Travel Blog: Literary Travel
The World Hum Travel Zeitgeist: The Explorers
by Michael Yessis | 02.02.07 | 9:38 AM ET
Travelers appear top of mind this week, not destinations. The journeys of Daisann McLane, Bill Bryson, Paulina Porizkova, Martin Sargent, celebrity watchers and Dora the Explorer lead off the Zeitgeist.
Most Read Weblog Post
World Hum (this week)
Daisann McLane: ‘Learning Cantonese’ in Hong Kong
Most Popular Travel Podcast
iTunes (current)
Travel Song Medley by Dora the Explorer
Most Read Story
World Hum (this week)
Paulina Porizkova: A Model Traveler
Most Read Travel Story
USA Today (current)
Oscars Tourism: Celebrity Sightings and a Hotel Within Gawking Distance of the Red Carpet
Best Selling Travel Book
Amazon.com (current)
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert
* We like this book.
Most Popular Travel Story
Netscape (current)
Area-Daily.com Launches
Most Popular Page Tagged Travel
Del.icio.us (recent)
Farecast
Top Travel and Adventure Audiobook
iTunes (current)
A Walk in the Woods
Most Dugg Travel Podcast
Digg (current)
Martin Sargent: Web Drifter
Email to friend
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Mixx
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! BuzzThe World Hum Travel Zeitgeist: Celebrations and the ‘Soccer People’
by Michael Yessis | 01.26.07 | 9:14 AM ET
Happy Australia Day! This week online travelers are going Down Under, up Mount Everest and around the world via Clarkston, Georgia. Here’s the Zeitgeist.
Most Viewed Weblog Post
World Hum (this week)
‘The Soccer People’: Heartbreak and Triumph in Clarkston, Georgia
Most Popular Travel Story
Netscape (current)
Melburnians Celebrate Australia Day
* Among the highlights of the day for Australians: Whipping England at cricket.
Best Travel Magazine
North American Travel Journalism Association Awards (2006)
Budget Travel
* The list of winners includes National Geographic Traveler (best online travel magazine) and St. Louis Post-Dispatch (best newspaper travel section).
Most Blogged Travel Story
New York Times (current)
Site Calculates Risk Factors for Travelers
* It’s a joint project by “researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, with support from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.”
Most Popular Travel Podcast
iTunes (current)
Travel With Rick Steves
Most Popular Page Tagged Travel
Del.icio.us (recent)
Travel Like a Pro: 8 Tips To Make Your Journey Easier
Most Read Travel Story
USA Today (current)
Online Oracles Promise to Ease Your Airfare Angst
* An overview and comparison of Farecast, Farecompare, Kayak, Hotwire and Airfarewatchdog.
‘Travel Writing: Inner and Outer Journeys’
by Frank Bures | 01.25.07 | 8:38 AM ET
Every year, writers of narrative nonfiction get together at Harvard’s Neiman Conference on Narrative Journalism to talk about the genre. The event has been going on long enough that the speeches have been gathered into a new book, Telling True Stories. It’s got some great stuff from Tom Wolfe, Susan Orlean, Gay Talese and other writers. But one of the most exciting things is that travel writing makes an appearance as a bona fide subgenre. “Travel writing is one of the oldest forms of our craft,” Bury the Chains author Adam Hochschild writes in an essay “Travel Writing: Inner and Outer Journeys.” Hochschild traces the journey archetype back to the Odyssey, and cites Primo Levi’s The Reawakening and Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat as classics of travel literature.
‘A Sense of the World’ Nominated for National Book Critics Circle Award
by Michael Yessis | 01.22.07 | 8:31 AM ET
Jason Roberts’s book about the life of James Holman, a man who became a prolific traveler in the 1800s after losing his sight, has earned a National Book Critics Circle nomination in the biography category. In her review for World Hum, Liz Sinclair called ‘A Sense of the World’ insightful, highly detailed and gripping.
