Book Review - A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby

 A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby, preface by Evelyn Waugh

Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968 (first published 1958)

My wife highly recommended this book to me - she said I'd like it. That can often be a fraught statement, as reactions to books can be highly personal, and our judgments of what a particular person might like can sometimes be wide of the mark.

Not this time though. I loved this book for all sorts of reasons. I loved the "stiff-upper lip" style of writing and the understated humor as much as I loved the description of the journey that Newby and his travelling companion Hugh Carless undertook.

The journey began with a telegram from Newby to Carless - "CAN YOU TRAVEL NURISTAN JUNE?" In the 1950s Nuristan was practically unexplored by Westerners. Newby and Carless were not only going to traverse Nuristan, but also attempt to climb Mir Samir, the highest mountain in the area.

The preparations for the trip, as described by Newby are laughingly amateurish - neither he nor Carless had done any serious climbing, and so went to Wales for a few days rock climbing to get some experience of being roped together. Newby briefly describes the drive from London to Kabul, and then the real adventure begins!

With their main guide Abdul Ghiyas, Badar Khan and Shir Mohammed, they make their way to Mir Samir. Newby describes their repeated, but failed, attempts to get to the top as they battled the weather (hot days and frozen nights), the mountain (constant bombardment by falling rock), and themselves (fatigue and injury). Eventually they admit defeat, and one gets the sense that Newby is amazed that they thought that they could try such a thing, and that they survived the attempt (Mir Samir remains unclimbed to this day as far as I can ascertain).

They then trek into Nuristan itself. As infidels, it's not clear how they will be received by the locals, and it is generally with a mix of fear and wonder. Newby describes a life for Nuristanis that is brutal, hard, and most probably short for the men. Of the women he can say little, as they are rarely seen. The countryside is the hero here, magnificent valleys enclosed by massive peaks make for wonderful vistas, even if they are not so good for walking.

The book ends with Newby and Carless back in the Panjshir valley, where they run into Wilfred Thesiger, who puts them in their place with his nonchalance and toughness - his reaction to the revelation that Newby and Carless use air mattresses is the last line in the book, and priceless.

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush is a great travel book - you'll learn, you'll laugh, and you'll enjoy. 

Recommended

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Return to Tibet by Heinrich Harrer

 Return to Tibet by Heinrich Harrer, translated from the German by Ewald Osers

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 (first published in German 1983)   ISBN 014007774X

About eighteen months ago I read Heinrich Harrer's Seven Years in Tibet and enjoyed it very much, so when I came across this book I thought I'd give it a go. While it was an interesting read, it is not nearly as good as the first book, and given the way it was written, it was never going to be so.

In the early 1980s, when China's Tibet policy had thawed somewhat, Harrer was able to revisit the country he'd spent time in during the 1940s. It's unclear how long he was there, but it was as part of a guided tour at a time when tourism was just beginning in Tibet, and only limited numbers of foreigners were allowed in. Return to Tibet is a book formed around this visit - it is mostly a comparison of what he saw and experienced when he lived there, to what he's seeing and hearing now (in 1982) with his own eyes, and through the testimony of the Dalai Lama and his circle in Darjeeling.

What Harrer sees and hears appalls him. In particular, the destruction of most of the religious buildings he views as a great tragedy. Those temples and palaces that remain are also a sad sight for him, as he remembers the vibrancy and life that used to thrum through these great buildings when the Dalai Lama ruled his country. He tries to pick his way through the curtain that the Chinese try to draw over the real state of Tibet and its people. He wanders markets replete with Yak meat and butter, but is told by his old friends that in the countryside people are starving. He sees workmen "repairing" temples when he walks past with his group, but when he returns unexpectedly later, they have gone. He is told that temples have many monks, but he sees no sign of permanent residency. Those monks he does see he is tempted to believe are actually just workers dressed in the appropriate gear.

He tells of repression and unlawful executions, but Harrer also shows the reader how the religious life of Tibet has continued despite Chinese attempts to extinguish it. He is constantly pressed by Tibetans for pictures of the Dalai Lama, and does in fact see some on public display, which heartens him to think that perhaps the Chinese really were going down a new path and letting Tibetans express their culture more freely. His postscript, which reports on the 1983 crackdown on Tibet, validated the views of many Tibetans he spoke to that thought that the loosening of Chinese repression was only temporary.

