Tag: Travel Books
The Guardian Picks 100 Top Non-Fiction Books
by Eva Holland | 06.16.11 | 11:58 AM ET
The list is organized thematically, and the travel section—way down at the bottom—includes World Hum favorites by Mark Twain, Jan Morris, Jonathan Raban and the late Patrick Leigh Fermor. A number of travel-themed titles have also found their way into the other sections, and the whole list is worth a read. (Via @legalnomads)
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Yahoo! BuzzThe Special Chaos of Mexico City
by Daniel Hernandez | 06.06.11 | 3:53 PM ET
In an excerpt from "Down & Delirious in Mexico City," Daniel Hernandez endures smog season in Mexico's famously polluted capital
‘Back to the Wild’: More on Christopher McCandless
by Eva Holland | 04.01.11 | 12:44 PM ET
The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reports that members of the McCandless family recently traveled to Alaska to visit the old school bus where one of their own, Christopher McCandless, died. The visit was part of a promotional effort for a new book (and accompanying DVD), Back to the Wild, which will showcase McCandless’ photos and writing. Profits from the book will go to a non-profit aimed at helping “new mothers in need.”
As always, McCandless and his bus are a contentious subject in Alaska. After describing the parents’ visit, News-Miner writer Dermot Cole adds:
I have long believed that the junked bus ought to be moved, largely because it’s an attractive nuisance. With people ripping off additional parts of the bus as time goes by, it makes more sense to move it closer to Healy or somewhere else.
Year after year, a steady stream of unprepared people risk their lives trying to get to what would otherwise be seen as an example of environmental blight instead of a shrine.
Wired’s Kevin Kelly: Travel as ‘Higher Education’
by Eva Holland | 02.23.11 | 11:41 AM ET
Chris Mitchell interviewed Kelly, who’s taken a break from writing bestsellers about technology to release a travel photography book. The book, Asia Grace, compiles photos from Kelly’s travels through Asia as a young backpacker in the 1970s. Here’s the Wired co-founder on those early travels:
I had hoped to work for National Geographic. I even called up one photo editor there and told him where I was going, looking for an assignment, but of course, they did not work that way… My travels never “paid” for themselves in any economic way, but I never really tried very hard to do so. I think of them more like my higher education. And for the amount of time I spent there, and what I learned, it was the cheapest education ever.
The Best Travel Books of 2010
by Frank Bures | 12.09.10 | 12:10 PM ET
Frank Bures surveys the year's most intriguing titles and offers a few gift ideas
New Travel Book: ‘The Minaret of Djam’ by Freya Stark
by Eva Holland | 11.30.10 | 4:26 PM ET
The 1970 hardcover of this Freya Stark classic has been out of print for some time, but a new paperback edition is set to hit bookstores on Dec. 21.
The book recounts Stark’s journey in search of Afghanistan’s Minaret of Jam; the 12th-century relic is now a UNESCO World Heritage site, though at the time Stark visited, it was a recently re-discovered archaeological find. The publisher’s description notes that “Djam is, even today, one of the most inaccessible and remote places in Afghanistan. When Freya Stark traveled there, few people in the world had ever laid eyes on it or managed to reach the desolate valley in which it lies.”
Three of Stark’s books appeared on our list of the 100 most celebrated travel books of all time.
Travel Books Make the New York Times’ 2010 Notable List
by Eva Holland | 11.29.10 | 12:58 PM ET
The Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2010 list has arrived, and a couple of familiar names appear on it. Peter Hessler’s “Country Driving” and Ian Frazier’s ” Travels in Siberia” both made the non-fiction section of the list, while travel writer and novelist Gary Shteyngart landed on the fiction side for his latest, “Super Sad True Love Story.”
We ran an excerpt from Hessler’s book and interviewed him about road tripping in China earlier this year. (Via The Book Bench)
Sons of ‘The Beach’
by Rolf Potts, Kristin Van Tassel | 11.11.10 | 11:22 AM ET
What do "The Beach," "Are You Experienced?" and other travel novels say about us? Rolf Potts and Kristin Van Tassel explore backpacker fiction.