The Critics: ‘Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration’
by Jim Benning | 01.19.07 | 7:16 AM ET
Writing a sweeping history of world exploration sounds like no easy feat. Doing it well sounds even tougher. But the critics are raving about Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s new book that attempts just that, Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration. The New York Times calls it a “brilliant and readable book,” adding that it’s “an illuminating and, at times, stirring examination of the divergence and convergence of cultures, a rich study of humankind’s restless spirit. As intimate as Alexander the Great’s deathbed wish and as vast as human migration, this book explains who we are as much as what we have done.”
Next Up on Hollywood’s Travel Book Adaptation List: ‘Eat, Pray, Love’
by Michael Yessis | 01.18.07 | 12:38 PM ET
Julia Roberts is on board to play the lead in Elizabeth Gilbert’s critically acclaimed bestseller “Eat, Pray, Love,” which World Hum books editor Frank Bures calls hilarious, moving and deeply engaging. Will a movie version of the book work? Bures, who also interviewed Gilbert for Poets & Writers, thinks it could. “It’s hard to say how much the film will resemble the travel book, but Julia Roberts is a fine actress,” Bures says. “She might not be quite as funny or quick-witted as Gilbert, but I’m sure she’ll be great. You can’t really lose with Julia Roberts playing you.”
Jack Kerouac in Denver: ‘Just Another Traveler on His Way to Wherever’
by Michael Yessis | 01.16.07 | 8:51 AM ET
The original scroll of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is currently on display in Denver, and Westword’s Amy Haimerl uses the occasion to revisit the writer’s time in the city and examine its far-reaching impact.
The World Hum Travel Zeitgeist: Cheap Flights and Covered Bridges
by Michael Yessis | 01.05.07 | 9:08 AM ET
It’s a new year, and travelers are still showing love for some old standbys—Las Vegas, cheap travel and a good Irish beer. But they’re also looking for some underwater adventure. Here’s your first Zeitgeist of 2007:
Most Viewed Weblog Category
World Hum (this week)
Las Vegas
Most E-Mailed Travel Story
New York Times (current)
No Place for a Zamboni: A Hockey Rink Where Players Sink
* Yes, this story is about the glorious sport of underwater hockey. It is, apparently, big in Britain.
Most Popular Page Tagged Travel
Del.icio.us (current)
How to Get the Cheapest Flight Every Single Time
Most Dugg Travel Podcast
Digg (current)
The Traveling Morans
Most Viewed Weblog Post
World Hum (this week)
Three Travel Books Crack Entertainment Weekly’s Nonfiction Books of the Year List
Best Selling Travel Book
Amazon.com (current)
The Places in Between by Rory Stewart
Top Travel and Adventure Audiobook
iTunes (current)
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
Busiest Airport in the U.S.
FAA (2006)
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport
* Total flights logged in Atlanta: 976,307. Chicago O’Hare International Airport finished a close second with 958,643 flights.
Most Popular Travel Story
Netscape (current)
Covered Bridges Take You From Present to Past
More Gifts for the Traveler
by Jim Benning | 12.18.06 | 3:19 PM ET
We’ve already noted a number of books that could make fine gifts for the traveler in your life. (For more book ideas, see World Hum contributor Jerry V. Haines’s suggestions in Sunday’s Washington Post, or, for classic narrative titles, our list of the top 30 travel books.) But what if—gasp—the traveler you have in mind doesn’t want more books? Worry not. We have ideas. For starters, consider a T-shirt featuring one of the New Yorker’s many travel-related cartoons, such as the class-conscious one pictured here. Perusing the cartoons is good fun, even if you’re not in the market for a shirt. How can you not love this one in which a flight attendant announces to passengers, “Ladies and gentlemen, is there a bankruptcy attorney on board?” If you place a T-shirt rush order by tomorrow, you can still ensure pre-Christmas delivery.
