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Best of 2008
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READING AND TRAVEL GUIDE
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/SB11980. You may also call 800-342-2164 to order or request a catalog.
Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All
Christina Thompson
BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR
2009
PAPER
288 PAGES
In this endearing, offbeat memoir, Christina Thompson effortlessly alternates tales of mostly disastrous early encounters with the Maori (she's an anthropologist) and the story of the love of her life, Seven, the Maori she married. Her title is taken from what "Darwin said that Cook said the Maori's said at that interesting moment when Europeans first appeared." What probably actually transpired on that fateful day in 1769 at the Bay of Isles was more complex.
(NZL96, $16.00) |
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Apples are from Kazakhstan
Christopher Robbins
TRAVEL NARRATIVE
2010
PAPER
304 PAGES
Yes, apples do come from Kazakhstan. Tulips too. Christopher Robbins writes winningly of the country and its people in this rich cultural portrait of a remarkable country the size of Western Europe, sealed off from the world for the last 100 years by the Tsars and then Soviet Russia.
(CAS160, $15.00) |
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Twenty Chickens for a Saddle
Robyn Scott
BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR
2009
PAPER
464 PAGES
Haphazardly schooled by her free-spirited mother and left to roam the bush, Scott writes with warmth and candor of her unconventional upbringing in Botswana, including her Grandpa Ivor (personal pilot to the first president of Botswana), physician father's work, unfortunate pets, siblings and adventures.
(SAF203, $15.00) |
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A Wildlife Guide to Chile
Sharon Chester
FIELD GUIDE
2008
PAPER
392 PAGES
Sharon Chester, a talented lecturer and guide, hauled out expedition logs and field notes, consulted dozens of colleagues and spent many, many hours on hundreds of illustrations in this comprehensive guide to Chilean wildlife. From bats to butterflies, lizards to llamas, and ferns to flamingos this full-color, compact guide covers it all in detail.
(CHI77, $19.95) |
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Antarctica, Secrets of the Southern Continent
David McGonigal
NATURAL HISTORY
2008
HARD COVER
400 PAGES
Both a gorgeous photographic portrait and a comprehensive, up-to-date primer, this oversize, illustrated survey of Antarctic history, exploration, wildlife, science and conservation features 600 spectacular color photographs and terrific maps, many by the well-traveled colleague and Antarctic expedition leader David McGonigal, who also rounded up dozens of experts to contribute. It's got it all: geology, geography and climate, wildlife, exploration, science and Antarctica today. We especially like the detailed maps of Antarctic regions, including the Gerlache Strait, which highlight popular visitor sites.
(ANT167, $59.95) |
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The Fruit Hunters, A Story of Nature, Obsession, Commerce and Adventure
Adam Leith Gollner
SCIENCE
2008
HARD COVER
288 PAGES
The coco-de-mer, found only in the Seychelles, Asia's repugnant and coveted durian and all many exotic and wonderful fruits that you've never heard of take the starring role in this surprisingly juicy account of the history, pleasure and business of fruit. Admittedly addled, Gollner chronicles his travels all over the planet in search of Galangal, chempedak, salak, jambu, sapote, voavanga, farkleberry, ballion and other such marvels.
(NAT138, $25.00) |
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China, Portrait of a Country
Heung Shing Liu
HISTORY
2011
HARD COVER
424 PAGES
A sweeping portrait of China, its people and its history since 1949 as witnessed by China's most prominent photographers and edited by Pulitzer-winning photojournalist Liu Heung Shing. Accompanying text is by journalist James Kynge (China Shakes the World) and art historian Karen Smith.
(CHN525, $29.99) |
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Venice Is a Fish
Tiziano Scarpa
TRAVEL NARRATIVE
2009
PAPER
160 PAGES
The hugely popular Venetian novelist, poet and playwright makes his English-language debut with these marvelously digressive essays on the many moods and pleasures of La Serenissima. He appends a 40-page tribute to Venetian writers.
