Latitude Zero: Tales of the Equator
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.69 (738 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0786709014 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-03-18 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
A Good Read on the Road Daniel Graf For Latitude Zero, Gianni Guadalupi and Anthony Shugaar have put together a collection of short historical essays recounting the exploration of the equator. The accounts are organized somewhat chronologically. Following a brief introduction to the ancient folklore, the authors tell some. Denis Benchimol Minev said NICE TIDBITS OF HISTORY IN THE TROPICS. The tropics have always fascinated European explorers with tales of monsters and incredible nature. In this book, the authors tell the stories of a few handpicked explorers of the tropics.The stories are divided among continents:1. In South America, we have Orellana (first man down the . ilmk said Excellent. A thoroughly enjoyable collection of tales across the equator. Any historical 'travelogue' afficionado should read this. A quick glance at any globe and you might think: "well, there's not much landmass there, so there's bound to be a lot of seafaring tales". Not true. Confessionably, t
Yet the equator is a wholly imaginary construct, a human idea that has fascinated and challenged explorers for three thousand years—from the ancient Egyptian spice traders in search of the legendary land of Punt, to the fifteenth-century Portuguese who sought a route to the Indies, to the expeditions of Victorian naturalist Charles Darwin in the Galapagos Islands, off the Pacific coast of South America, at latitude zero. The mysterious source of the Nile and the enigma of the Congo’s swell, the perils of the Doldrums (“the living death in life” in Coleridge’s phrase) and the vicissitudes of El Nino, the quest for the lost Eden and the search for Eldorado, all fall within the compass of Guadalupi’s extraordinary volume. The equator—its location not only on the globe but also in the minds and exploits of navigators, travelers, poets, and dreamers since the dawn of civilization—is the magical thread on which the eminent Italian historian Gianni Guadalupi strings some of humankind’s most intriguing lore and most amazing adventures in this original and riveting intellectual history. So do the names of Columbus, Magellan, Don Lope de Aguirre, Sinbad the Sailor, Henry Stanley, Charles-Marie de la Condamine, and Dante Alighieri, who placed Purgatory on an island athwart the equator.. It extends 24,000 miles, farther and longer than an
From Publishers Weekly Several years ago, U.S. The names, places and histories are familiar (Sir Walter Raleigh and his failed trip to find the city of gold; Stanley and Livingston tromping through the African hinterland; Magellan's incomplete circumnavigation of the globe; the eruption of Krakatoa). More discouraging is their desire to uncover tales of the equator while operating under historically Western European assumptions. Illus. Of course, it was negative only according to the general belief that "the history of the world has almost always been written from a point of view situated around forty-five degrees latitude i.e., the Northern Hemisphere." Guadalupi (coauthor of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places) and Shugaar (translator of Niccolo's Smile) hope to unveil what has fascinated and often fri