Tag: Travel Books
Paul Theroux’s New Novel: ‘A Dead Hand’
by Jim Benning | 11.18.09 | 1:50 PM ET
Paul Theroux’s new novel isn’t scheduled to be released in the U.S. until February 2010, but it’s already getting mixed reviews in the British press. It’s a mystery of sorts set in Calcutta and featuring a down-on-his-luck travel-writer-protagonist named Jerry Delfont.
Intriguingly, writes Doug Johnstone in The Independent:
Midway through the book, Delfont meets a fictional veteran US travel writer called Paul Theroux, a more successful and famous version of Delfont, whom he despises. The next 20 pages amount to a diatribe by Delfont about the act of travel writing, describing it as an emotionally stunted, puerile and selfish pastime, and brutally denouncing anyone who is stupid and arrogant enough to do it. This remarkable interlude is compelling, like rubbernecking a psychological car crash - but the rest of the novel is distinctly patchy, the bad points eventually outweighing the good.
Apparently the sex writing in the book leaves something to be desired. Once again, Theroux has been nominated for the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction award.
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Yahoo! BuzzThe Death of the Idyll
by Frank Bures | 11.13.09 | 10:54 AM ET
Frank Bures on "The Wisdom of Tuscany" and the last, dying gasp of a travel book genre
Following Chekhov to ‘Hell’
by Robert Reid | 11.04.09 | 10:41 AM ET
Photo by Robert Reid On Sakhalin Island, Robert Reid communes with the world's first "Gulag tourist"
Travel Writer as Curator
by Rick Steves | 11.03.09 | 9:51 AM ET
On the state of newspapers and the role of tour guides and guidebook writers
The Perfect Traveler
by Pico Iyer | 10.28.09 | 10:14 AM ET
He was cool, steady and prone to breaking rules. Pico Iyer celebrates the life and work of Somerset Maugham.
New Travel Book: ‘Save the Deli’
by Eva Holland | 10.21.09 | 3:40 PM ET
Here’s one for traveling pastrami-lovers everywhere.
“Save the Deli” follows author David Sax around Europe and North America in search of a shrinking number of Jewish delicatessens—and, though the project was driven by fears for a declining institution, the result seems to be a hopeful one.
In a letter to potential readers posted on Amazon, Sax addresses the “heresy” of his search for the deli in such unlikely spots as Salt Lake City or Brussels:
Three years ago, when I began working on this book, I too had fallen prey to the misguided notion that great deli was only confined to New York and Montreal. Anything outside those cities had to be a pale imitation. I, like many Jewish deli lovers, was narrow-minded, could see and imagine no further than the local delicatessen I frequented…a village simpleton who knows nothing beyond his little shtetl and the salamis therein.
But as I hit the road, in search of the story of delicatessen in American and around the world, I tasted revelation after revelation.
Publishers Weekly describes these revelations as “joyful moments in this otherwise elegiac travelogue,” and notes that the book’s “well-crafted portraits don’t string together perfectly, but individual chapters shine.”
Sully Book Watch: ‘Highest Duty’ has Arrived
by Eva Holland | 10.13.09 | 5:07 PM ET
Highest Duty, the memoir from celebrity pilot hero and mustached American Chesley Sullenberger, hit bookstores across the nation today. Over at Gawker, Hamilton Nolan offers his preferred title, which we present in a slightly sanitized form: “How to Crash Land a Plane in a Mother*&$#ing River and 99 Other Life Skills Every Badass Should Know.”
Another new book—Miracle on the Hudson, also released today—tells the story of Flight 1549’s crash into the Hudson River from the passengers’ perspective. USA Today has an excerpt.
My Next Travel Book
by Tom Swick | 10.12.09 | 10:53 AM ET
Contemplating and celebrating the world of travel
Interview with Bonnie Tsui: ‘American Chinatown’
by Jenna Schnuer | 10.07.09 | 10:07 AM ET
Photo by Matthew Elliott Jenna Schnuer talks to the author of a new book about American Chinatowns and why "broken Chinese is the mark of being Chinese American"
New Travel Book: ‘Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities’
by Eva Holland | 10.06.09 | 11:33 AM ET
We know there’s no shortage of odd and innovative maps out there these days—and now, a new book aims to collect some of the best. This “atlas of cartographic curiosities” comes from Frank Jacobs, the author of the Strange Maps blog, and it mixes everything from inaccurate historical maps to satirical cartoon maps, map mash-ups, maps of fictional literary settings and more. Book Bencher Jenna Krajeski calls the book “a peculiar and delightful compiling of disparately obsessive imaginations, selected on the criteria of strangeness, rarity, and originality.”