The value in this book is that it is a report on Tibet from someone who knew what it used to be like. While Harrer is not rosy-eyed about the past, what he shows us is how the soul of the Tibetan people and culture had been and was still being crushed by the Chinese. His hopes expressed in the book that Tibet could perhaps become like a Bhutan with India, or a Mongolia (as it then was) with the USSR, i.e. under Chinese rule but essentially free to chose their own path, was naive. Communist China would and could never allow that to happen.

As we all know, since this book was written the degradation of Tibetan culture, society and even the country itself has continued. This book is an interesting historical snapshot of a stage in that process. It is not a sequel to Seven Years in Tibet. 

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer

 Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer, translated from the German by Richard Graves, with an introduction by Peter Fleming

London: Pan Books, 1956 (First published 1953)

Having seen the Brad Pitt movie of this book, and only half-believing that it could be true, I approached this book with much interest. Yes, a lot of the movie was made-up, but not the parts that I thought! Seven Years in Tibet is an amazing tale of struggle and hardship, adaptability, stoicism and ultimately friendship and growth.

Heinrich Harrer was a well-known Austrian mountaineer, famous for his ascent of the North Face of the Eiger, when in 1939 he joined an expedition to climb Nanga Parbat headed by Peter Aufschnaiter. Unfortunately for this group of Germans, war was declared and they were promptly placed into an internment camp by the British in India. Harrer was determined to escape, and escape to Tibet, a neutral country from where he was going to attempt to get to the Japanese lines and then back to Germany. He made several attempts to escape before he succeeded with a group of others. Eventually, only Aufschnaiter and Harrer actually made it across the border into Tibet. Tibet at that time was not only closed to foreigners, but also was a medieval-style feudal society. Harrer and Aufschnaiter, by a series of tricks, stratagems, and begging, managed to gain a foothold in Tibet, and over the course of a year managed to make it to Lhasa. That year involved a series of almost unbelievable treks through the most desolate of country, exposing them to the best and worst of the Tibetan people: the invariably friendly and helpful nomads, the brutish bandits, and the (sometimes) imperious officials, who found these European interlopers both fascinating, and a problem.

Eventually they made it to Lhasa, and were given respite by one of the nobles there. They soon carved out a niche for themselves: Tibet at that time was almost wholly lacking in any form of modern appliances or technology, and Harrer and especially Aufschnaiter (who had an engineering background) set to in assisting the government with flood-mitigation works, sewerage, and other improvements to the town. They moved from being curiosities to being part of the upper-class social set.

None of this had gone un-noticed by the young Dalai Lama, and eventually Harrer was introduced to him, and became his tutor and guide in all things Western. Harrer describes a young man who was very bright, very curious, and very knowledgeable in Buddhist scripture and tradition. Harrer came to admire him very much, as he did the Tibetan way of life, despite its superstition and seeming backwardness.

Unfortunately his time in Tibet came to an untimely end, with the Chinese invasion of 1950. He knew he couldn't stay, but was heartbroken to have to go.

Seven Years in Tibet is not only a wonderful description of a personal journey, but an informative guide to what Tibet was like in its last few years as an independent country on the roof of the world. A wonderful way to while away some winter hours in front of a fire.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Light Garden of the Angel King by Peter Levi

The Light Garden of the Angel King : journeys in Afghanistan by Peter Levi

London: Collins, 1972

I mentioned in my review of Peter Levi's book of travel and archaeology in Ancient Greece, The Hill of Kronos, that Levi had travelled to Afghanistan with Bruce Chatwin. This book, The Light Garden of the Angel King, is the record of that journey, from Levi's perspective. It is a journal of archaeology and travel, rather than a journal of personalities. It is a journal of a poet, collecting images and events to mull over and use (the poems Levi composed whilst on the journey are in an appendix at the back of the book).