Backpacker Novels: A Conversation
by Rolf Potts, Kristin Van Tassel | 11.11.10 | 11:17 AM ET
Rolf Potts and Kristin Van Tassel discuss travel fiction and their essay, Sons of "The Beach"
New Travel Book: ‘A Moveable Feast’
by Jim Benning | 11.10.10 | 2:07 PM ET
Lonely Planet has just published a new anthology to whet travelers’ appetites, A Moveable Feast: Life Changing Food Adventures from Around the World. Edited by Don George, it includes never-before-published tales from Simon Winchester, Anthony Bourdain, Andrew Zimmern and several World Hum contributors, myself included.
George, Andrew McCarthy, Johanna Gohmann and Anita Breland will be reading from the book tonight at Lolita Bar in New York City as part of David Farley’s Restless Legs Reading Series.
I’ll join George, Larry Habegger and Amanda Jones in a reading Sunday evening at Book Passage in Corte Madera.
If you’re around, stop by and say hi.
New Travel Book: ‘100 Journeys for the Spirit’
by Eva Holland | 10.25.10 | 12:19 PM ET
The new guidebook rounds up 100 destinations that feed the soul. Twenty-five of those spots get write-ups from well-known travel writers, poets and novelists, including Pico Iyer, Jan Morris and Paul Theroux. The Telegraph features several excerpts from the book—here’s Pico Iyer, in the foreword:
We all know how we can be turned around by a magic place; that’s why we travel, often. And yet we all know, too, that the change cannot be guaranteed. Travel is a fool’s paradise, Emerson reminded us, if we think that we can find anything far off that we could not find at home. The person who steps out into the silent emptiness of Easter Island is, alas, too often the same person who got onto the plane the day before at Heathrow, red-faced and in a rage.
Yet still the hope persists and sends us out onto the road: certain experiences can so shock or humble us that they take us to places inside ourselves, of terror or wonder or the confounding mixture of them both, that we never see amid the hourly distractions and clutter of home.
They slap us awake and into a recognition of who we might be in our deepest moments.
Foreign Policy Tackles the State of Modern Travel Writing
by Eva Holland | 10.06.10 | 1:16 PM ET
The magazine lines up three perspectives. First up, Bookslut‘s Jessa Crispin emphasizes the greatness of the travel classics, in contrast to today’s offerings. Here’s Crispin:
There’s a reason why you still find so many dusty paperbacks of In Patagonia stuffed in the back pockets of travelers in Argentina. Chatwin’s book is not simply the story of one man’s journey—it reveals the timeless nature of the land and its people by rooting his adventures in the odd and surprising history of the place. But somewhere down the line, that sort of thing went out of fashion. Both travel and writing have changed dramatically in the past 50 years, with the result that it’s been ages since we’ve seen a work that lasts beyond the remaindering season.
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro cites recent works Suketu Mehta’s “Maximum City” and Rory Stewart’s “The Places in Between”—both on our list of the 100 most celebrated travel books of all time—in his rebuttal, arguing that travel writing, with its frequent focus on the lives of distant “others,” is more relevant than ever:
The signal geopolitical event of our time—9/11—was enabled by globalization’s emblematic technologies (the Internet, jetliners) and carried out by a small group of individuals raised in “remote” cultures. Increasingly, it’s an obvious truth that choices made by peoples and nations everywhere may transform the planet’s societies in cataclysmic ways. And so the traditional domain of travel writers—the texture of everyday life; cultures, belief systems, and personal climes—has suddenly become interesting to a whole new audience.
Graeme Wood, meanwhile, sees a lot to dislike in today’s travel writing—but also reason for hope. He starts out arguing for a “catastrophic turn” in travel writing, picking on “Eat, Pray, Love” as symbolic of that turn. He writes, it’s “a whole memoir premised on the notion that even the most decadent, boring, and conventional kinds of travel somehow heal the soul and can turn a suburban ninny into a Herodotus or a Basho.” Ouch. But then Wood eases up, saying that this “doesn’t mean the generation of widely roaming travel writers is finished. Many know that a plane ticket is no guarantee of wisdom and that what one sees on arrival is both more and less than the full story.”
I find this last approach most compelling. Sure, there’s a lot of bad travel writing out there, and it’s never been easier to publish or to find, but there are also plenty of thoughtful, talented traveling writers committed to telling great stories about the world they move through.
Six Spots to Relive ‘Travels With Charley’
by Robert Reid | 09.23.10 | 10:43 AM ET
Robert Reid Fifty years ago John Steinbeck began the road trip that begat a travel classic. Robert Reid unearths the spots where you can still make like the author -- minus the poodle.