(ITL964, $12.00) |
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The Open Road, The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
Pico Iyer
CULTURAL PORTRAIT
2009
PAPER
288 PAGES
Travel writer Pico Iyer, who has known the Dalai Lama since his days as a graduate student in Britain, draws on his long association with the man and his ideas for this remarkable portrait of the Tibetan people and the aspirations of their leader. He includes chapters on daily life in Dharamsala, travels with the Dalai Lama and incisive commentary on the history and future of Tibet. A Best of 2008, this new paper edition is published to mark the 50th anniversary of the Dalai Lama's hair-rasing escape from Tibet over the Himalayas on March 10, 1959.
(TBT118, $14.95) |
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Long After Midnight at the Nino Bien
Brian Winter
TRAVEL NARRATIVE
2008
HARD COVER
336 PAGES
A journalist posted to the capital during the economic crisis, Winter captures the rhythms and character of Buenos Aires with fearless, profane wit in this wise and rollicking portrait.
(ARG80, $24.95) |
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Beyond the Great Wall
Jeffrey Alford
Naomi Duguid
FOOD
2008
HARD COVER
376 PAGES
The globe-trotting duo weaves their own tales of travel with contemporary politics, commentary, carefully documented recipes and stunning photographs for this sumptuous overview of the food and culture of Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Yunnan and other far-off regions of ethnically diverse China.
(CHN475, $40.00) |
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Sea of Poppies
Amitav Ghosh
LITERATURE
2009
PAPER
528 PAGES
Ghosh conjures the tumult of the 19th-century Opium Wars and colonial India in this gripping saga, featuring an unforgettable cast of characters, Indian, Chinese and British. First in a planned trilogy, this is the tale of the Ibis and its crew, en route to Mauritius.
(IDA529, $16.00) |
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Wolf Totem
Jiang Rong
LITERATURE
2009
PAPER
544 PAGES
Defiant, unyielding, feared, hunted and revered, the great Mongolian wolf is the heart and center of Jiang Rong's epic tale of a young man from Beijing and his encounters in this strange, ancient world on the Mongolian steppe. Winner of the first Man Asia Prize and hugely popular in China, it's a stirring epic, allegory and elegy for a vanished way of life with the emotional punch of Arseniev's Dersu the Trapper (SIB24, $16.00). Sent to Olonbulag in the 1969 during the cultural revolution, Rong spent ten year's living among the nomads of north-central Inner Mongolia.
(CHN471, $15.00) |
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Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC-AD 1000
Barry Cunliffe
HISTORY
2011
PAPER
520 PAGES
In this magnificent book, distinguished archaeologist Barry Cunliffe views Europe not in terms of states and shifting political land boundaries but as a geographical niche particularly favored in facing many seas. These seas, and Europe's great transpeninsular rivers, ensured a rich diversity of natural resources while also encouraging the dynamic interaction of peoples across networks of communication and exchange.
(EUR310, $30.00) |
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India, In Word and Image
Eric Meola
CULTURAL PORTRAIT
2008
HARD COVER
272 PAGES
Hopelessly attracted to the impossibly vivid colors and pageantry of India, Meola shows the diversity of people, culture and traditions in this gorgeous collection of photographs, deftly paired with quotations from Salman Rushdie, R. K. Narayan, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anita Desai and others celebrated authors.
(IDA540, $60.00) |
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Also Recommended
Made in France, A Shopper's Guide
Laura Morelli
GUIDEBOOK
Both a fascinating history of France's artisanal legacy and an insider's shopping guide, Made in France includes illustrations, maps, a primer on French shopping culture, and craft festivals.
(FRN706, $24.95) |
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Bhutan, Hidden Lands of Happiness
John Wehrheim
CULTURAL PORTRAIT
COMING IN
Wehrheim pairs black-and-white photographs of the people, monasteries, villages and festivals with stories, journal entries, teachings and lore in this striking, personal portrait of the Buddhist kingdom.