The aim of the journey, for Levi, was to investigate whether the ancient Greek influence on Afghanistan was discernable through its archaeology, and how much of it still remained. Much as Levi does in The Hill of Kronos, he and Chatwin travel through areas where archaeology abounds, but the knowledge of it was minimal or non-existant. Travelling in Afghanistan has always been dangerous from a human and geographical point of view, and Levi has guns pointed at him, sleeps through an earthquake and suffers both extremes of heat and cold during his journey through the rugged hills and valleys of the country.

In this book he gets around quite a bit of the country, from Helmand, to Kandahar, Kabul, through Nuristan and to within sight of the Oxus River, he describes to us ancient citadels, ruined cities, nail-biting 'plane trips and interesting characters met along the way. There are some highly technical sections in the book about the finds Levi makes archaeologically, and these are well supported with footnotes. But, for me, it is his descriptions of the Afghan countryside, in its starkness and beauty, that are the best parts of the book.

Much like The Hill of Kronos, The Light Garden of the Angel King somewhat falls between two stools as a book, neither being a proper archaeological study, nor a full-on travel book. It is, however a good book.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh Fermor

The broken road : from the Iron Gates to Mount Athos by Patrick Leigh Fermor, edited by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper

London : John Murray, 2014                                         ISBN 9781848547544

And so it ends - after reading A time of gifts, and Between the woods and the water, it was with some sadness that I finally finished this, the third and last instalment describing Fermor's 1934 walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople.

Fermor famously spent many years honing the prose for this magisterial trilogy, with - almost as famously - writer's block allegedly stopping him from finishing this third and final instalment. So what we have here is a blessing, and a very interesting insight into Fermor's development as a writer.

Although The broken road is a description of the final part of Fermor's journey, most of this book was  actually written well before he began the other two: Fermor was asked to write about his Bulgarian experiences for a magazine, and when he started writing, the words flowed and flowed and he soon realised he had much more than an article on hand. Fermor then decided to write the whole journey, and what we have here is this earlier writing, skilfully edited.

The difference in tone between this volume and the first two is no doubt due to it being written earlier - so it was not necessarily a case of writer's block that denied us this book while Fermor was alive, but more a case of an inability (for whatever reason) to revise what, in great part, already existed.

The broken road is fascinatingly different to the first two volumes of Fermor's travels. Written in the early 1960s, Fermor had yet to solidify how he actually wanted to write about his travels - the erudite, elegiac style of A time of gifts and Between the woods and the water is not as obvious here - there is more personal input, more questioning of how he is to write his story using just his memory and his map (having no access to any of his diaries at the time of writing), and much more included of the ups and downs of the travelling life - there is more misery and disappointment in this instalment (which might of course also be due to travelling in the colder months).

This difference however, is actually refreshing after the first two books: the reader gets more insight into Fermor's character and personality through this book than in the previous two, and gets more of an idea of what it's like to travel on foot for long distances. There are passages describing in detail the pain of a dodgy boot, the fear of getting lost in the dark, the misery of a cold wet night, and the dismay at being rejected when seeking help. These of course are balanced out by the opposite situations: wonderful days in the mountains in glorious weather, the kindness of local peasants, and Fermor's seeming natural ability to make friends that turn out to be very helpful to him in his travels.

As the book moves further on, the reader can see Fermor developing the style that stood him in such good stead for the later (earlier) volumes, with more discursions on the history of the locations through which he was travelling. The travelling itself describes a lost world of peasants and gypsies, aristocratic students, Jewish quarters, diplomatic parties and peasant hovels, all of which Fermor experiences in joyous wonder most of the time - never, it seems, with a worry about finding somewhere to eat (and drink!) and lay his head.

Most of this book describes Fermor's big detour - after travelling through Rumania, he finds Bulgaria poorer, and certainly much more Turkish in custom and population. Getting to Plovdiv - almost realising his dream of reaching Constantinople - he turns North on the advice of some new friends and re-crosses into Rumania and Bucharest, before heading to the Black Sea and travelling down to Turkey from there. Fermor's ability to be hobnobbing with Ambassadors one day, carousing with students the next and then spending the next night in a cave with shepherds and fishermen, charming all and sundry and noting everything, is what makes him such compulsive reading, and what we get more of in this third volume is a sense of Fermor's youthfulness, with it's attendant energy and wonder.

