilean, and that he had left not in th e political upheavals of the 1970s when everyone else had left, b ut in 1990; he had felt compelled to stay during the dictatorship , to do what he could, but once it was over he wanted space to br eathe. He came from the Azapa valley, one of the hottest places o n earth, yet he said he felt a bond as strong as iron with every Chilean he had ever met, even those from the brutally cold settle ments around the Beagle Channel over 2500 miles to the south. I told him that I had just finished writing a book about a Greek is land - I had posted the typescript off two days previously. I exp lained that I had lived in Greece, that I had studied ancient and modern Greek, and all that. The next day, at the lido, Salvador said: 'Why don't you write a book about my country now? I had wanted to go back to South America ever since I paddled a canoe u p the Amazon in 1985. The shape of the emaciated strip of land we st of the Andes in particular had caught my imagination, and I of ten found myself looking at it on the globe on my desk, tracing m y finger (it was thinner and longer than my finger) from an inch above the red line marking the Tropic of Capricorn down almost to the cold steel rod at the bottom axis. Chile took in the driest desert in the world, a glaciated archipelago of a thousand island s and most of the things you can imagine in between. After Salva dor had planted his idea, I sought out people who knew about the thin country. 'In Chile,' a Bolivian doctor told me, 'they used to have a saying, En Chile no pasa nada - nothing happens in Chil e.' He paused, and bit a fingernail. 'But I haven't heard it fo r a few years.' I went to the Chilean Embassy in Devonshire Stre et and looked at thousands of transparencies through a light box. The Andes were in every picture, from the brittle landscape of t he Atacama desert to the sepulchral wastes of Tierra del Fuego. I took a slow train to Cambridge and watched footage of Chilean An tarctica in the offices of the British Antarctic Survey; the pilo ts, who came home during austral winters, told me stories about l eave in what they described as 'the Patagonian Wild West'. I was utterly beguiled by the shape of Chile (Jung would have said it was because I wanted to be long and thin myself). I wondered how a country twenty-five times longer than it is wide could possibly function. When I conducted a survey among friends and acquaintan ces I discovered that hardly anyone knew anything about Chile. Pi nochet always came up first ('Is he gone, or what?'), then they u sually groped around their memories and alighted on Costa-Gavras' film Missing. The third thing they thought of was wine; they all liked the wine. Most people knew it was a Spanish-speaking count ry. That was about it. Our collective ignorance appealed to my cu riosity. I told Salvador that my Spanish had gone rusty, and tha t anyway it was the Spanish spoken in Spain. 'Well, you must lea rn a new Spanish! Do you want everything to be easy?' Duly chast ened, I persuaded Linguaphone to sponsor the project by donating a Latin American Spanish course and shut myself away with it for three hours a day for the first month. One afternoon, at the lido , I surprised Salvador with it. You have to go and see for yours elf now,' he said. I left three months later, to the day. I was anxious that the trip should be a natural progression from one en d of the country to the other, but I was obliged to fly to Santia go, the capital, which was unhelpfully situated in the middle. ' Make it your base camp!' said an enthusiastic adviser, so I did. I had been invited, via a mutual friend in London, to stay with Simon Milner and Rowena Brown of the British Council. They met me at the airport, she sitting on the barrier and smiling, holding a sign with my name on, and as we walked together through the har shly lit hall and the automatic glass doors and into the soft, wa rm air, fragrant with bougainvillea, she put her arm around my sh oulder and her face close to mine and she said: Your Chile begin s here. Welcome.' Simon and Rowena were about my age, and had be en in Santiago for a year, living in a penthouse on the thirteent h floor of a well-kept block of flats set among manicured lawns a nd acacia trees in the north of the city. It wasn't really their style - I had the idea that they thought it was quite a joke - bu t it was clear that they loved their Chilean posting, and their e nthusiasm steadied my wobbling courage. I nurtured a sense of arr ival for a day or two, contemplating the Andes on one side and th e urban maw on the other from their spacious and safe balconies. When I did venture out I found a city discharging the usual inter national urban effluents - exhaust fumes to McDonald's hamburgers - though it had a delightful insouciance about it which was quin tessentially South American, and it was impossible to imagine I w as in Rome or Amsterdam or Chicago. I badly wanted to explore, bu t I was too impatient for the journey to begin; the city would wa it. I was going to save Santiago until its proper place, half-wa y down the