Here's a page from Longitude, the specialty bookseller for travelers. To order online, and to see the latest, most comprehensive selection of books and maps, go to http://reading.longitudebooks.com/WT11428. You may also call 800-342-2164 to order or request a catalog.

La Bella Lingua  •  Dianne Hales TRAVEL NARRATIVE •  2010 •  PAPER  • 336 PAGES • NEW Hales, "a sensible woman of sturdy Polish stock," writes with verve and humor of her journey into the Italian of the piazze, literature, movies and streets in this charming memoir, travelogue and cultural primer. Brava, Signora! A Longitude Best of 2009. (ITA26, $15.00)
Madre, Perilous Journeys With a Spanish Noun  •  Liza Bakewell HISTORY •  2012 •  PAPER  • 224 PAGES An anthropologist with an interest in language and gender, Bakewell collects the manifold, culturally fraught uses of the word madre (mother) throughout her many journeys in Mexico, organizing her musings into chapters cleverly titled Love, Mixed Messages, Food Fight, Lost in Los, Sounding it Out, Explaining What Happened and Looking Back. (MEX285, $23.95)
Dreaming in Chinese, Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language  •  Deborah Fallows BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR •  2011 •  PAPER  • 208 PAGES Deborah Fallows has spent much of her life learning languages and traveling around the world. But nothing prepared her for the surprises of learning Mandarin, China's most common language, or the intensity of living in Shanghai and Beijing. Over time, she realized that her struggles and triumphs in studying the language of her adopted home provided small clues to deciphering the behavior and habits of its people and its culture's conundrums. As her skill with Mandarin increased, bits of the language--a word, a phrase, an oddity of grammar--became windows into understanding romance, humor, protocol, relationships and the overflowing humanity of modern China. (CHN648, $13.00)
Don't Get Me Wrong, The Global Gestures Guide  •  Judith Reker  •  Julia Grosse GUIDEBOOK •  2010 •  PAPER A raised thumb, cupped fingers or a rised pinky might mean very different things, depending on the culture. Two roving journalists colected hundrds of examples for this photguide to digital communication. (WLD214, $14.95)
Dreaming in Hindi, Coming Awake in Another Language  •  Katherine Russell Rich BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR •  2010 •  PAPER  • 384 PAGES • NEW Katherine Russell Rich skewers the hilarity and challenges of taking on not just a new language but a new culture in this spirited tale of life in Udaipur. A fine writer with a devilish wit, she thanks "all the bank clerks, restaurant personnel, cybercafe owners and rickshaw drivers who, unbidden, jumped in to fine-tune my Hindi every time I turned around and who, in the process, made me love the country even more than I already did." (IDA565, $14.95)
Grammar Lessons  •  Michele Morano TRAVEL NARRATIVE •  2007 •  HARD COVER  • 184 PAGES Morano, who lived in Oviedo in the early 1990s, reflects on the humor and trials of living in a new language in these 13 essays on travel in Spain and search for self. (SPN345, $22.50)
Untangling My Chopsticks, A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto  •  Victoria Abbott Riccardi TRAVEL NARRATIVE •  2004 •  PAPER  • 304 PAGES The appetizing memoir of Victoria Abbott Riccardi's experiences in Kyoto, where she studied the ancient culinary art of kaiseki, the ritual which precedes the Japanese tea ceremony. Riccardi writes with a good-natured humor that could only come from someone who has fought the uphill battle of learning the local language from scratch, and a wide-eyed appreciation for all that she learned about Japanese culture, history, and, of course, food. She includes 25 recipes for traditional and less traditional Japanese dishes. (JPN135, $19.00)

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