Thoreau writes ten essays about the relationship between the shore and the sea.

They had been there often as tourists. They had cherished the dream of someday living all year under the Provencal sun. And suddenly it happened. Here is the month-by month account of the charms and frustrations that Peter Mayle and his wife -- and their two large dogs -- experience their first year in the remote country of the Luberon restoring a two-centuries-old stone farmhouse that they bought on sight. From coping in January with the first mistral,...

At once a romantic history of the mighty Mississippi River, an autobiographical account of Twain's early steamboat days, and a storehouse of anecdotes and sketches, this stirring account of America's vanished past is the raw material from which Twain wrote his finest novel--"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". A new introduction is provided by Twain biographer, Justin Kaplan.

A fascinating tale of the French wine trade from Peter Mayle, the enchanting chronicler of the Provencal ex-pat life.

Having settled in Provence, France, the author describes simple events in his life, such as sneaking through customs with expensive truffles, attending a Pavarotti concert, finding two coins in his garden and enjoying his fiftieth birthday.

A true account of one woman's quest to move a vacation cottage across Cape Cod to create a home, and the people, complications, and self-discoveries she encountered along the way.
When Kate Whouley saw the classified ad for an abandoned vacation cottage, she began to dream: Transport the cottage through four Cape Cod towns. Attach it to my three-room house. Create more space for my work and life. Smart, single, and self-employed, Kate was...

"When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed a property listing for a grand estate that had been unoccupied for nearly sixty years, he stumbled into one of the most surprising American stories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Empty Mansions is a rich tale of wealth and loss, complete with copper barons, Gilded Age opulence, and backdoor politics. At its heart is a reclusive 104-year-old heiress named Huguette Clark. Dedman...

Dinesen, whose real name is Karen Blixen, tells her story of the 17 years she ran a coffee farm in Kenya, Africa.

Fernando first sees Marlena across the Piazza San Marco and falls in love from afar. When he sees her again in a Venice café a year later, he knows it is fate. He knows little English; she, a divorced American chef traveling through Italy, speaks only food-based Italian. Marlena thought she was done with romantic love, incapable of intimacy. Yet within months of their first meeting, she has quit her job, sold her house in St. Louis, kissed her two...

When South African conservationist Lawrence Anthony was asked to accept a herd of "rogue" wild elephants on his Thula Thula game reserve in Zululand, his common sense told him to refuse. But he was the herd's last chance of survival: they would be killed if he wouldn't take them. In order to save their lives, Anthony took them in. In the years that followed, he became a part of their family. And as he battled to create a bond with the elephants, he...