country, so after two indolent days I bought a bus tic ket to the far north. The plan was to travel up to the Peruvian b order straightaway, in one leap, and then work my way south, leav ing the continent right at the bottom and crossing over to the sl ice of Antarctica claimed by Chile - though I had no idea how I w as going to do that. I was also determined to visit the small Chi lean archipelago called Juan Fernández, half-way down, four hundr ed miles out in the Pacific and the prison-home of the original R obinson Crusoe. I had two arrangements to meet up with people fro m London, one in the north, which would coincide with Christmas, and one in the south, and these I saw as punctuation marks on the journey. The only big decision I had made - to leave Santiago i mmediately - was almost instantly overturned. A South African pho tographer called Rhonda telephoned to say that she was working on a feature about a sex hotel for a London magazine and had been l et down by the journalist doing the words: could I step in? The s ubject was irresistible, though a bizarre introduction to the com plex and apparently paradoxical Catholic moral code, so I changed my ticket and stayed an extra day. Alongside the shifting sands of Santiago's public and private lives stands an institution of such permanence that it is difficult to imagine the city without it. Inscrutable and silent, its patrons anonymous but its service s widely appreciated, the Hotel Valdivia is the example par excel lence of what is inaccurately known as a love hotel, a concept in ured in Japan but perfected west of the Andes. Rhonda had made an appointment with the manager of the Valdivia at ten the next mor ning, and she told me that I would have to pose as her assistant, as the man had specified photographs only; he didn't want anybod y writing anything. She had only wheedled her way that far round him by promising she would never sell the pictures to any paper o r magazine within Chile. The hotel was disguised as a discreet p rivate mansion, and I was obliged to ask a man in a kiosk for dir ections. He winked at me, and leered a spooky leer. I met Rhonda in the street outside the hotel. She was about my age, was wearin g army fatigues, and she gave me an affectionate slap on the back . At ten o'clock exactly a young woman scuttled out of the hotel, sideways, like a cockroach, and hustled us in. 'We don't like p eople waiting in the street,' she said. 'It attracts attention.' She showed us into a small, windowless office where a man in his mid-thirties wearing a dark suit and a herbaceous tie stood up t o shake our hands and introduce himself as Señor Flores. He didn' t look like a sleazebag at all; I was disappointed. His hair was neatly parted, and he had frilled the edge of a silk hanky half a n inch above the lip of his breast pocket. He reminded me of an i nsurance salesman who used to live next door to us in Bristol. Th ere were two photographs of brightly dressed children and a smili ng wife on his desk, and four enthusiastically executed oil paint ings of rural scenes hanging behind him which I feared were his o wn work. A VDU stood on one side of the desk, and neatly stacked piles of paper on the other. ., Modern Library, 1999, 3<

2011, ISBN: 9780375753657

Modern Library. Very Good. 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches. Paperback. 1999. 336 pages. <br>Squeezed between a vast ocean and the longest moun tain range on earth, Chile is 2,600 miles long an… Mehr…

Modern Library. Very Good. 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches. Paperback. 1999. 336 pages. <br>Squeezed between a vast ocean and the longest moun tain range on earth, Chile is 2,600 miles long and never more tha n 110 miles wide--not a country that lends itself to maps, as Sar a Wheeler discovered when she traveled alone from the top to the bottom, from the driest desert in the world to the sepulchral was tes of Antarctica. Eloquent, astute, nimble with history and deft ly amusing, Travels in a Thin Country established Sara Wheeler as one of the very best travel writers in the world. Editorial Rev iews Review Notably well written, perceptive, lively and sympath etic. Sara Wheeler is very well worth reading. --Daily Telegraph She is a marvelous writer--funny, elegant and observant. As a tr aveling companion, Sara Wheeler is shrewd and amusing and likeabl e and well informed . . . not just a good but an outstanding trav el writer. --The Oldie Always lively and informative, sketching in the history with a light but sure touch . . . she admirably co nveys the mood of contemporary Chile. --The New Statesman A gift ed writer with a knack for discovering the unexpected . . . Ms. W heeler is a writer with attitude. --The Hindu From the Inside Fl ap Squeezed between a vast ocean and the longest mountain range o n earth, Chile is 2,600 miles long and never more than 110 miles wide--not a country that lends itself to maps, as Sara Wheeler di scovered when she traveled alone from the top to the bottom, from the driest desert in the world to the sepulchral wastes of Antar ctica. Eloquent, astute, nimble with