Destination: United States
America’s 10 Best Travel Books
by Jim Benning | 06.22.04 | 9:27 PM ET
With the summer road trip season underway and travelers looking for good beach reading material, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel’s Thomas Swick suggests they try one of his 10 favorite U.S. travel books published in the last century. Author Jonathan Raban makes the list twice. Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley” is there, of course.
Interestingly, Swick included a couple of novels, including Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.” Writes Swick: “Only people who’ve never read this novel think it’s about sex with a minor. Everyone else knows that it’s the sublimely told story of the seduction of a donnish European by the nymphetish New World. And at its heart is a spot-on evocation of roadside America, where even some of our natural attractions are turned into kitsch which, in the hands of a transplanted Russian genius, is transformed into art.”
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Yahoo! BuzzTravel Trend Watch: Bookstore Tourism
by Michael Yessis | 06.04.04 | 9:47 PM ET
Here’s a travel trend we can get behind: Travel in support of independent booksellers. Larry Portzline started the venture last year as a “grassroots campaign to promote and support independent bookstores by marketing them as a travel and tourist destination.” “It all started last July, when Portzline organized another group of 45 book lovers to travel from Harrisburg to Manhattan to visit 18 bookstores in Greenwich Village,” writes Jane Van Ingen in Poets and Writers magazine. “During the four-hour bus ride to the city, Portzline gave a presentation about competition in the bookselling industry. During the day, travelers visited landmark bookstores such as the Strand and Three Lives and Co., as well as niche stores that sell only cookbooks, foreign-language titles, children’s books, or mysteries.” Next trip: A June 12 excursion, also from Harrisburg, where Portzline works at the local community college, to New York City. Through his Web site, Portzline encourages others to coordinate trips in their own areas. “Wouldn’t it be great,” he writes, “to see busloads of book-lovers pulling up in front of independent bookstores on a regular basis?”
Family Traveling
by Jeff Biggers | 05.25.04 | 9:41 PM ET
Photo of Maysville courtesy Jackie's Gateway Properties. A relative warned him: Don't go digging up ghosts. But Jeff Biggers crossed the Ohio River, seeking his ancestors' long-buried history.
Swick: Where Are All the Domestic Travel Stories?
by Jim Benning | 05.16.04 | 12:48 AM ET
South Florida Sun-Sentinel Travel Editor Thomas Swick was going through a stack of freelance travel story submissions recently when it hit him: Most of the stories he was receiving were about foreign travel. “I asked myself: What is wrong with the United States?” he wrote in a column last Sunday. “It is one of the most geographically diverse, ethnically rich, scenically stunning (three categories that travel writers butter their bread with) countries in the world. Why don’t its travel writers sing its glories? It is especially puzzling that in the golden age of flag waving I should be having more trouble than ever finding good stories about the United States. Are travel writers so out of touch with the rest of the country?” It’s a frustration Swick also mentioned in a recent World Hum interview. I suspect Swick hit the nail on the head when he acknowledged in the column that “nothing gets the adrenaline going like a border.” Like the upstart city hall reporter who dreams of a foreign posting, travel writers inspired by books like “Video Night in Kathmandu” and “The Old Patagonian Express” see the big stories, rightly or wrongly, as residing primarily in distant lands, the more distant the better.
What’s the Strangest Travel Book Ever Written?
by Jim Benning | 05.13.04 | 12:51 AM ET
According to writer John Derbyshire’s recent article in The New Criterion, it’s “An African in Greenland,” Tete-Michel Kpomassie’s story of his experience in Greenland in the late 1950s and 1960s. First published in French, the book was translated into English in 1983. Why did Kpomassie leave his home in a tribal society bordering the Gulf of Guinea to visit Greenland? “After Kpomassie had an unpleasant encounter with a snake, his family elders decided that he was destined to become a priest in a local snake cult,” Derbyshire writes. “This involved living in the deep jungle among pythons. Kpomassie was not keen on the idea. At just this time, at a bookstore in the nearest city, he happened to see Dr. Robert Gessain’s book ‘The Eskimos from Greenland to Alaska.’ Kpomassie was seized with the idea that he should go and live among these folk. By a sustained effort of will, and through many difficulties—it took him six years just to work his way to Europe, two more to get to Greenland—he eventually did so. It is, as it sounds, the strangest travel book ever written.”
On the Road to See the Kerouac House
by Jim Benning | 02.23.04 | 9:10 PM ET
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel’s Thomas Swick visits the Orlando, Florida house where Jack Kerouac stayed just before the New York Times proclaimed him the voice of his generation. Kerouac may not often be associated with Florida, but a local author told Swick he thought it was important people knew Kerouac spent time in suburban Florida. “I want people, especially young people, to embrace the idea of history in the suburbs,” Bob Kealing said. “I call it suburban archaeology. This idea of him [Kerouac] as the precursor of the hippies. He was Catholic, he was conservative, and he lived with his mother in the suburbs.”
