10 Best Afghanistan Travel Guides Books

” A sumptuous whistle-stop tour of India’s diverse food ways. Maneet has penned a love letter to the best of Indian food.”–Padma Lakshmi, host and executive producer of Top Chef and Taste the Nation NAMED ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Food Network • Epicurious • Wired Explore the bold flavors, regional dishes, and stunning scenery of India with over 80 recipes from Chopped judge and James Beard Award-winning chef Maneet Chauhan. In Chaat, Maneet Chauhan explores India’s most iconic, delicious, and fun- to-eat foods coming from and inspired by her discoveries during an epic cross- country railway journey that brought her to local markets, street vendors, and the homes of family and friends. From simple roasted sweet potatoes with star fruit, lemon, and spices to a fragrant layered chicken biryani rice casserole, and the flakiest onion and egg stuffed flatbreads, these recipes are varied, colorful, and expressive. Maneet weaves in personal stories and remembrances as well as historical and cultural notes as she winds her way from North to South and East to West, sharing recipes like Goan Fried Shrimp Turnovers, Chicken Momo Dumplings from Guwahati in Assam, Hyderabad’s Spicy Pineapple Chaat, and Warm-Spiced Carrot and Semolina Pudding from Amritsar. With breathtaking photography and delectable recipes, Chaat is a celebration of the diversity of India’s food and people.

In January 2002 Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan-surviving by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers. By day he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers’ floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient past. Along the way Stewart met heroes and rogues, tribal elders and teenage soldiers, Taliban commanders and foreign-aid workers. He was also adopted by an unexpected companion-a retired fighting mastiff he named Babur in honor of Afghanistan’s first Mughal emperor, in whose footsteps the pair was following. Through these encounters-by turns touching, con-founding, surprising, and funny-Stewart makes tangible the forces of tradition, ideology, and allegiance that shape life in the map’s countless places in between.

Discover the tantalizing true stories behind your favorite colors. For example: Cleopatra used saffron–a source of the color yellow–for seduction. Extracted from an Afghan mine, the blue “ultramarine” paint used by Michelangelo was so expensive he couldn’t afford to buy it himself. Since ancient times, carmine red–still found in lipsticks and Cherry Coke today– has come from the blood of insects.

In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that “pendant off the ear of India, ” Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer.

THE GREATGAME: THE EPIC STORY BEHIND TODAY’S HEADLINES Peter Hopkirk’s spellbinding account of the great imperial struggle for supremacy in Central Asoa has been hailed as essential reading with that era’s legacy playing itself out today. The Great Game between Victorian Britain and Tsarist Russia was fought across desolate terrain from the Caucasus to China, over the lonely passes of the Parmirs and Karakorams, in the blazing Kerman and Helmund deserts, and through the caravan towns of the old Silk Road–both powers scrambling to control access to the riches of India and the East. When play first began, the frontiers of Russia and British India lay 2000 miles apart; by the end, this distance had shrunk to twenty miles at some points. Now, in the vacuum left by the disintegration of the Soviet Union, there is once again talk of Russian soldiers “dipping their toes in the Indian Ocean.” The Washington Post has said that “every story Peter Hopkirk touches is totally engrossing.” In this gripping narrative he recounts a breathtaking tale of espionage and treachery through the actual experiences of its colorful characters. Based on meticulous scholarship and on-the-spot research, this is the history at the core of today’s geopolitics.

First published in 1963, James A. Michener’s gripping chronicle of the social and political landscape of Afghanistan is more relevant now than ever. Combining fact with riveting adventure and intrigue, Michener follows a military man tasked, in the years after World War II, with a dangerous assignment: finding and returning a young American woman living in Afghanistan to her distraught family after she suddenly and mysteriously disappears. A timeless tale of love and emotional drama set against the backdrop of one of the most important countries in the world today, Caravans captures the tension of the postwar period, the sweep of Afghanistan’s remarkable history, and the inescapable allure of the past. Praise for Caravans “Brilliant . . . an extraordinary novel . . . The old nomadic trails across the mountains spring into existence.” — The New York Times “Romantic and adventurous . . . [Michener] has a wonderful empathy for the wild and free and an understanding of the reasons behind the kind of cruelty that goes with it.” — Newsday “Michener has done for Afghanistan what . . . his first [book] did for the South Pacific.” — The New York Herald Tribune