history and deftly amusing, Travels in a Thin Country established Sara Wheeler as one of the very best travel writers in the world. From the Back Cover ween a vast ocean and the longest mountain range on earth, Chile is 2, 600 miles long and never more than 110 miles wide--not a country that lends itself to maps, as Sara Wheeler discovered when she tr aveled alone from the top to the bottom, from the driest desert i n the world to the sepulchral wastes of Antarctica. Eloquent, ast ute, nimble with history and deftly amusing, Travels in a Thin Co untry established Sara Wheeler as one of the very best travel wri ters in the world. About the Author Sara Wheeler is the author o f many books of biography and travel, including Access All Areas: Selected Writings 1990-2011 and Travels in a Thin Country: A Jou rney Through Chile. Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica was an international bestseller that The New York Times described as gr ipping, emotional and compelling, and The Magnetic North: Notes f rom the Arctic Circle was chosen as Book of the Year by Michael P alin and Will Self, among others. Wheeler lives in London. Excer pt. ® Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Noche, nieve y arena hacen la forma de mi delgada patria, todo el silencio está en su larga línea Night, snow, and sand make up th e form of my thin country all silence lies in its long line Pablo Neruda, from 'Descubridores de Chile' ('Discoverers of Chile'), 1950 I was sitting on the cracked flagstones of our lido and squ inting at the Hockney blue water, a novel with an uncreased spine at my side. It was an ordinary August afternoon in north London. A man with dark curly hair, toasted skin and only one front toot h laid his towel next to mine, and after a few minutes he asked m e if the water was as cold as usual. Later, the novel still unope ned, I learnt that he was Chilean, and that he had left not in th e political upheavals of the 1970s when everyone else had left, b ut in 1990; he had felt compelled to stay during the dictatorship , to do what he could, but once it was over he wanted space to br eathe. He came from the Azapa valley, one of the hottest places o n earth, yet he said he felt a bond as strong as iron with every Chilean he had ever met, even those from the brutally cold settle ments around the Beagle Channel over 2500 miles to the south. I told him that I had just finished writing a book about a Greek is land - I had posted the typescript off two days previously. I exp lained that I had lived in Greece, that I had studied ancient and modern Greek, and all that. The next day, at the lido, Salvador said: 'Why don't you write a book about my country now? I had wanted to go back to South America ever since I paddled a canoe u p the Amazon in 1985. The shape of the emaciated strip of land we st of the Andes in particular had caught my imagination, and I of ten found myself looking at it on the globe on my desk, tracing m y finger (it was thinner and longer than my finger) from an inch above the red line marking the Tropic of Capricorn down almost to the cold steel rod at the bottom axis. Chile took in the driest desert in the world, a glaciated archipelago of a thousand island s and most of the things you can imagine in between. After Salva dor had planted his idea, I sought out people who knew about the thin country. 'In Chile,' a Bolivian doctor told me, 'they used to have a saying, En Chile no pasa nada - nothing happens in Chil e.' He paused, and bit a fingernail. 'But I haven't heard it fo r a few years.' I went to the Chilean Embassy in Devonshire Stre et and looked at thousands of transparencies through a light box. The Andes were in every picture, from the brittle landscape of t he Atacama desert to the sepulchral wastes of Tierra del Fuego. I took a slow train to Cambridge and watched footage of Chilean An tarctica in the offices of the British Antarctic Survey; the pilo ts, who came home during austral winters, told me stories about l eave in what they described as 'the Patagonian Wild West'. I was utterly beguiled by the shape of Chile (Jung would have said it was because I wanted to be long and thin myself). I wondered how a country twenty-five times longer than it is wide could possibly function. When I conducted a survey among friends and acquaintan ces I discovered that hardly anyone knew anything about Chile. Pi nochet always came up first ('Is he gone, or what?'), then they u sually groped around their memories and alighted on Costa-Gavras' film Missing. The third thing they thought of was wine; they all liked the wine. Most people knew it was a Spanish-speaking count ry. That was about it. Our collective ignorance appealed to my cu riosity. I told Salvador that my Spanish had gone rusty, and tha t anyway it was the Spanish spoken in Spain. 