Retracing Steinbeck’s ‘Travels With Charley’
by Jim Benning | 09.20.10 | 3:50 PM ET
Fifty years ago this week—on Sept. 23, 1960—John Steinbeck set out on the 10,000-mile road trip that would inspire the classic American memoir, “Travels With Charley.”
This Thursday, writer Bill Steigerwald will set out to retrace Steinbeck’s journey. He plans to write about it, using the trip as “the frame for a book that compares simple, poor, square 1960 America with 2010 America.”
He admits the two journeys will be very different.
Steinbeck camped out under the stars a bunch of times. I won’t. He drove a clunky uncomfortable truck with a Spartan camper shell on its back. I’ll stay at pre-1960 motels when I can and drive a 2010 Rav4 I can sleep in when I must. When Steinbeck was on the road he had only an AM radio and pay phones to keep him tethered to the world. I’ll have enough communication gear for a trip to the moon.
The book “Travels With Charley” will be my map/guide/timeline to the places Steinbeck went and the things he mused, complained or fretted about. Unfortunately, “Charley” is not a travelogue and wasn’t meant to be. It’s often vague and confusing about where Steinbeck actually was on any given date, and Steinbeck, who died in 1968, left no notes, no journal, no expense records.
There’s more information and an interactive map here.
Pico Iyer’s ‘10 Best Travel Books for Your Second Act’
by Eva Holland | 09.20.10 | 12:31 PM ET
Over at Second Act, a site aimed at the over-40 crowd, the author of “Video Night in Kathmandu” shares his “wildly subjective list of the books that have moved me to think about life in new ways and transported me to the farthest corners of possibility.” Four of his picks—along with two of his own books—appeared on our list of the 100 most celebrated travel books of all time.
New Travel Book: ‘Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin’
by Eva Holland | 09.13.10 | 5:11 PM ET
A collection of the author’s letters is due out in February. Many were sent to family and friends—including fellow travel writers Patrick Leigh Fermor and Paul Theroux—during his travels around the world. Nowness.com has a few brief excerpts; here’s a tantalizing favorite:
To Francis Wyndham, Lima, Peru, 1974
I have done what I threatened. I suddenly got fed up with N.Y. and ran away to South America… I intend to spend Christmas in the middle of Patagonia… I’m working on something that could be marvelous, but I’ll have to do it in my own way.
Chatwin’s “In Patagonia” and “The Songlines” both made our list of the 100 most celebrated travel books of all time.
David Byrne’s ‘Bicycle Diaries’ Audio Book to Feature Music, Sounds
by Jim Benning | 09.09.10 | 1:34 PM ET
The “Bicycle Diaries” audio book comes out Sept. 28. I’m intrigued. From DavidByrne.com:
The audiobook version of Bicycle Diaries is available as individual chapters in a podcast-style download exclusively via this site. In addition to music and narration by DB, it also features location sounds, creating an atmosphere more akin to a radio show than a simple reading of the book.
We published Cycle Killer, an excerpt from the book, last year.
Hanging Ten with the Havana Surf Club
by Michael Scott Moore | 09.08.10 | 12:37 PM ET
Reuters In an excerpt from his new book, "Sweetness and Blood," Michael Scott Moore tracks down the origins of surfing in Cuba
Interview with Michael Scott Moore: ‘Sweetness and Blood’
by Jim Benning | 09.08.10 | 12:32 PM ET
Jim Benning talks with the author of a new travel book about the spread of surfing around the globe
New Travel Book: ‘Dreaming in Chinese’
by Jim Benning | 08.31.10 | 6:42 PM ET
Anyone who has ever tried to learn even a few words of Chinese will appreciate the difficulty of the task. It turns out it was a serious challenge even for a woman with a Ph.D. in linguistics and six languages already under her belt.
That would be Deborah Fallows, author of the new book, Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love and Language.
NPR just profiled her. My favorite passage from the radio piece concerned her attempt to order take-out Taco Bell, of all things:
Her tones weren’t very good at that point, though, so Fallows’ request for “takeout”—dabao—was met with a blank stare from the Taco Bell employee. Fallows tried saying dabao with every combination of tones she could think of—rising tones, falling tones—and when that didn’t work, she started pointing at the menu, and then miming the action of walking out the door with a bag of food. After a consultation with several other employees, finally—eureka! Yes, dabao! Yes, of course, they did takeout.