The Politics of Cuba-U.S. Travel
by Jim Benning | 02.06.04 | 9:27 PM ET
The South Florida Travel Editor Diet?
by Jim Benning | 01.29.04 | 10:07 PM ET
That’s right. Forget the ultra-trendy South Beach Diet. South Florida Sun-Sentinel Travel Editor Thomas Swick has come up with a diet of his own sure to attract the masses: “The South Florida Travel Editor Diet.” Swick’s key piece of advice: travel. “Abroad, we all walk more than we do at home, and we do it painlessly, not worrying about calories burnt but concentrating on the architecture and the curious signs and the coy window displays,” he wrote in last week’s column. “Not to mention the crowds of people—slim and hardy—who are walking along with us.” How to explain the veteran travel editor’s sudden interest in diets? We have a theory. Swick, whose collection of travel stories, “A Way to See the World,” was recently published by The Lyons Press, no doubt saw “The South Beach Diet” book on the New York Times bestseller list and began brainstorming. Diet books, after all, always outsell travel books in the U.S. Which is why we suspect Swick has a lucrative travel-diet book deal in the works. Brilliant!
Retracing Steinbeck’s “The Log From the Sea of Cortez” Journey
by Jim Benning | 01.21.04 | 10:40 PM ET
Five people, including scientists and a writer, plan to leave Monterey, California on a wooden fishing boat in March to recreate the marine expedition made famous in John Steinbeck’s “The Log from the Sea of Cortez.” The Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday: “The two-month trip will be chronicled by a Steinbeck Fellow, an academic position at San Jose State University held by freelance writer Jon Christensen. He plans to write a book about the expedition and create a daily Web log on the Internet for schoolchildren and others to follow.”
“Once Upon a Time, We Could Love an Airline”
by Jim Benning | 12.15.03 | 9:33 PM ET
The Los Angeles Times’ Susan Spano on Sunday offered a heart-warming recollection of Pacific Southwest Airlines, which was sold to US Airways in 1988 and is now the subject of a permanent display at the San Diego Aerospace Museum in Balboa Park. “The San Diego-based carrier holds a special place in the hearts of many, especially those who flew PSA in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the glory days when the airline summed up everything that was groovy and freewheeling about California,” she writes.
What do Visitors to California Want?
by Jim Benning | 12.01.03 | 9:41 PM ET
“Celebrities. Big houses. Conspicuous consumption. A sense of dipping their toes into a hedonistic way of life they’d seen fetishized on T.V.,” writes Rick Lyman in a travel essay in Sunday’s New York Times. Lyman lived in California for four years and tried hard to deliver on that when guests were in town. It wasn’t easy.
Skyhigh Airlines: The Relentless Pursuit of Adequacy
by Michael Yessis | 11.26.03 | 9:42 PM ET
Just how bad have things gotten for commercial airlines? They’re now making fun of their own industry. Alaska Airlines’ latest advertising campaign centers on the faux SkyHigh Airlines, a carrier that embodies everything wrong with modern air travel. High prices. Lost luggage. Callous employees. The idea is to contrast Alaska with the misery of this hilarious, straw man airline. According to Wall Street Journal reporter Scott McCartney, it’s a risky strategy. He writes, “Alaska must now ensure its own customers don’t have a SkyHigh Airlines experience.” (McCartney’s story is available online only to WSJ subscribers.) At the very least, anyone who flies should find the accompanying Web site good for a laugh. My favorite features: The rotating slogans—“Flying More, Caring Less” and “A Commitment to Mediocrity” among them—and the travel tips, including this one: Don’t talk to freaks. “Man, are there some nut jobs out there! And given the chance, they’ll talk a hole through your brain. Word to the wise: If you see a guy skipping toward you with rainbow stockings and a handful of spoons, act unconscious.”
“America on the Move” Opens
by Michael Yessis | 11.24.03 | 9:45 PM ET
The Smithsonian Museum’s “America on the Move” exhibit, which focuses on the various ways transportation shaped the country, opened this weekend in Washington D.C. Virtual visitors can check it out at the museum’s excellent Web site or via a behind the scenes tour with Savvy Traveler radio program host Diana Nyad.
T.C. Boyle’s California
by Jim Benning | 10.30.03 | 8:49 PM ET
Novelist T.C. Boyle’s essay about the California wildfires in Wednesday’s New York Times isn’t exactly travel writing. Boyle lives in California; he’s not describing a physical journey. But he sure does a fine job of evoking a sense of the place at this moment in history. Take this powerful opening paragraph: “It is dark here today, the generous golden sun of the Golden State reduced to a pink gumball hanging powerlessly over the treetops. Indoors, the house is a wash of strange, muted colors, the floors glowing red, the kitchen countertops thinly painted in the hue of vin rouge. Outside, the birds are holding their breath as fine threads of white ash roll down out of the sky and the distant thunder of aircraft rumbles through the leaves.” Wow. (Registration required to access the article.)
Note: Peanut Butter, Batteries and Air Travel Do Not Mix Well
by Michael Yessis | 10.30.03 | 8:48 PM ET
That’s the word from David Menzies, who, after sending a two-kilogram jar of Kraft Extra Creamy Peanut Butter and a six-pack of Duracell C-size batteries through the X-ray machine in Anchorage, Alaska, was called out by security. Why? Read his amusing tale in the National Post.