Destination: United States
‘Wanderlust: On the Road with American Road Movies’
by Michael Yessis | 05.29.06 | 7:30 PM ET
Tonight at 9 p.m ET/PT the Independent Film Channel debuts Wanderlust: On the Road with American Road Movies, a 90-minute documentary that, according to the promo materials, explores the questions: “Does the road still promise us an open sense of freedom and liberation as it did in so many great films? Or, has the adventure of the American road ultimately been reduced to the stuff of Hollywood lore?” As someone who earlier this month spent eight days driving America’s interstates and backroads relocating from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., I know the adventure of a road trip is very much alive.
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Yahoo! BuzzNo. 9: “The Innocents Abroad” by Mark Twain
by Michael Yessis | 05.23.06 | 9:32 PM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1869
Territory covered: Europe and the Holy Land
Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad marks a turning point for both the author and American travel writing. In 1867, Twain boarded the ship the Quaker City for a five-month Journey through Europe and the Holy Land, and he convinced the Daily Alta California, a San Francisco newspaper, to pay him $1,250 to file letters from abroad for publication. He sent 51, and those, along with a few others written for newspapers in New York, comprise “Innocents Abroad.” The dispatches, followed by lectures he delivered based on his travels, helped establish Twain’s voice as an American original. During Twain’s lifetime, “Innocents” was his most popular book, and today it remains perhaps the most celebrated travel book by an American writer. Some critics credit its longevity to its fresh approach: It was written from a different angle than most travel books of its time. As Twain writes in the preface:
No. 13: “Travels with Charley” by John Steinbeck
by Michael Yessis | 05.19.06 | 11:52 AM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1962
Territory covered: The United States
Some readers may question the inclusion of John Steinbeck’s best-known work of nonfiction, Travels with Charley, in our list of the top travel books. It is, after all, about a man driving across the United States in a camper named after Don Quixote’s horse in the company of a poodle named Charley. On the face of it, that doesn’t sound like a work to be taken seriously. But “Travels with Charley” is no Marley & Me. The dog, for the most part, remains in the background, and the Salinas, California-bred Steinbeck trains his Nobel Prize-winning eye—he was awarded the Literature Prize the same year “Charley” was released—on what he believed to be a decaying America. Beginning in Long Island, New York, Steinbeck rolls to the west and, eventually, into the south, sticking to backroads and reflecting on life, politics and the places and people he meets along the way. In lesser hands, such a book could turn into a rambling mess. But Steinbeck, one of America’s most treasured writers, holds it together. The result is a vivid snapshot of “this monster land” between two of its most significant and tragic events, World War II and the Vietnam War, as well as an engaging meditation on the power of travel.
The Lust for Travel: Literature as Inspiration
by Michael Yessis | 05.15.06 | 8:33 AM ET
No. 19: “Hunting Mister Heartbreak” by Jonathan Raban
by Michael Shapiro | 05.13.06 | 7:30 PM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1990
Territory covered: The United States
Like a modern-day Alexis de Tocqueville, Jonathan Raban has traveled the length and breadth of the United States, observing Americans with the keen eye of a foreigner. His book Hunting Mister Heartbreak traverses the pathways of American immigration from late 19th-century Ellis Island to late 20th-century Seattle. In the book, Raban fully inhabits each place he visits, even borrowing an old black labrador named Gypsy in Alabama to feel more at home among the locals. He investigates whether a foreigner can truly become an American. In the end Raban realizes that one can adopt American ways but can never become completely American. And he seems quite relieved about that.
No. 21: “Road Fever” by Tim Cahill
by Rolf Potts | 05.11.06 | 9:54 AM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1991
Territory covered: Tierra del Fuego to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska
A founding editor of Outside magazine, Cahill has been credited with revitalizing adventure writing—a genre that had previously been confined to breathless, semi-fictional tales of danger in the pages of low-culture men’s magazines. The tongue-in-cheek titles of Cahill’s early essay collections—“Jaguars Ripped My Flesh”; “A Wolverine is Eating My Leg”; “Pecked to Death by Ducks”—are a nod to his pulpy precursors, but his writing is the opposite of pulp: informed, nuanced, self-deprecating, and frequently laugh-out-loud funny. Road Fever, Cahill’s only book-length travel narrative, chronicles a 15,000-mile dash to set a world record by driving overland across the Americas in less than 24 days. In many ways, it’s an anti-adventure book, since a large portion of the tale documents the process of making plans and procuring corporate sponsorship—but this says a lot about the competitive, publicity-driven, and weirdly postmodern state of post-Exploration Age adventure. The author’s partner in the journey is professional endurance driver Gary Sowerby, and together the duo deal with fatigue, dangerous roads, stubborn bureaucrats—and an overabundance of sponsor-supplied pudding—as they race north into the pages of the “Guinness Book of World Records.” As the miles speed by, Cahill’s exuberant reporting and eye for the absurd make for an amusing and exhilarating ride.
