An author, foreign correspondent, academic, and television personality, Roger Willemsen is a familiar figure in Germany, and The Ends of the Earth offers English-language readers a chance to engage with his uniquely astute take on the world. Consisting of twenty-two essays recounting and reflecting on a lifetime of travel to the far and forgotten corners of our planet, the book offers remarkable encounters and mysterious entanglements in locations as diverse as a Kamchatkan volcano, a Burmese railway station, an Arctic icebreaker, and a Minsk hospital ward. Willemsen is the perfect companion, reveling in the strange and unlovely, and tracing unexpected connections among places, times, and peoples.
"Brilliant. . . . We go from Gibraltar to Iceland, from Minsk to Patagonia, to Timbuktu and Bombay, the Kamchatka Peninsula and Mandalay. . . . Every episode is a drama with the traveler as tragic hero."
- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, on the German edition
"Those who prefer an adventurous armchair read to the real thing should look no further than Roger Willemsen's daring new book. . . . A rewarding read that questions the art of travel and our human existence."
- Metro
"This engrossing collection of travel essays . . . carries the reader to exotic locales while exploring the psychogeographical links that draw them all together. In exploring places considered foreboding by others, Willemsen reminds us of the indomitable human urge to inhabit and understand our environment, however extreme."
- World Literature Today
