David Zurick

A full-color photographic journey around the Great Lakes Locals affectionately call the Great Lakes the “third coast”—though at 4,500 miles, this beloved freshwater shoreline is the nation’s longest, covering more distance than the country’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts combined. Divided into four galleries by lake and season, David Zurick’s award-winning photographs spotlight the distinct personality of each coastline and the people who call its shores home. We visit windswept Lake Superior in winter, Lake Michigan bursting into spring, Lakes Erie and Ontario under the summer sun, and Lake Huron in the changing palette of autumn, with an additional gallery devoted to the straits and rivers that connect them. An evocative foreword from award-winning nature writer Jerry Dennis sets the stage for this sweeping visual tour. In Zurick’s photographs, lifelong lovers of the Great Lakes will find the familiar shorelines of coastal hometowns, summer refuges, and secret fishing spots—as well as images that reawaken us to the majesty and mystery of North America’s “freshwater seas.”

In the 1970s many thousands of young persons travelled from Europe to Asia on the Hippie Trail in search of adventure, spiritual enlightenment, and personal discovery. Their sprawling, free-wheeling escapades changed their lives and the places they visited. While the overland route between Amsterdam and Kathmandu no longer exists, its stopovers in India — Pushkar, Rishikesh, Hampi, Goa, and the Pushkar Valley — continue to attract counterculture travelers from throughout the world. And just as the visitors have absorbed experiences and material culture, even spiritual wisdom, from their Indian hosts, so, too, have local residents learned a thing or two from their hippie guests. During the past half century, an intense cultural intermingling has taken place in these distant locales, where lifeways, architectures, and philosophies are exchanged as freely as costumes, music, and hairstyles. This photographic book, the first of its kind, vividly captures the beguiling love affair between East and West in its portrayal of modern-day India and the free-spirited people who travel or reside there — Westerners and Indians, alike. Acclaimed essayist and travel writer Pico Iyer wrote the book foreword entitled “The Long Strange Trip.”

The expansive blues of the water, lush greens of the vegetation, and bright shades of a rich and active cultural life make David Zurick's images in this collection a visual feast. His Polynesia photographs extol the marvels of a magnificent part of the globe and bring to light questions about the future of the islands. Tourism, resources, and politics all play key roles in oceanic society, as do the resiliency of traditional culture and the many generations of accumulated knowledge. The Polynesians face a daunting task: to look to the past for strength and wisdom but to the future for opportunities, and to do so without unduly sacrificing cultural heritages and natural settings. Zurick's imagery speaks for the globe at this important time, cautioning us to stay informed, witness the boundless beauty of our planet, and respect change that is inevitable while guarding against that which is destructive and exploitative.

This book tells the story of the painted towns of Shekhawati in rural Rajasthan, India. For centuries, the painted buildings served the towns as trading houses, pleasure palaces, temples, caravansaries, and private homes. Following independence, the descendants of the merchant families left Shekhawati for India's burgeoning cities, abandoning their opulent structures. Some were left in the charge of caretakers; squatters took up residence in many; most simply remain vacant. The buildings have slowly deteriorated over time, ravaged by climate and neglect, and now lie scattered among the desert settlements as an elegiac collection of beautiful living ruins--a crumbling open-air gallery set amid the ordinary affairs of small town life. This book portrays the fascinating ruinous beauty of the painted towns, and, along the way, provides an intimate look at life and landscape on the arid fringes of Rajasthan. This world, too, is fading, and so the book's photographs, in the end, are a visual study of both place and society at the edge of time.

The landscapes of Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan are filled with holy places. Some are of natural origin -- summits, rivers and lakes, caves, or forest sanctuaries. Others are consecrated by religious practice -- shrines, temples, monasteries, or burial grounds. The holy sites of the Himalaya unite faith and geography to produce some of the most sublime places on Earth. In Land of Pure Vision, David Zurick draws from his thirty-five years of experience as a geographer, photographer, and explorer of the Himalaya, combining scholarship and art to capture divine landscapes undergoing profound change. The stunning photographs featured in this volume cover the full geographical reach of the region, from the high plateaus of the western Himalaya to the rugged gorges of Tibet's eastern borderlands, from the icy summits of the north to the subtropical southern foothills. Some sites exist in isolation, with intact natural environments and cultural monuments. Others display the tension between the ancient, sacred character of a place and the indifferent course of the modern world. Land of Pure Vision explores how the religious practices of Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism, and shamanism interweave holy sites into a cohesive landscape of transcendent beauty and inspiration. It portrays a world of mystery, magic, and beauty, where the human spirit is in synchronicity with natural forces. Beyond elegy, this beautifully illustrated book is a visual ethnography of people and place.

The Himalaya inspire the notion of Shangri-la and are world renowned for their exquisite mountain scenery and the ancient cultures that tenaciously inhabit this harsh and sublime landscape. Home to all fourteen of the world's highest peaks, including Mount Everest, and some of its deepest gorges, the region is a trove of biological and cultural diversity. A sweeping overview of the geography, economics, politics, and culture of this spectacular region, the Illustrated Atlas of the Himalaya is the first full-color, comprehensive atlas of contemporary land and life in the Earth's highest mountains. Drawing from the authors' twenty-five years of scholarship and personal experience in the region, the volume contains a stunning and unique collection of informative maps based on state-of-the-art cartography, exquisite photography, and compelling text to give accurate coverage of the Himalaya. The entire 2,700-kilometer length of the range is covered, from the Indus Valley in northern Pakistan and India, across Nepal and Bhutan, to the hidden realms of northeast India. With over 300 artfully produced four-color maps and photographs, the Illustrated Atlas of the Himalaya is an indispensable reference and a superb collector's volume for anyone interested in the vast mountain panorama that is the Himalaya.

Tourism is becoming one of the world's most important economic activities. There is hardly a place on earth, no matter how inaccessible, that has not been visited by some traveler seeking adventure, enlightenment, or simply change from the familiar world back home.In this pathfinding book, David Zurick explores the fastest-growing segment of the travel industry-adventure travel. He raises important questions about what constitutes the travel experience and shows how the modern adventure industry has commercialized the very notion of adventure by packaging it as tours.Drawing on two decades of personal travel, as well as the writings of others, Zurick unravels the paradox of adventure travel-that the very act of visiting remote places untouched by Western culture introduces that culture and begins irreversible changes. This first in-depth look at adventure travel opens new insights into the physical, philosophical, and spiritual attributes of the travel experience. Written in a lively style, the book is intended for everyone interested in travel and its effects on both travelers and the people and places they visit.