“Strange Maps” hits bookstores on October 29.
The Worst Hotel in the World
by Frank Bures | 10.02.09 | 10:47 AM ET
Frank Bures reflects on the hotels we love to hate -- and the book celebrating one of them
In Praise of ‘Hindoo Holiday’
by Michael Yessis | 10.01.09 | 1:56 PM ET
Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Dirda professes his love for J.R. Ackerley’s book about his five months in India, Hindoo Holiday—both for its content and his quest to find it.
“I first read Hindoo Holiday 25 years ago because of [Evelyn] Waugh’s atypical rave, which I came across in the massive, and massively enjoyable, volume of his collected essays and journalism,” Dirda writes. “In those pre-Internet days it took a while to turn up a copy of Ackerley’s onetime best seller, and I can still remember my glee in finally unearthing that worn Chatto and Windus edition in Heffer’s bookstore during a short visit to Cambridge, England.”
Interview With Richard Hammond and Jeremy Smith: ‘Clean Breaks’
by Joanna Kakissis | 09.23.09 | 12:15 PM ET
Joanna Kakissis talks green travel, greenwashing and experiential journeys with the authors of a new book
The Times’ 20 Best Travel Books of the Past Century
by Eva Holland | 09.21.09 | 5:17 PM ET
The venerable London daily has an excellent roundup, with plenty of attention to some lesser-known (these days) names from several decades past. Wilfred Thesiger, Freya Stark, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Paul Theroux and Jonathan Raban hold down the top five slots. As a bonus, each entry includes links to the original Times reviews, interviews, excerpts and other archived material.
William Dalrymple on Travel Writing, Past and Future
by Eva Holland | 09.21.09 | 4:02 PM ET
The author of “In Xanadu” and “City of Djinns”—which landed at number 16 on our list of the top 30 travel books—has a thoughtful, if fairly grim, essay in the Guardian on the changing state of travel writing. Dalrymple opens with the story of his visit, with Patrick Leigh Fermor, to the spot where Bruce Chatwin’s ashes had been scattered:
Inevitably, it was a melancholy visit. Not only were we there to honour the memory of the dead friend who had introduced us, but Leigh Fermor himself was not in great shape. At dinner that night, it was clear that the great writer and war hero, now in his mid-90s, was in very poor health. Over dinner we talked about how travel writing seemed to have faded from view since its great moment of acclaim in the late 1970s and 80s, when both Leigh Fermor and Chatwin had made their names and their reputations. It wasn’t just that publishers were not as receptive as they had once been to the genre, nor that the big bookshops had contracted their literary travel writing sections from prominent shelves at the front to little annexes at the back, usually lost under a great phalanx of Lonely Planet guidebooks. More seriously, and certainly more irreversibly, most of the great travel writers were either dead or dying.
He offers a little hope further in. The whole thing is worth reading.
Cycle Killer
by David Byrne | 09.21.09 | 10:27 AM ET
iStockPhoto In his new book, "Bicycle Diaries," David Byrne reflects on his travels on two wheels. Herewith, an excerpt.
Jon Krakauer Talks Chris McCandless and Pat Tillman
by Eva Holland | 09.18.09 | 1:35 PM ET
In this Daily Beast interview, the “Into the Wild” author talks about his new book on the NFL star-turned-soldier, and what Tillman and McCandless had in common:
They were both uncommonly idealistic. They were both pretty hardass in their ideals and sticking to them. But they chose such different paths—McCandless dropped out of society, while Tillman was all about living in this world and doing your duty. They were both very similar and very different.
Krakauer also explains why “Into the Wild” is his favorite of his four books. (Via The Book Bench)
Interview With John Rasmus: ‘The New Age of Adventure’
by Jim Benning | 09.16.09 | 10:03 AM ET
Jim Benning asks the National Geographic Adventure editor about a new travel anthology, and about how technology is changing our sense of adventure
Interview With Andrew Zimmern: Travels in a ‘Bizarre World’
by Joshua Berman | 09.15.09 | 10:22 AM ET
Credit: Travel Channel, L.L.C. Joshua Berman asks the Travel Channel host about his new show, his book, and the impact of globalization on culinary diversity
Skip the Colosseum? Give Prague a Pass?
by Eva Holland | 09.02.09 | 10:24 AM ET
Eva Holland sees an emerging trend in the world of travel advice, and she's not happy about it
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