Athens News Books





Title: Athens and Beyond: 30 Day Trips & Weekends
Author: Diana Farr Louis
Publisher: Athens News
Place and Date of Publication: Athens 2005
ISBN: 960-86395-3-0
Price: 15.00 Euros
Description: Softcover,
Availability: Order directly from Athens News at the URL
http://www.athensnews.gr/


"In the old days, even fifteen years ago, you had to be tough to venture into most of Greece's mountains. And I don't mean just to walk or hike amongst the glorious peaks or verdant upper pastures. Surviving the nights in a bleak, unheated room required even sterner stuff. We faced the nights with the help of a small potbellied stove and immoderate quantities of rough local wine. But these days one doesn't have to suffer. There are signs that a revolution is taking place in formerly remote mountain regions."

Whether in hot pursuit of a traditional festival in the mountains, a riveting fresco hidden in an Attican church, a new find coming to light in the archaeological sites of the Peloponnese, or even just a very good island wine -- Diana Farr Louis has been taking to the roads less traveled in Greece for the last thirty years and coming back to Athens with ever more stories, recipes, and a deep sense of what makes the country what is today.

In this collection of articles printed in the Athens News from 1997 to 2003, the paper's foremost travel columnist recounts her day trips around Athens and short weekends further afield, bringing together the history, mythology, cuisine and culture of each place with the ease of a local, and the eye for detail of a modern day Pausanias.

Athens and Beyond: 30 Day T rips & Weekends is divided by region into chapters on Athens and Attica, the Peloponnese and Central Greece, and nearby Islands. It also provides practical information, updated for this edition, such as restaurant and hotel recommendations, phone numbers and museum hours, leaving travelers to the thrill of the chase.

About the Author

Diana Farr Louis, a native New Yorker, has been living in Greece since the early 1970s. Author of Feasting and Fasting in Crete and co-author of Prospero’s Kitchen, Mediterranean Cooking of the Ionian Islands from Corfu to Kythera, she is also a regular contributor to the Athens News travel pages. The "Only the Best" guides to Corfu and Andros are also among her latest guidebooks.

To read an online review of Athens and Beyond: 30 Day Trips & Weekends, go to the URL http://cretanvista.gr/goodreading12.htm. Reviewer Ann Lisney summarizes her assessment: "I started reading as a skeptic, thinking this would be ‘just another guidebook’, and ended as a Diana Farr Louis fan, with exploring appetite thoroughly whetted and raring to go."





Title: Greece, Garden of the Gods
Author: Jennifer Gay
Publisher: Athens News
Place and Date of Publication: Athens News 2005
ISBN:
Price: 15.00 Euros
Description: Softcover
Availability: Order directly from Athens News at the URL
http://www.athensnews.gr/


Discover indigenous Greek species and the secrets of their survival.

"A spring day on a hillside in Greece is an unforgettable experience, with the warmth of the sun on your skin, a tapestry of colour beneath your feet and startling blue seas and skies stretching before you. How lovely it would be to capture that quintessential Greekness and transfer it to your own plot. . . whenever I begin to garden anywhere, one of the first things I consider is which plants grow naturally in that locality. . . and why. By taking note of those plants content in their place--either growing in the wild or in garden--I gather ideas about what could flourish. Greece has many plants that are excellent candidates for garden use."

This compact guide is a must-have for anyone trying to grow plants in Greece. Whether you are coaxing climbers out of pots on a balcony, or are carving a garden from several acres of rockly wilderness, this book offers invaluable advice. Find out how to deal with drought, pests, high winds, fire and soil erosion. You won't need a budget for artificial fertilisers and pesticides. This book teaches you how to compost, mulch and turn one pest against another.

Lavishly illustrated and clearly laid out, Greece: Garden of the Gods offers comprehensive advice on when, where and whether you should use a particular plant. It tells you how plants came to be named in Greek mythology. The final section offers a directly of Mediterranean climate species including trees, shrubs, bulbs, palms, perennials and succulents.

About the Author

Landscape designer and Athens News columnist Jennifer Gay draws on a decade of experience in the Mediterranean to show gardeners how to succeed in an environmentally friendly way.




Title: The Greek Economy 1940-2004
Author: Mark Dragoumis
Publisher: Athens News
Place and Date of Publication: Athens 2005
ISBN: 960-86395-6-5
Price: 9.00 Euros
Description: Softcover
Availability: Order directly from Athens News at the URL
http://www.athensnews.gr/


Greece’s economic history reflects the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that have bedevilled the country ever since it became independent in 1832. The road to development has been full of pitfalls such as coups, one fully fledged civil war, several Balkan wars, two World Wars, one devastating occupation, one global crisis, and two outright bankruptcies. These have endowed Greeks with a sense of insecurity of varying intensity. This has led to a deep-rooted conservatism in national economic planning and deep-seated protectionism on the part of industry and workers. The result is an inflexibility in the face of changing market demands that has, for many years, prevented liberalisation and reform.