Gorgeously jaw-dropping, India has been beautifully redesigned with 32 additional pages of glorious photos shot by Eric Meola since India was first published. This revised and expanded version of Eric Meola’s 2008 India takes the reader on a journey through Mumbai, Rajasthan, Agra, Dungarpur, along desert roads, to the Ganges water’s edge, including spectacular ruins, the Taj Mahal, and the Festival of Elephants, capturing the spectacle and vibrant colors of these ancient regions. INDIA is rapidly becoming one of the pre-eminent leaders of the twenty-first century. For more than a decade, Eric Meola has returned repeatedly to India, photographing the people, temples, landscapes, architecture, celebrations, and art of this uniquely exuberant and incredibly diverse country. Meola’s journeys took him from the Himalayas and monasteries in the North to the temples of Tamil Nadu in the South, from the color and pageantry of Rajasthan in the West to the tea plantations of Darjeeling in the East. Over 200 photographs (edited from more than 25,000 images) will fill this beautifully printed, large-format book. The photographs will be accompanied by dozens of essays, stories, and poems by contemporary and classical Indian writers. Table of Contents INDIA: In Word & Image Photographs by Eric Meola Contents 19 Eric Meola My Private India 24 Bharati Mukherjee Introduction 29 Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children 34 I. Allan Sealy The Trotter-Nama 47 R. K. Narayan Ganga’s Story 52 R. K. Narayan The Ramayana 63 William Buck Mahabharata 67 R. K. Narayan Mr. Sampath–The Printer of Malgudi 71 Gita Mehta A River Sutra 83 Kiran Desai The Inheritance of Loss 86 Manil Suri The Death of Vishnu 94 R. K. Narayan The Guide 100 Ruth Prawer Jhabvala The Housewife 110 Jhumpa Lahiri Interpreter of Maladies 119 Thomas Byrom Dhammapada 120 Anita Desai Fasting, Feasting 129 Amit Chaudhuri A Strange and Sublime Address 132 Nirad C. Chaudhuri My Birthplace 136 R. K. Narayan The Dark Room 147 Nirad C. Chaudhuri My Birthplace 150 Kiran Desai Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard 163 Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children 169 Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee Days and Nights in Calcutta 178 Rabindranath Tagore Subha 182 Upamanyu Chatterjee English, August 185 Vikram Seth A Suitable Boy 190 Amit Chaudhuri A Strange and Sublime Address 194 Arundhati Roy The God of Small Things 198 Anita Desai Fasting, Feasting 203 O. V. Vijayan The River 211 Kamala Markandaya Nectar in a Sieve 214 Amit Chaudhuri Sandeep’s Visit 222 Gita Mehta A River Sutra 232 V. S. Naipaul An Area of Darkness 239 Manil Suri The Death of Vishnu 243 Ismat Chughtai The Wedding Shroud 246 Nirad C. Chaudhuri The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian 250 Nirad C. Chaudhuri My Birthplace 254 Anita Desai A Devoted Son 260 Kamala Markandaya Nectar in a Sieve —

But, if my hands were empty of honey, and pearls and gold, There were treasures far sweeter than honey, and marvelous things to be told. -Gulistan This is the true story of a young man’s epic bicycle journey from England to India. Traveling more than eight thousand miles, he encounters all manner of adventure, from the curious company of a butterfly in the wilds of Iran to the aftermath of a coup in Kandahar, Afghanistan–from navigating the foreign yet welcoming Muslim world, where he learns the basics of Islam, to the journey’s end in mystical India, where he arrives at an understanding of what it means to be free. William Spencer establishes himself as a writer to watch in his debut book, weaving masterful storytelling and cultural insights in a page-turning adventure.