(BHU30, $65.00) |
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Horse Song, The Naadam of Mongolia
Ted Lewin
Betsy Lewin
CULTURAL PORTRAIT
FAMILY
Caldecott winners Ted and Betsy Lewin depict the splendor of the Naadam festival and the intricacies of Mongolian culture in this terrific, gorgeously illustrated account of their travels. Geared for children, enjoyable for the whole family.
(MGL61, $19.95) |
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A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World
Tony Horwitz
TRAVEL NARRATIVE
What happened in America after Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue? In this latest outing, Tony Horwitz (Blue Latitudes) takes us on a thrilling and eye-opening adventure in Pre-Mayflower America. It's not so much Roanoke, Jamestown and Plymouth that interest him (though they are included too), it's the places associated with forgotten explorers, many of them Spanish, like Erik the Red (Vinland gets the first chapter), Henry Hudson, Verrazano, De Soto, Cabeza de Vaca, Cortes and Balboa. Horwitz rescues whole chapters of early America from the dustbin of history in this rich mix of wit, scholarship and modern-day adventure.
(NAM51, $18.00) |
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Blood River, Retracing Stanley's Journey to Africa's Broken Heart
Tim Butcher
TRAVEL NARRATIVE
Correspondent for the Telegraph, Butcher retraces Stanley's 3,000-mile journey down the Congo in this harrowing, utterly absorbing and compassionate tale of hard travel through "the most daunting, backward country on earth."
(AFR228, $16.00) |
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China's First Emperor and His Terracotta Warriors
Frances Wood
BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR
Wood's astute biography -- enlivened with woodcuts, engravings, poetry and recipes from the period -- is a rich introduction to Emperor Qin Shihuangdi (258-210 BC) and his times.
(CHN492, $24.95) |
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State by State
Matt Weiland
Sean Wilsey
TRAVEL NARRATIVE
With chapters by Rick Moody (Connecticut), Jhumpa Lahiri (Rhode Island) and Jonathan Franzen (New York), this inspired book, modeled after the WPA-era American Guides, pairs a writer with each of the 50 states. It's an irresistible tribute to the diversity of the country.
(USA325, $16.99) |
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The Ancient Shore
Shirley Hazzard
TRAVEL NARRATIVE
Hazzard's lyrical collection of essays on the history, beauty, complexities and contradictions of Naples. Includes a celebrated New Yorker essay by husband Francis Steegmuller.
(ITL967, $18.00) |
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The Eaves of Heaven, A Life in Three Wars
Andrew X. Pham
BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR
Pham recounts the story of his father's life during the French occupation, Japanese invasion and the American War, weaving such momentous events with anecdotes from his childhood and details of family, friends, food and daily life.
(VNM120, $16.00) |
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The Geography of Bliss, One Grump's Search For the Happiest Places in the World
Eric Weiner
TRAVEL NARRATIVE
NPR corespondent Weiner's hilarious, well-informed and surprisingly profound tale of a quest in search of what makes us happy.
(GEN430, $13.99) |
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The Great Wall, The Extraordinary Story of China's Wonder of the World
John Man
TRAVEL NARRATIVE
Off he went, across China and Mongolia, in search of the wall of history and legend, not continuous, built over millennia, in many places a faint hill or rammed earth, not necessarily a wall at all.
(CHN533, $16.95) |
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The Last Days of Old Beijing, Tales from the New City
Michael Meyer
BIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR
Meyer's lovely memoir of the hutong (ancient lane), where he taught school, captures the rhythms, traditions and spirit of the alleyways, gardens and courtyard houses of Beijing's traditional neighborhoods south of Tiananmen.
(CHN493, $16.00) |
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Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black
Nadine Gordimer
LITERATURE
The Nobel Prize winner daringly explores racial identity, sexuality and loss in this latest, marvelous collection of South African tales.