It all comes crashing to a halt on the Black Sea. Fermor's manuscript ends here, frustratingly short of his goal. Thubron and Cooper add a mere handful of pages of raw diary from Constantinople, which are frustratingly incomplete and inconsequential. The editors suggest that Fermor may have been too overwhelmed by reaching his goal to write coherently, or that he didn't actually like Constantinople much. This may be true, as shortly after his arrival he left for Greece, and the Holy Mountain, Mount Athos. The final 80 pages of this book are Fermor's diary of his month spent travelling the monasteries of the Holy Mountain: possibly spurred to go there by Robert Byron's earlier visit, he wanders from monastery to monastery, gradually falling under the spell of the life of the monks and of the Orthodox services. There are, as always with Fermor, some fine character portraits and descriptive writing.

Three years after beginning this series of books, turning the last page was saying goodbye to someone who had become my friend over the journey - something that Fermor himself did many times, often never to see his new friends again. Fortunately for me I can revisit these books often, which I will assuredly do.

Another must read from Fermor.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Between the woods and the water by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Between the woods and the water : on foot to Constantinople : the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates
by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Introduction by Jan Morris

New York : New York Review Books, 2005                                ISBN 9781590171660


Some time ago I had a look at the first volume of this trilogy, A time of gifts, which you can read about here - the book under review in this post is the second volume of the recollections by a mature Fermor of his walking trip from Belgium to Turkey during the early 1930s, just after he had left school.

The end of the first volume left Fermor walking across the Danube to enter Hungary, and in this volume he leads us through that country and Romania, to the borders of Serbia, and the Iron Gates of the title. While the first volume had a feeling of being written by an innocent abroad, this part of the journey sees Fermor engaging in some more mature pursuits.

Thanks to some fortuitous meetings early on in his trip, Fermor finds himself well catered for in Hungary, with plenty of offers of accommodation with various members of the nobility and gentry of the former Empire. And it's clear from his writing that even as a young man he became aware quickly of the pain felt in Hungary over the loss of that empire during World War One - especially galling is the gains of territory by Romania at Hungary's expense. The catastrophe that befell the nobility during the War is evident as well - although many of the friends that Fermor makes still behave, and are treated, like landed aristocracy, they no longer have the land, or the necessary political power, to ensure their gilded lives will continue. And knowing what is to come, it can be painful to read Fermor's descriptions of wonderful evenings dining on the terrace, motoring or horseback picnics, fishing trips, insect collecting - all undertaken with a gay abandon that seems absurd when one considers the whirlwind about to overtake the region.

That nemesis pops up a couple of times during the text, with mentions of the Night of the Long Knives and the annexation of Austria, but Fermor conveys the feeling that, while not good, these events were far away and seemed to have few implications for his hosts. How wrong they were. Fortunately we have this book as one record of what life was like before it all disappeared in a maelstrom of Nazi and Communist madness.

As the dog days of summer wear on, Fermor becomes torn between enjoying the sybaritic life he's living in other people's great houses, the need to keep moving, and the guilt he's feeling given that he started the journey with the intention of travelling rough. His final fling with the nobility is literally that, when he goes on a motoring tour with one of his new friends and an unhappy wife of someone else, with whom he has a passionate affair. All too soon she has to return to her family life and Fermor heads into the hills, where he does begin to rough it with local shepherds and woodsmen.

As in the first volume, Fermors description of the countryside through which he moved is almost baroque in style: reading these books is like eating a mudcake, absolutely delicious but one can only consume a small portion at a time. Between the woods and the water is also a primer in the history of what has been historically a very contested area, so we hear quite a bit about the Draculs, Hunyadis and other famous families and people from history.

As is the case with many great books, this reader was melancholy on finishing this one, partly owing to the sadness of reading about a lifestyle that is no longer, and partly from the mere fact that there was no more to read.

