I’m a geography professor and travel writer. I’ve been writing books about the planet’s hidden and overlooked corners for some years now. In a world where people often imagine that everywhere is known, mapped and probably under the gaze of a security camera, that might seem a tall order. In fact, the world is teeming with places that remain, resolutely, stubbornly, or just weirdly and literally, ‘off the map’. And you don’t have to go far to find them; they can often be found under your feet or just round the corner.
My latest book is The Age of Islands: In Search of New and Disappearing Islands (published in the USA and Canada as Elsewhere: A Journey into Our Age of Islands). I wrote it because something very peculiar is happening to islands. At the same time as they are disappearing because of sea-level rise, new ones are popping up. New islands are being designed and sculptured in fancy, outlandish shapes off numerous shores. I travelled the planet to find them. In China, Panama, and UEA I found extraordinary new maritime exclaves for the wealthy. I also found new islands being built as dumping grounds: repositories for the things we don’t want onshore, like airports and toxic waste. You can also read about my adventures trying to get to a new volcanic island in Tonga. It didn’t go well! I draw up maps of all these places, as well as some of the islands that are still on the drawing board and will be sprouting out of the sea over the coming decades.
All sorts of islands have been spotted from afar and printed on our maps, only to be revisited years later and found to be ephemeral or just plain delusions. This book is a historical survey of late nineteenth-century British and American attempts to verify islands and establish a final, accurate map of the world. It was an impossible task back then and it is even more challenging today, for islands are coming and going with increasing speed.
Hundreds of islands that once appeared on nautical charts and general atlases are now known to have vanished — or never even existed. How were they detected in the first place? Henry Stommel, an oceanographer and senior scientist at Massachusetts' Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, chronicles his fascinating research in documenting the false discoveries of these phantom islands. British and American Hydrographic Offices compiled lists for navigators of reported dangers corresponding to the islands' supposed locations, which formed the basis for Stommel's surveys. These tales, which unfold according to location, blend historical and geographic background with intriguing anecdotal material. They relate…
What an odd book this is and how appealing. It’s as much art as geography. Schalansky’s style is cool and dry: she maps her unvisited islands and writes a little account of each. One of her fifty is Banaba Island, sitting thousands of miles from anywhere in the middle of the Pacific. It’s somehow comforting and moving to see its bays and hills, to acknowledge its existence and just let it be.
Judith Schalansky was born in 1980 on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. The Soviets wouldn't let anyone travel so everything she learnt about the world came from her parents' battered old atlas. An acclaimed novelist and award-winning graphic designer, she has spent years creating this, her own imaginative atlas of the world's loneliest places. These islands are so difficult to reach that until the late 1990s more people had set foot on the moon than on Peter I Island in the Antarctic.
On one page are perfect maps, on the other unfold bizarre stories from the history of…
I recently reread The Island of Doctor Moreau and I’d forgotten how clever it is. Written in 1896 it looks forward to modern debates on genetics and what makes us human, all the while radically questioning the borderline between other species and us. All these ideas roam freely in a compulsive horror story, as freely as the island’s many bizarre beasts.
What would Swallows and Amazonsbe without its islands? As in so many other children’s stories, it’s the speck of sovereignty that is Wild Cat Island and Peel Island that holds the key to the book’s appeal. To be honest I always found it difficult to identify with John, Susan, or Titty but the charm of those islands, adult-free and claimable, needs no explanation.
The ultimate children's classic - long summer days filled with adventure.
John, Susan, Titty and Roger sail their boat, Swallow, to a deserted island for a summer camping trip. Exploring and playing sailors is an adventure in itself but the island holds more excitement in store. Two fierce Amazon pirates, Nancy and Peggy, challenge them to war and a summer of battles and alliances ensues.
'My childhood simply would not have been the same without this book. It created a whole world to explore, one that lasted long in the imagination after the final page had been read' - Marcus…
The reason why this book has been in print, pretty much since it first appeared in 1719, lies in its almost tedious detail. Defoe’s description of the daily chores, the sheer effort, of survival is believable and, hence, compelling. It’s also a story of religion, slavery, and, to modern eyes, blatant racism. Crusoe was captured and enslaved in North Africa, he escapes and eventually becomes a slave trader, and goes on to treat ‘Friday’ as his slave. These chilling facts are treated in the same matter-of-fact way that Defoe applies to collecting drinking water.
'Robinson Crusoe has a universal appeal, a story that goes right to the core of existence' Simon Armitage
Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, regarded by many to be first novel in English, is also the original tale of a castaway struggling to survive on a remote desert island.
The sole survivor of a shipwreck, Robinson Crusoe is washed up on a desert island. In his journal he chronicles his daily battle to stay alive, as he conquers isolation, fashions shelter and clothes, enlists the help of a native islander who he names 'Friday', and fights off cannibals and mutineers. Written in…
The Hunt for the Peggy C is best described as Casablanca meets Das Boot. It is about an American smuggler who struggles to rescue a Jewish family on his rusty cargo ship, outraging his mutinous crew of misfits and provoking a hair-raising chase by a brutal Nazi U-boat captain bent on revenge.
During the nerve-wracking 3,000-mile escape, Rogers falls in love with the family’s eldest daughter, Miriam, a sweet medical student with a militant streak. Everything seems hopeless when Jake is badly wounded, and Miriam must prove she’s as tough as her rhetoric to put down a mutiny by some of Jake’s fed-up crew–just as the U-boat closes in for the kill.
The Hunt for the Peggy C: A World War II Maritime Thriller
John Winn Miller's THE HUNT FOR THE PEGGY C, a semifinalist in the Clive Cussler Adventure Writers Competition, captures the breathless suspense of early World War II in the North Atlantic. Captain Jake Rogers, experienced in running his tramp steamer through U-boat-infested waters to transport vital supplies and contraband to the highest bidder, takes on his most dangerous cargo yet after witnessing the oppression of Jews in Amsterdam: a Jewish family fleeing Nazi persecution.
The normally aloof Rogers finds himself drawn in by the family's warmth and faith, but he can't afford to let his guard down when Oberleutnant Viktor…
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