(SAF221, $14.00) |
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Breath
Tim Winton
LITERATURE
Tim Winton evokes the sea and the thrill of surfing in this emotionally complex tale of coming-of-age in western Australia in the 1970s.
(AUS218, $14.00) |
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China, A Traveler's Literary Companion
Kirk Denton
ANTHOLOGY
An introduction both to China's finest modern writers and its diverse cultures, concerns and landscapes, organized geographically.
(CHN520, $14.95) |
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City of Thieves
David Benioff
LITERATURE
David Benioff (screenwriter for The Kite Runner and Wolverine) turns his grandfather's stories of surviving the infamous Siege of Leningrad into a wise and touching novel of coming of age that's hard to put down. Seventeen-year-old Lev and his charismatic buddy Koly are sent out by their German captors to bring back a dozen eggs, just the start of a gripping odyssey.
(RUS380, $15.00) |
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Everything but the Squeal
John Barlow
LITERATURE
Barlow, his wife (from Galicia but a vegetarian) and young son gallavant from roadhouse to fine dining establishments, villages and cities in this endearingly offhand, loving account of travels in honor of pork. A delightful, witty guide to the traditions, culinary and otherwise, of the region.
(SPN368, $25.00) |
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Fine Just the Way It Is, Wyoming Stories 3
Annie Proulx
LITERATURE
A collection of visceral, often heartbreaking stories about life in the arid West by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Proulx, aurhor of Close Range, Bad Dirt and The Shipping News.
(USW569, $15.00) |
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How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone
Sasa Stanisic
LITERATURE
Stanisic's powerful, vivid novel shows the calamity of war in the Balkans through the eyes of a young Bosnian refugee from Visegrad.
(BOS32, $14.00) |
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In the Land of No Right Angles
Daphne Beal
LITERATURE
Beal evokes the grit of Kathmandu and the emotional intricacies of trying to do good in the world in this tale of a young American student abroad, an older expat and a young village woman whose life they change forever.
(NPL60, $13.95) |
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Lush Life
Richard Price
LITERATURE
With an ear for dialogue and feel for the nuances of class and race. Richard Price brilliantly explores the reverberations of the murder of a hipster on the Lower East Side.
(NYC203, $15.00) |
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People of the Book
Geraldine Brooks
LITERATURE
March turns the tale of a real book, the Sarajevo Haggadah, hidden from the Nazi's and safely ensconced in a bank vault as the national library burned in 1992, into a exhilarating modern novel, with an Australian conservator -- and mystery -- at its center.
(EUR284, $16.00) |
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Shadow Country
Peter Matthiessen
LITERATURE
Matthiessen returns to his tale of Florida sugarcane farmer and murderer Edgar J. Watson in this National Book Award winner, a reprise of his classic trilogy: Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man's River and Bone by Bone.
(FLA72, $17.00) |
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Telex from Cuba
Rachel Kushner
LITERATURE
Kushner re-imagines the world of her mother in this astonishingly wise first novel set in the American enclave in 1950s Cuba. Riveting.
(CBA111, $16.00) |
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The Adventures of Amir Hamza
Ghalib Lakhnavi
Musharraf Ali Farooqi
LITERATURE
A deft new translation of the rip-roaring tales of the storied life and fabulous exploits of the Prophet Mohammed's uncle Hamza and his heroic encounters with emperors, merchants, viziers, courtesans, warriors and magical beings.
(IDA391, $18.00) |
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The Lazarus Project
Aleksandar Hemon
LITERATURE
A tale historical sweep, contemporary insight and dazzling originality, cutting between events in Chicago in 1908 and the Balkans of today.
(BLK128, $16.00) |
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The Reserve
Russell Banks
LITERATURE
Bank's absorbing tale of class, politics, family and lunacy set in the Adirondacks in the 1930s.
(NYS69, $24.95) |
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The Secret Scripture
Sebastian Barry
LITERATURE
Barry, a noted playwright, evokes the sweep of 20th-Century Irish history in this gorgeously written tale of Roseanne McNulty, a very old woman shuttered in a Roscommon asylum.