Thankfully there is a third volume, left unfinished by Fermor on his death, but recently published - I look forward to that.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - A time of gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

A time of gifts : on foot to Constantinople : from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube by Patrick Leigh Fermor

New York: New York Review Books, 2005     ISBN 9781590171653

At the tender age of 18, Patrick Fermor left his native England to embark on an epic journey - to walk from the North-Eastern tip of Europe to it's end at the Straits of Bosphorus. The book under review here is the first of a proposed trilogy describing that trip (the second, Between the woods and the water is available - and no doubt will be reviewed here in due course - while the third, describing the end of his journey, was almost complete at the time of the author's death. Publication of the third volume is mooted for 2012).

Fermor must have been quite a precocious lad to think of undertaking the journey; and a romantic lad too, with visions of sleeping in haystacks and mixing with peasants. As it turned out, he only slept in the open once in the more than three months of tramping that this book covers, and that particular night ended in him being rounded up at gunpoint by the Czech border police.

By that time he had travelled over 1500 miles, nearly all on foot, with occasional journeys by train, truck and barge. He had spent time with tramps, university students and more than one member of the aristocracy, stayed in hotels, vagrants hostels and castles, and was slowly educating himself about Europe, history, and languages.

Fermor had the luck of connecting with the right people (at that time just being English seemed enough to grant entree anywhere, even in Germany), and is befriended by all and sundry, who provide him not only with shelter and food, but history and culture. Where the beginning of the book is about the joy of being on the open road and finding himself free, by the time he crosses the bridge over the Danube into Hungary (the final act of this volume), he is ruminating on the twists and turns of history in Europe and England, the wonders of architecture, and fine wines and cigars.

Fermor did not begin writing this book until well into adulthood, after heroic wartime service earned him the DSO (the story of which can be found in Ill met by moonlight), and he had sucessfully published two books of his later travels in Greece - Mani - Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, and Roumeli.

This accounts for the overall elegaic tone of the book: that of an older man looking back on a great adventure in his youth, in a time before he was corrupted and dragged down by adult life. The tone is heightened by his description of a Europe before the depredations of World War II; when aristocrats still lived in castles, and before Nazism cast a pall over the continent. Fermor's journey was undertaken in 1934, so his descriptions of the first rumblings of the Nazi scourge are a chill premonition of what was to come. Fermor made the most of the advantage of writing much later to occasionally discuss the future of some of the people he met and stayed with - not all of it good reading.

What sets this book apart as a work of literature, rather than merely a travel book or a memoir, is the craft and style with which it is written. There is never a lapse in tone - that of a wise and erudite adult looking back at his developing self, marvelling at what he saw and did, and noting events that turned out to be pivotal or formative for his later years. The descriptive passages are all immaculate - whether of a snow-bound German village, the abbey at Melk, or the city of Prague. These descriptions are all different, and are all as the older Fermor might remember them - Prague becomes a jumble of competing images, Melk an almost overwhelming history and art lesson, while other 'simpler' pleasures, such as watching the sun set over the Danube, acquire a gilded feeling of a moment captured in time, which the author felt as strongly at the time of writing as he did as a young man out in the wilds.

If you love fine writing, you must read this book. If you love European history, you must read this book. If you love armchair travel, you must read this book.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor

A time to keep silence  by Patrick Leigh Fermor

New York, New York Review Books, 2007                   ISBN 9781590172445


Patrick Leigh Fermor, even if he never wrote a word, would still be known for his daring wartime work with the Special Operations Executive, where he played a vital part in the daring kidnap of a German General, Heinrich Kreipe on the island of Crete in 1944.

Fortunately for us he did write, and write beautifully. Known as a travel writer, he was far more - his works are full of not only travel, but history, philosophy, art and an overflowing evanescence of language.

A time to keep silence is a collection of three - should we call them essays? - perhaps meditations might be a more exact term - written by Fermor in response to sojourns at two Abbeys in France, and a journey to the deserted cathedrals and cells for the Basilian monks in Cappadocia.

The work is sourced mainly from letters Fermor wrote at the time to his future wife, worked up for publication. In his introduction he points out that he is in no way an expert on religion or monasticism, and in fact not really fit to describe the monastic life in any complex way. And yet the book is a fascinating account of the life and times of the great Abbeys. The first 'meditation', written from the Abbey of St. Wandrille De Fontanelle, is Fermor's first introduction to such an institution - he has travelled to the Abbey as he thinks the peace and seclusion of the location will help him with his writing.

