Jan Morris

A history of Venice from the earliest times - Crusades - Ships and navigation - Byzantine and Gothics - Humanism - Renaissance - Merchant shipping - Scuole.

In a near future United States where the subliminal power of television has been boosted to irresistible levels, Dodd Corely is a man increasingly at odds with the world. His live-in girlfriend, Sheila, is addicted to the popular Travels television station, which features 24-hour-a-day viewing of a hypnotically seductive sphere bouncing on an endless, surreal journey through a variety of unspoiled natural environments. His friend and fellow veteran of the South American War, Danny Marauder, has joined the Anarchists, a disreputable group dedicated to the overthrow of the established order. His best friend, Toby, is so busy watching the Travels station's #1 rival, Jesus TV--which has just announced the greatest live special in television history: the Second Coming of Jesus Christ--that he fails to notice his own daughter is pregnant . . . a crime punishable by sterilization in this overpopulated society.

"One hundred years ago, Trieste was the chief seaport of the entire Austro-Hungarian empire, but today many people have no idea where it is. This Italian city on the Adriatic, bordering the former Yugoslavia, has always tantalized Jan Morris with its moodiness and melancholy. She has chosen it as the subject of this, her final work, because it was the first city she knew as an adult - initially as a young soldier at the end of World War II, and later as an elderly woman. This is not only her last book, but in many ways her most complex as well, for Trieste has come to represent her own life with all its hopes, disillusionments, loves and memories.". "Jan Morris evokes Trieste's modern history - from the long period of wealth and stability under the Habsburgs, through the ambiguities of Fascism and the hardships of the Cold War. She has been going to Trieste for more than half a century and has come to see herself reflected in it: not just her interests and preoccupations - cities, empires, ships and animals - but her intimate convictions about such matters as patriotism, sex, civility and kindness. Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere is the culmination of a singular career."--BOOK JACKET.

Author writes about ten Canadian cities and towns, each representing a different aspect of this unique land and people.

In 1912, a young D.H. Lawrence traveled to northern Italy. He spent nearly a year on the shores of Lake Garda, lodged in elegantly decaying houses set amid lemon groves and surrounded by the fading life of traditional Italy. It was here that he wrote Sons and Lovers and here too that we see the early flowering of the prose that would come to define Lawrence' s oeuvre. This is a travel book unlike any other, where landscapes and people are backdrops to Lawrence s deeper wanderings into philosophy, life, nature, religion and the fate of man. With sensuous descriptions of late harvests, darkening days and the fragility of ancient traditions, Twilight in Italy is suffused with nostalgia and premonition. For, looming over the idyll of rural Italy are the arrival of the industrial age and the brewing storm of World War I; upheavals that would change the face of Europe forever."