Kirjahaku

Echoing the experiences of Robert Louis Stevenson - who spent several years in the South Pacific - here is the story of a contemporary writer who lived in and came to love the Solomon Islands. Most unexpectedly, Will Randall, once a happy schoolteacher, found himself dispatched to a small village on a not very large island, far out in the vastness of the South Pacific. His mission (although he had hardly chosen to accept it): - to fulfil the dying wishes of the 'Commander' and help the local people set up a money-making community project. The Solomon Islands, islands lost in time - Solomon Time; these little gems of land scattered across the ocean, must be the last sanctuary on our shrivelled planet not yet overshadowed by the Golden Arches or encapsulated in a Coca-Cola bubble. Everyone has dreamed at some time of living on a desert island. Here is the unvarnished truth. Sharks, turtles, a band of unruly chickens, a cast of extraordinary characters, and a bird called the Spangled Drongo, accompany Will Randall through some of the most fascinating and certainly funniest scenes to be found in travel writing since Gerald Durrell.

While attempting to teach at an inner London comprehensive Will Randall is taken up by an elderly German woman who asks him to accompany her to India. Nothing ventured, he agrees and so begins a wonderful life-changing adventure. Set down in Puna (3 hours from Bombay) he begins work teaching English at a slum school. Most of the children are orphans or parentless (one lost his parents four years previously when his mother had let go of his hand at a railway station and he 'd boarded the wrong train ). When zamidars -slum barons - arrive and threaten to pull down the school Randall has to put on a fund-raising performance of the Indian epic The Ramayana in order to help the slum dwellers buy their own land. Meanwhile he's also been spotted by a Bollywood Director who persuades him to take the role of leading man in his new film. Will Randall is 'the teacher who travels' and, as in SOLOMON TIME, this is a funny and heart-warming account of how one man's enthusiasm and old-fashioned desire to do good have helped to preserve a community.

* A moving personal account of Africa's great success story, Botswana.

Writer, adventurer, ex-teacher and veteran of umpteen travel disasters, Will Randall has fallen off donkeys in Spain and out of canoes in the Solomon Islands, but none of this has prepared him for a disastrous season as a ski-bum with a posse of raucous, hard-drinking ex-students.Dismally unfashionable and hopeless at skiing, Randal finds that his stay in the charming Alpine backwater of mont St Bernard brings a whole host of new opportunities for domestic catastrophe, romantic rejection and public humiliation, including a stint as a chalet girl and an encounter with a Russian oligarch and his hair-raising entourage.Wry, self-deprecating and deliriously funny, ANOTHER LONG DAY ON THE PISTE is a rollercoaster of a travel adventure and essential apres-ski reading.

Who hasn't fantasized about dismantling his or her hassled, wired-up life for a simpler existence? Yet who among us has the will and opportunity to do it? The answer, of course, is very few. Will Randall, a young English schoolmaster, had such a chance -- and took it. He uprooted his conventional First World life and let himself be blown to one of the farthest and most beautiful corners of the earth, the Solomon Islands of the South Pacific. In the entertaining tradition of Bill Bryson's "In a Sunburned Country, " this is the story of "Solomon Time." From the first, it's an improbable journey. In a chance encounter on a rugby field, Randall meets a doddering old man known as "the Commander," who has retired to England after running a cocoa plantation in the South Pacific for thirty years. Six months later, the Commander dies and his will is read: he wants someone to travel to his beloved, long-missed island -- where his plantation has fallen into ruin -- and devise a way for the natives to support themselves. If successful, they might avoid poverty, build a new school, and even fend off the greedy developers circling their peaceful waters. It's a mission of noblesse oblige, yet possibly a fool's errand, too. Randall agrees to go. Spread across the Tropic of Capricorn, the Solomon Islands are not so much the Pacific archipelago that time forgot as the one that forgets time. Randall's new home is Mendali, a fishing village so remote it can be reached only by motorized canoe. But the people of the village, some with cheeks engraved with a rising sun, are welcoming, for they remember the Commander kindly, and still practice a pagan Anglicanism in a church he built for them in 1956. They sleep in houses made of leaves and live on fish of every sort, mud crabs, yams, ngali nuts, even the honeycomb of termites. Randall decides that the villagers could raise chickens, and they greet the idea with enthusiasm. But finding live chicken eggs in their watery world proves wildly difficult, and Randall must chase after the eggs over shark-infested seas and through jungles where strange characters reside, including a one-eyed dwarf and a tattooed lady. One couldn't imagine a better man than Will Randall to help the people of Mendali meet the twenty-first century on their own terms. But will he succeed? "Solomon Time" is a moving and witty account of one man's accidental adventure in paradise and is certain to enchant explorers and armchair travelers alike.

God v Afrike Uvlekatelnyj dokumentalnyj roman o prikljuchenijakh anglijskogo uchitelja, rabotavshego volonterom v odnoj iz shkol Botsvany. God v Okeanii Kogda u cheloveka est vse, chto daet emu tsivilizatsija, on ot presyschenija vdrug nachinaet iskat prikljuchenij. I togda ponimaet, chto glavnoe v zhizni poroj byvaet blizhe, chem kazhetsja. Avtor knigi, obladajuschij chisto anglijskim chuvstvom jumora, poznal na sebe ocharovanie Solomonova vremeni, no smog iz ego plotnoj nekolebimosti vynesti urok druzhby i predpriimchivosti.