About the Author

Mark Dragoumis has been observing Greek affairs both from inside the government and as a journalist since the 1940s. His informative and compelling account explains economic developments in the light of political ones.





Title: It's All Greek to Me
Author: John Mole
Publisher: Athens News
Place and Date of Publication: Athens 2005
ISBN:
Price:
Description: Softcover
Availability: Order directly from Athens News at the URL
http://www.athensnews.gr/






Title: It's All Greece to Me
Author: John F. L. Ross
Publisher: Athens News
Place and Date of Publication: Athens 2005
ISBN: 960-86395-0-6
Price: 9.00 Euros
Description: Softcover
Availability: Order directly from Athens News at the URL
http://www.athensnews.gr/

Greece is a country famed worldwide for its physical beauty, wealth of antiquities and other vestiges of its unsurpassed ancient civilisation. Yet despite over ten million annual visitors and an open and inviting culture, modern Greece is not an easy country for outsiders to understand or comprehend fully. Countless tourist guides extoll its resorts and archaeological tomes unravel its classical past, but there are few books that attempt to explore the many complexities of Greek life and lifestyles right here in the present.

Until now, that is, It's All Greece to Me: Impressions of Contemporary Greek Life, by longtime Athens News contributor John F.L. Ross, offers an accessible and dependable guide to the nooks and crannies of the modern Greek character, mentallity, customs and attitudes. It offers a sharp-eyed and challenging yet sympathetic look at the rapidly changing nature of contemporary Greece at the dawn of the new milleniium. Throughout, Ross writes with the clarity, gentle wit and perceptive insight that readers have come to expect from the author of the longrunning and popular Thursday column "On Second Thought."

About the Author

Dr. John F. L. Ross is an Athens-based writer and lecturer.




Title: Always on a Sunday
Author: Brian Church
Publisher: Athens News
Place and Date of Publication: Athens 2005
ISBN: 960-86395-2-2
Price: 9.00 Euros
Description: Softcover
Availability: Order directly from Athens News at the URL
http://www.athensnews.gr/


When friends ask about Greece, give them this book (or three bottles of ouzo).
  • Brian Church, author of Learn Greek in 25 Years, selects 30 memorable pieces from his Athens News column, "Church on Sunday".
  • Why do Greeks always argue yet never fight?
  • In which year will the 2004 Athens Olympics take place?
  • Why is reversing on a motorway illegal?
  • Where did hunger-strikers find themselves next to a world-record attempt at making the largest-ever profiterole?
    Answers in "Always on Sunday".

"Going home on the late-night bus, it slowly dawned on me that there were in fact two people sitting in the driver's seat."

About the Author

A columnist with the Athens News, Church was born in England, in 1965, and came to Greece several years ago. The politics graduate plans to leave in 2023 when his now famous lessons, published every Wednesday, have finally finished.




Title: Learn Greek in 25 Years
Author: Brian Church
Publisher: Athens News
Place and Date of Publication: Athens 2005
ISBN: 960-86395-1-4
Price: 9.00 Euros
Description: Softcover
Availability: Order directly from Athens News at the URL
http://www.athensnews.gr/


Perfect Greek by 2029. . . or your money back! (This offer doesn't apply to people who bought the book.)

Trying to learn Greek but finding it far too hard? Just arrived and wondering where your suitcase has gone? If you have tried, tried and tried again to learn Greek--and always failed miserably--then this is the book for you. In 25 humorous yet helpful lessons, Brian Church takes you through the minefields of modern Greek and gets blown up by every single one. Learn Greek in 25 Years helps the reader understand even less of this beautiful language. Each lesson ends with a helpful table of WORLD I REALLY MUST LEARN THOUGH I KNOW I WON'T.

"Unique. The author openly admits he doesn't speaki, write, read or even remotely recognise the language he's trying to teach. And yet, somehow, it works!"--Romol Gandolfo

About the Author

A columnist with the Athens News, Church was born in England, in 1965, and came to Greece several years ago. The politics graduate plans to leave in 2023 when his now famous lessons, published every Wednesday, have finally finished.




Title: Everyday Life in the Village
Author: Michael Saunders
Publisher:Athens News
Place and Date of Publication: Athens 2005
ISBN: 960-86395-8-1
Price: 9.00 Euros
Description: Softcover
Availability: Order directly from Athens News at the URL
http://www.athensnews.gr/

What does an urban British couple know about runaway turkeys, out-of-control egg production and the finer points of manure selection? Not much! But that doesn't stop Michael and Pauline from embarking on their harebrained dream of building a home, and a new life, in a Greek village.

About the Author

Michael Saunders has been writing a humorous column about everyday life in a remote village in Crete for the Athens News




HCS readers can view excellent articles by the Athens News in our extensive, permanent archives at the URL http://www.helleniccomserve.com./contents.html
. Readers enjoying these articles may wish to view other fine selections, browse the Athens News online bookstore, or subscribe to this weekly publication by visiting the website http://www.athensnews.gr.

All articles of
Athens News appearing on HCS have been reprinted with permission.




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