'Well, you must lea rn a new Spanish! Do you want everything to be easy?' Duly chast ened, I persuaded Linguaphone to sponsor the project by donating a Latin American Spanish course and shut myself away with it for three hours a day for the first month. One afternoon, at the lido , I surprised Salvador with it. You have to go and see for yours elf now,' he said. I left three months later, to the day. I was anxious that the trip should be a natural progression from one en d of the country to the other, but I was obliged to fly to Santia go, the capital, which was unhelpfully situated in the middle. ' Make it your base camp!' said an enthusiastic adviser, so I did. I had been invited, via a mutual friend in London, to stay with Simon Milner and Rowena Brown of the British Council. They met me at the airport, she sitting on the barrier and smiling, holding a sign with my name on, and as we walked together through the har shly lit hall and the automatic glass doors and into the soft, wa rm air, fragrant with bougainvillea, she put her arm around my sh oulder and her face close to mine and she said: Your Chile begin s here. Welcome.' Simon and Rowena were about my age, and had be en in Santiago for a year, living in a penthouse on the thirteent h floor of a well-kept block of flats set among manicured lawns a nd acacia trees in the north of the city. It wasn't really their style - I had the idea that they thought it was quite a joke - bu t it was clear that they loved their Chilean posting, and their e nthusiasm steadied my wobbling courage. I nurtured a sense of arr ival for a day or two, contemplating the Andes on one side and th e urban maw on the other from their spacious and safe balconies. When I did venture out I found a city discharging the usual inter national urban effluents - exhaust fumes to McDonald's hamburgers - though it had a delightful insouciance about it which was quin tessentially South American, and it was impossible to imagine I w as in Rome or Amsterdam or Chicago. I badly wanted to explore, bu t I was too impatient for the journey to begin; the city would wa it. I was going to save Santiago until its proper place, half-wa y down the country, so after two indolent days I bought a bus tic ket to the far north. The plan was to travel up to the Peruvian b order straightaway, in one leap, and then work my way south, leav ing the continent right at the bottom and crossing over to the sl ice of Antarctica claimed by Chile - though I had no idea how I w as going to do that. I was also determined to visit the small Chi lean archipelago called Juan Fernández, half-way down, four hundr ed miles out in the Pacific and the prison-home of the original R obinson Crusoe. I had two arrangements to meet up with people fro m London, one in the north, which would coincide with Christmas, and one in the south, and these I saw as punctuation marks on the journey. The only big decision I had made - to leave Santiago i mmediately - was almost instantly overturned. A South African pho tographer called Rhonda telephoned to say that she was working on a feature about a sex hotel for a London magazine and had been l et down by the journalist doing the words: could I step in? The s ubject was irresistible, though a bizarre introduction to the com plex and apparently paradoxical Catholic moral code, so I changed my ticket and stayed an extra day. Alongside the shifting sands of Santiago's public and private lives stands an institution of such permanence that it is difficult to imagine the city without it. Inscrutable and silent, its patrons anonymous but its service s widely appreciated, the Hotel Valdivia is the example par excel lence of what is inaccurately known as a love hotel, a concept in ured in Japan but perfected west of the Andes. Rhonda had made an appointment with the manager of the Valdivia at ten the next mor ning, and she told me that I would have to pose as her assistant, as the man had specified photographs only; he didn't want anybod y writing anything. She had only wheedled her way that far round him by promising she would never sell the pictures to any paper o r magazine within Chile. The hotel was disguised as a discreet p rivate mansion, and I was obliged to ask a man in a kiosk for dir ections. He winked at me, and leered a spooky leer. I met Rhonda in the street outside the hotel. She was about my age, was wearin g army fatigues, and she gave me an affectionate slap on the back . At ten o'clock exactly a young woman scuttled out of the hotel, sideways, like a cockroach, and hustled us in. 'We don't like p eople waiting in the street,' she said. 'It attracts attention.' She showed us into a small, windowless office where a man in his mid-thirties wearing a dark suit and a herbaceous tie stood up t o shake our hands and introduce himself as Señor Flores. He didn' t look like a sleazebag at all; I was disappointed. His hair was neatly parted, and he had frilled the edge of a silk hanky half a n inch above the lip of his breast pocket. He reminded me of an i nsurance salesman who used to live next door to us in Bristol. Th ere were two photographs of brightly dressed children and a smili ng wife on his desk, and four enthusiastically executed oil paint ings of rural scenes hanging behind him which I feared were his o wn work. A VDU stood on one side of the desk, and neatly stacked piles of paper on the other. ., Modern Library, 1999, 3<