Rory MacLean's uncle was a Soviet spy, his aunt a faded Austrian aristocrat. They lived in furious, frustrated retirement in a rambling house filled with animals in Potsdam, Prussia's Versailles. In their youth they stole secrets from Stalin and changed history. He visited them briefly as he passed through Berlin en route from the Baltic to the Black Sea. He was travelling along the line of the old Iron Curtain, writing about the Eastern European revolutions. But his aunt, a vivacious eccentric, would not be left behind. In her rattling Trabant, accompanied by her pet pig, they moved across the continent, following the threads of memory. Her remarkable East European relations - the angel of Prague, a Hungarian grave digger, a dying Romanian propagandist - help tie together the loose ends of her life. They picknicked at Auschwitz, they met Lenin's embalmer and they visited an improverished Czech town. This book is a documentary of their journey and a history of Eastern Europe. Its portrayal of subjugated peoples at a time of great change, of their fears of the past and hopes for the future, illustrates the icy comedy of human existence.

Stalin's nose: Across the face of Europe

MacLean, Rory

HarperCollins, Publishers

THE OATMEAL ARK - Across Canada by Water

Harper-collins Publishers

The farce of which Rory Maclean often clothes his narrative is metaphor for the much blacker and indeed surreal comedy of the Communist years.

Stalin's Nose: Across The Face Of Europe

London

Spine creased. Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.

The Oatmeal Ark: From the Western Isles to a Promised Sea

Travel

Canada

Flamingo

The oatmeal ark: Across Canada by water

Harpercollins

This expression of the pain of Burma uses novelistic techniques to weave together the patient endurance of its stricken inhabitants, together with their fragility and immense charm. Through his studies of the lives of the individual Burmese whom he encounters, the author makes us feel the weight of the regime under which they labour, from the girls who work on the building-sites under appallingly exploitative conditions to the drunken pirates who profit from the chaos.

Under the Dragon: Travels in a Betrayed Land

Asia

Harpercollins Pub, Ltd.

Used book in good condition, due to its age it could contain normal signs of use

Stalin's Nose : Across the Face of Europe

Europe

Rory Maclean had hoped to get through life without ever visiting Florida. Then one day the "Daily Mail" is delivered to his house by mistake. Twenty-four hours later he is in the land of Mickey Mouse, gull-wing Thunderbirds and eternal youth.

Next Exit Magic Kingdom: Florida Accidentally

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

On a windy afternoon in early spring Rory MacLean fell to earth in Anissari, a village surrounded by white mountains in an ancient corner of Crete. MacLean's mother had died only a few months earlier and he had been engulfed by grief. But an old desire had also taken hold to build and fly an aeroplane. And so he set off to the land where Daedalus and Icarus had made their maiden flight and settled in to days of eating lamb and drinking wine with his Cretan neighbours and, with their help, attempting to build a Woodhopper from scratch and make it fly.

Falling for Icarus : A Journey Among the Cretans

Penguin??Books

In the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of young Westerners, inspired by Kerouac and the Beatles, blazed the 'hippie trail' overland from Istanbul to Kathmandu in search of enlightenment and a bit of cheap dope. Since the Summer of Love, the countries that offered so much to these dreamers have confronted the full force of modernity and transformed from worlds of Western fantasy to political minefields. Through a landscape of breathtaking beauty Rory MacLean retraces the path of the once well-worn 'hippie trail' from Turkey to Iran, Afghanistan to Pakistan, India to Nepal, meeting trail veterans and locals on his way, and relives wide-eyed adventures as he witnesses a world of extraordinary and terrifying transformation.

Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India

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Books by MacLean, Rory