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Book Review: The Innocent Anthropologist – Notes from a Mud Hut by Nigel Barley

The Innocent Anthropologist - Notes from a Mud Hut by Nigel Barley

The Innocent Anthropologist – Notes from a Mud Hut by Nigel Barley

This book was sent to me as a review copy.

The Innocent Anthropologist is a cultural dive into the deep end.

Written in the early 1980s by anthropologist Nigel Barley, it describes the author’s first attempt at fieldwork in Africa. The result, built around us and others, is shocking and funny, and bashed about with the perils of first hand observation. Continue reading

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Book Review: Hunting Mr Heartbreak – A Discovery of America by Jonathan Raban

Hunting Mr Heartbreak - A Discovery of America by Jonathan Raban

Hunting Mr Heartbreak – A Discovery of America by Jonathan Raban

A few weeks back I “took ship” in Liverpool, and headed off to find America with the English author Jonathan Raban.

It was pure pleasure – page after page of portrait and insight.

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Book Review: Forgotten Kingdom – Nine Years in Yunnan, 1939-1948 by Peter Goullart

Forgotten Kingdom - Nine Years in Yunnan, 1939-48 by Peter Goullart

Forgotten Kingdom – Nine Years in Yunnan, 1939-48 by Peter Goullart

This is a travel book that unfurls like a lotus flower. It has happiness at its heart but is grown out of hardship in the steep-sided valleys of south-western China.

The decade is the 1940s and the location is the province of Yunnan, geographically cut apart from the rest of China and still webbed with tribes, traditions and traders.

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