No. 30: “A Turn in the South” by V.S. Naipaul
by Tom Swick | 05.02.06 | 11:33 AM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1989
Territory covered: The American South
In deceptively simple prose conveying complex insights, the great novelist and travel writer V.S. Naipaul penetrates what may be the most impenetrable region of the United States. And he would seem to be the perfect chronicler of the place: a man who feels he doesn’t belong anywhere amidst people who feel they don’t belong anywhere else. Each of the seven chapters is devoted to a city or town—Atlanta, Charleston, Tallahassee, Tuskegee—and Naipaul is often helped in his understanding of each by a long-time resident who patiently, sagely, shows him around. Telling observations from the author are interspersed with long passages of reported speech. His almost ornithological fascination with spotting a “redneck” is balanced by his steadfast determination to look beyond the stereotypes. The last chapter, on North Carolina tobacco culture, is a masterpiece of meticulous reporting and illuminating reflection.
California Woman Plans to Turn a 747 Into a House
by Michael Yessis | 04.26.06 | 12:16 PM ET
Francie Rehwald has hired architect David Hertz to build her an environmentally friendly and “feminine” house out of an old 747. “The wings will be the main house,” according to an Agence France-Presse report. “The cockpit will become a meditation temple, the jet’s trademark hump will become a loft and the remaining scrap will be used for more buildings.” A computer rendering of the house is pictured here.
Notes From the Global Travel & Tourism Summit
by Michael Yessis | 04.20.06 | 2:27 PM ET
Last week in Washington DC, travel ministers, travel company CEOs and other industry bigwigs gathered for a three-day Global Travel & Tourism Summit, an event that, if my Google searches are any indication, didn’t get much coverage from major media outlets. That’s not just a shame. It’s practically unconscionable. The travel industry is central to the economies of so many countries around the world, and here in the United States, the number of incoming visitors is at its lowest rate since 1992. According to a story on Hotelmarketing.com about the summit, the U.S. market share for international travel has decreased 35 percent, which has cost the country’s economy $286 billion. Yes, that’s billion.
Talking Travel Writing at the L.A. Times Festival of Books
by Jim Benning | 04.19.06 | 12:31 PM ET
For Southern California book lovers, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is, hands down, the must-attend event each spring, mainly because of the terrific panel discussions. This year, the festival takes place at UCLA on April 29 and 30. Two panels are of particular interest to travel-lit fans, and both are conveniently scheduled for Sunday.
Which City Has the Worst Drivers?
by Michael Yessis | 03.31.06 | 1:45 AM ET
Is it Buenos Aires? Mexico City? Kuwait City? Rome? Los Angeles? London Times correspondent Chris Ayres devotes his latest So L.A. blog entry to his opinion on the subject. “[T]his week I returned from Buenos Aires, Argentina, a city whose entire population seems to be trying to break the land speed record in a 1984 Renault 9 GLS,” he writes. “And I concluded that the lapses of concentration demonstrated by motorists in Los Angeles is far preferable to the sociopathic stare of the average Porteno cab driver, who considers it his duty to accelerate towards stationary objects (including human beings) at double the speed limit, before averting multiple homicide by stomping on the brakes or swerving violently.” Sounds horrible, but I’m going the other way on this. I’ve seen some dreadful drivers here in Los Angeles. Just tonight, for instance, I was traveling a busy two-lane street when the guy in front of me swerved into the oncoming lane and stopped cold, just to drop off his passengers. No hazards. No signal. No brain.
J.R. Moehringer: A Day at Sinatra’s House
by Michael Yessis | 03.28.06 | 2:27 PM ET
Francis Fukuyama vs. Bernard Henri-Lévy: Battling Over Las Vegas
by Michael Yessis | 03.28.06 | 12:29 PM ET
Flight 187 in the Hizzouse!
by Michael Yessis | 03.21.06 | 9:54 AM ET
Jet Blue, you and your seat-back satellite televisions are no longer on the cutting edge of in-flight entertainment. Pilots at Miami International Airport have told FAA officials that their communications are being disrupted by hip-hop music being broadcast from a pirate radio station called Da Streetz.
Church Leaders to Bush Administration: Stop Restricting Religious Travel to Cuba
by Michael Yessis | 03.16.06 | 1:14 PM ET
Representatives from churches around the United States and members of congress met with executive branch officials yesterday to protest new travel restrictions to Cuba. “The meeting,” writes Pablo Bachelet in today’s Miami Herald, “was in response to a March 3 bipartisan letter signed by 105 lawmakers, asking the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control to explain why travel licenses for some U.S. church groups were not being renewed.”