Of Spilled Beer and Lederhosen: Recalling Oktoberfest
by Jim Benning | 12.04.06 | 7:46 AM ET
So October is but a distant memory. That doesn’t mean the annual bacchanal in Munich cannot still be celebrated. Thomas Swick of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel does just that in Sunday’s paper: “Remember this. The vast hall. The great din. The spilled beer. The smoky haze. The saccharine music. The pretzel vendors. The workhorse waitresses. The buttery smell of roasted chickens. The vendors of silly hats. The bodies squeezed onto benches that disappear into the distance and suggest a boarding school cafeteria of colossal scope and questionable fare. The strange feeling, as you drink engulfed by a human sea, of escape, of having departed the world of work, responsibility, sobriety.”
Gifts for the Traveler: Photo Books
by Jim Benning | 11.17.06 | 11:31 AM ET
‘Tis the season when intriguing travel-related photo books hit bookstores, offering travelers a raft of gift ideas. We already noted the recent release of Middle of Nowhere, Lonely Planet’s celebration of picturesque, far flung places. Yesterday, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Regan McMahon suggested several other intriguing titles. For starters, McMahon noted Hans Kemp’s Bikes of Burden, featuring photos of motorbikes pressed into delivery work in Vietnam. “In each sharp color photo, one can barely see the rider as items from ducks to hula hoops to fish to wooden cabinets to topiary are piled high on the two-wheeled vehicles,” McMahon writes. “My favorite: a shot from behind of a towering stack of live fish floating, one each, in water-filled, gallon-size baggies, with the driver completely obscured.”
A Guide to the ‘Middle of Nowhere’
by Jim Benning | 11.03.06 | 7:11 AM ET
Having created guidebooks to just about everywhere, Lonely Planet has set its sights on nowhere, and in a big way. We recently noted the release of Lonely Planet’s new literary travel anthology, Tales from Nowhere, which features stories from far-flung locales. Now comes the Lonely Planet Guide to the Middle of Nowhere, a coffee table book with arresting photos and short essays about middles of nowhere around the globe, from Bolivia’s Atacama Desert to India’s Himachal Pradesh. “For a supposedly social species, our appetite for space, wilderness and isolation is remarkable,” writes Ben Saunders in the introduction. “The phrase ‘middle of nowhere’ has wormed its way into our everyday language; we all know where it is, and we can all recount a visit there, but unlike the summit of a mountain, the shore of an ocean or a famous monument, ‘nowhere’ itself is harder to pinpoint.” Yet LP manages to locate it in more than 50 places, each of which can whet the appetite of those yearning for their own kind of nowhere.
Eric Newby, One of the Last of the ‘Fearless English Gentlemen-Adventurers’
by Jim Benning | 10.30.06 | 1:26 PM ET
That’s how Pico Iyer recently described Newby, the author of “A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush,” who died earlier this month at the age of 86. Michael Shapiro recalled the author’s life in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle. In an e-mail, Iyer told Shapiro: “Newby was one of the last of that dazzling generation of fearless English gentlemen-adventurers distinguished by Norman Lewis, Wilfred Thesiger and Patrick Leigh Fermor, the kind who could toss off a walk across Afghanistan as easily as a journey to the corner shop and who in their travels remind us how small are the distances between Englishman and Bedouin. What made Newby so wonderful and distinctive was that he often seemed to be traveling in spite of himself, less professional explorer than professional Everyman.” Earlier this year, Shapiro sang the praises of Newby’s “A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush” for our list of the top 30 travel books of all time.
Related on World Hum:
* NPR Remembers Eric Newby
* Rory MacLean Remembers Eric Newby
* R.I.P. Eric Newby
Rory MacLean Remembers Eric Newby
by Michael Yessis | 10.24.06 | 6:38 AM ET
R.I.P. Eric Newby
by Michael Yessis | 10.22.06 | 5:43 PM ET
Eric Newby, author of the classic travel book “A Short Walk In The Hindu Kush” and other works, passed away of natural causes Friday evening in Southern England. He was 86, and lived an adventurous life.