(IRE246, $15.00) |
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The Size of the World
Joan Silber
LITERATURE
Drawing on her travels in Asia, Joan Silber brings a depth of experience to her richly imagined tales -- set in wartime Vietnam, Thailand and Florida in the 1920s, Mexico, WWII Sicily and present-day Indiana. She deftly illuminates the difficulty of finding one's place in the world in just 300 heartfelt pages.
(WLD143, $14.95) |
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The Wasted Vigil
Nadeem Aslam
LITERATURE
Calm, richly told written, this beautiful novel shows the reality of war-torn Afghanistan through the interlocking lives of five people in the wake of 9/11.
(CAS167, $25.00) |
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The White Mary
Kira Salak
LITERATURE
Set in the remote jungles of New Guinea's interior, Salak's first novel -- the tale of a young reporter searching for a colleague -- captures the thrill and uncertainty of adventure.
(PNG25, $14.00) |
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The White Tiger, A Novel
Aravind Adiga
LITERATURE
Mordant, funny, angry, horrifying, this Booker Prize-winning tale of a village pauper turned success (and murderer) skewers the ambition, inequity and corruption of 21st-century India.
(IDA542, $15.00) |
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Unaccustomed Earth
Jhumpa Lahiri
LITERATURE
The least three stories in this luminous collection by the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the Interpreter of Maladies, many set in Southeast Asia, form an intricate love story -- a couple who met as children are separated and then reunited by destiny.
(WLD139, $15.00) |
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Albatross: Their World, Their Ways
Tui De Roy
Mark Jones
Julian Fitter
NATURAL HISTORY
The culmination of a storied career at sea as roving naturalist-photographers, this remarkable collection of 300 photographs of the ocean wanderers, both at sea and on the nest, is not just beautiful. It's also an authoritative survey of the natural history, status and conservation of the world's Diomedeidae. Anyone who has tried to photograph these magnificent birds in flight will appreciate the art, experience and perseverance of De Roy, Jones and Fitter.
(BRD64, $49.95) |
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Nature of the Rainforest, Costa Rica and Beyond
Adrian Forsyth
E.O. Wilson
Michael Fogden
NATURAL HISTORY
Our favorite biologist-writer returns to the Neotropics in this beautifully illustrated, oversized overview of the rain forest. With chapters on Monteverde and Guanacaste, plants, frogs and snakes, birds, monkeys and jaguars, the sloth, peculiar insects and biodioversity, the book is a marvelous, anecdotal introduction to ecology, evolution and conservation.
(CRC67, $29.95) |
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The Antarctic From the Circle to the Pole
Stuart Klipper
NATURAL HISTORY
Make room in your library for this exceptional book of Antarctic photography by National Science Foundation five-time grantee Stuart Klipper. The 110 large color photographs, beautifully bound in sturdy white covers, display Klipper's talent in translating scenery into art. With an introduction by Guy Guthridge, a marvelous essay on the transformation of ice into art by Stephen J. Pyne and a biographical essay on Klipper and his work by William L. Fox. Fond of panoramas, Klipper works with a 110-degree Technorama camera.
(ANT282, $45.00) |
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The Rainforest, Light and Spirit
Harry Holcroft
Ghillean Prance
NATURAL HISTORY
One in a series of beautifully illustrated journals featuring exquisite watercolor paintings.
(NAT160, $65.00) |
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Thousand-Mile Song
David Rothenberg
NATURAL HISTORY
Musician-naturalist Rothenberg jams with cetaceans from the Caribbean to the Arctic in this exuberant chronicle of the rich underwater universe of whales. Audio CD included.
(NAT144, $18.00) |
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Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America
Roger Tory Peterson
FIELD GUIDE
This revised combo edition of Peterson's classic field guides, published in celebration of the centennial of his birth, includes all new maps and digital enhancements to the master's original paintings.
(NAM42, $26.00) |
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