Tag: The Critics
The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson
by Jim Benning | 12.06.05 | 12:10 AM ET
Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle featured a review of “Myself and the Other Fellow,” a new biography of the man who wrote “Treasure Island.” Critic Diane Scharper writes of Stevenson: “[H]is work received mixed reviews after he died. The gothic tales lacked the psychological twists popular in the 20th century, and his adventure stories were too difficult for children but didn’t contain enough sex for adults. Although he took the personal essay to new heights with a combination of craftsmanship and directness, and practically invented modern travel writing, his literary essays are relatively unknown today.”
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Yahoo! BuzzThe Critics: AARP Recommends Armchair Travel Books
by Michael Yessis | 09.19.05 | 11:47 PM ET
Dennis Boyles selected seven books for the September/October issue of AARP magazine, including “The Station” by Robert Byron and “A Traveller’s Alphabet” by Sir Steven Runciman.
“Sales of Guidebooks to Afghanistan Have Not Been Strong”
by Jim Benning | 01.12.02 | 2:30 AM ET
The latest edition of the New York Review of Books features a story by Tim Judah about his recent travels in Afghanistan. “Sales of guidebooks to Afghanistan have not been strong during the last two decades, so the bookshop in Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel (no running water on most floors, and bring your own sleeping bag) still has plenty of copies of Nancy Hatch Dupree’s 1977 Afghanistan left on its shelves,” he writes. “It is perhaps the most extraordinary guide I have ever read.” In the same issue, Ian Buruma, author of the analytical Asia travel narrative God’s Dust, among other books, offers a historical perspective on Occidentalism, September 11 and anti-modernization movements. “There is no clash of civilizations,” he writes. “Most religions, especially monotheistic ones, have the capacity to harbor the anti-Western position.”
The Critics: ‘Up in the Air’
by Jim Benning | 07.08.01 | 11:37 PM ET
Most travelers disdain waiting at airports, enduring long flights and sleeping in bland, standardized hotels, but not Ryan Bingham. The 35-year-old career transition counselor—and the narrator of Walter Kirn’s critically acclaimed new novel, Up in the Air—spends most of his time in transit, in the place he calls “Airworld.” He loves it. “Airworld is a nation within a nation,” Ryan says, “with its own language, architecture, mood and even its own currency—the token economy of airline bonus miles that I’ve come to value more than dollars. Inflation doesn’t degrade them. They’re not taxed. They’re private property in its purest form.” Ryan’s chief goal in life is to accumulate one million frequent-flyer miles, something, on a smaller scale, any traveler can appreciate.
“Ryan is as original and cool a character to come along in American fiction in a while,” reviewer Christopher Buckley writes in the July 8 New York Times Book Review. “Into the bargain, Kirn is such a sharp writer he gives your brain paper cuts. Never have I so happily bled to death.”
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