At first Fermor has an aversion to everything in the Abbey: the monks seem cadaverous, the location grim, and the solitude lead-heavy, like being "by mistake locked up in a catacomb". After a few days however, he begins to fall into the rhythm of the Abbey, and feels wonderfully refreshed. He writes "The two ways of life [monastic and secular] do not share a single attribute; and the thoughts, ambitions, sounds, light, time and mood that surround the inhabitants of a cloister are not only unlike anything to which one is accustomed, but in some curious way, seem its exact reverse."

He gives a history of the Abbey, which, far from being a millenium-long island of peace, coped with many periods of dis-estabilishment, despoilation and despair; in fact as recently as 1901 the monastry was dispersed, and passed to a new owner who roller-skated down the cloisters followed by his various hounds! The power of the life of prayer for those who chose to follow it is wonderfully evoked by describing all the hurdles these communities have overcome to just be able to devote their lives to their Lord.

As he delves further into the life and belief of the monks who share this space with him, he realises "the dominating factor of monastic existance is a belief in the necessity and efficacy of prayer; and it is only by attempting to grasp the importance of this principle - a principle so utterly remote from every tendency of modern secular thought - to the monks who practise it, that one can hope to understand the basis of monasticism." Fermor directly asked one of the monks ..."how he could sum up, in a couple of words, his way of life. He paused a moment and said, 'Have you ever been in love?' I said 'Yes.' A larger Fernandel smile spread across his face. 'Eh bien,' he said, 'c'est exactement pariel...'".

From the contemplative surroundings of St. Wandrille De Fontanelle, Fermor then moves, with a quick detour via Solesmes, to La Grande Trappe, the headquarters of The Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (O.S.C.O.), or Trappists. Fermor quickly describes the much stricter rules of this house (no separate cells for monks, no talking at all, very vigorous daily labour, prayers beginning at about 2am after a mere five hours sleep), and then proceeds to try to understand why these monks would submit to such a labour. The following quote is long, but neatly encapsulates the way of Trappist thought - "To understand these Cisterican rigours, we must dismiss modern accomodations and rationalistaions and seek to return to the uncompromising literalness of the early Christians. Prayer for the redemption of mankind is the basis of Benedictine monasticism; and in the Cisterican branch of the Benedictine family the principle of prayer has been supplemented by the idea of vicarious penance........A Cistercian Cloister is a workshop of intercession and a bitter cactus-land of expiation for the mountains of sin which have accumulated since the Fall. A Trappist career is a long-drawn-out atonement, a protracted imitation of the Wilderness, the Passion, the Agony in the Garden, the Way of the Cross, and the final sacrifice of Golgotha. By fierce asceticism, cloistered incarceration, sleeping on straw and rising in the darkness after a few hours' sleep, by abstinence, fasting, humiliation, the hair shirt, the scourge, the extremes of heat and cold, and the unbroken cycle of contemplation, prayer and back-breaking toil, they seek, by taking the sins of others on to their own shoulders, to lighten the burden of mankind."

Fermor is allowed no contact with the monks at La Grande Trappe, which frees him for his writing, but leaves him wondering how a person can chose this life; he falls back on conversations with someone who has left the order to try and gain insights into the psychology of a Trappist, a problem he grapples with in this section of the book.

The final section is a description of a trip taken by Fermor and a friend to Urgub, in Cappadocia. These few pages are mostly given to marvellous descriptions of the cells and churches cut into the living rock, with a wonderful evocation of the life that must have once been lived there, centuries ago, and, when Fermor was there, all but forgotten by the modern world.

A short postscript describes the growing monastic movement in Fermor's home country England.

At 96 pages, this is a book that is short in length, but long in what it gives the reader - highly recommended for those who are interested in finding out more about the monastic life without too much religion thrown into the mix, or those who love magnificent evocative writing - it has encouraged this reviewer to read more of Fermor.

The New York Review edition of this book is wonderfully presented, with an interesting introduction by Karen Armstrong. You can purchase it directly from their website, online at Amazon, or borrow it from your local library if they have it.

 Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell