Travel Blog: News and Briefs
Thank You, Department of Homeland Security, For Protecting Americans from British Novelists
by Jim Benning | 07.12.04 | 9:18 PM ET
The author of “Amsterdam” and other acclaimed novels made the tongue-in-cheek remark in front of a Seattle audience after he was initially refused entry into the United States. Officials told him the $5,000 speaking honorarium he was to be paid disqualified him from a visa-waiver program. Unfortunately, he is but one of many writers who have been harassed by U.S. officials since the Department of Homeland Security took over border and immigration control last year, writes British journalist Elena Lappin in the New York Times. Lappin was handcuffed and detained for 36 hours after she arrived in the United States without a special journalist visa. Understandably, she wasn’t pleased. “American journalists working abroad, especially in free countries, are not accustomed to monitoring of this kind,” she writes. “By requiring foreign journalists to obtain special visas, the United States has aligned itself with the likes of Iran, North Korea and Cuba, places where reporters are treated as dangerous subversives and disseminators of uncomfortable truths.”
Email to friend
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Mixx
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! BuzzTen Years of Travelers’ Tales
by Jim Benning | 07.12.04 | 9:16 PM ET
The San Francisco Chronicle’s John Flinn celebrates the publishing company’s travel anthologies in a column Sunday. “[T]hese rambling anthologies are like mosaics: Each piece might add only a single note of color, but combine them and step back, and a rich and multifaceted portrait emerges,” he writes. Travelers’ Tales editor Jen Leo liked Flinn’s column, writing in her weblog that it was “a well written primer for those who have never heard of Travelers’ Tales.” She also noted a few upcoming titles from the company, including a collection of China stories. For more on Travelers’ Tales, World Hum interviewed co-founder James O’Reilly in May.
Can Soccer Explain the World?
by Jim Benning | 07.07.04 | 9:15 PM ET
Writer Franklin Foer thinks so. His new book, aptly titled “How Soccer Explains the World,” views culture, politics and human needs through the prism of the international sport. It’s a lovely idea—that by looking at a single sport we can find a way to understand globalization, geopolitics and a host of other complex issues. Whether Foer pulls off the feat is open to debate. Reviews have been mixed. Either way, the author makes some fascinating observations in an interview in the Atlantic Online by Frank Bures, a frequent World Hum contributor. Among them, Foer discusses a key difference between American sports teams and soccer teams around the world, noting that American franchises represent broad regions that cross many demographic lines. “But soccer clubs represent communities or neighborhoods,” he says. “And when you’re representing a neighborhood, you’re representing a very specific segment of the population. Soccer clubs become proxies for ethnicity, class, religion, or social caste. That makes them inherently more political. So soccer matches usually signify a clash of religions, classes, and castes. To me, that’s what makes the game so thrilling to watch. There’s always some elevated stake to the game.”
Rick Steves: The “Perambulating, Mildly Mischievous Mister Rogers” of Guidebook Writers
by Jim Benning | 07.06.04 | 9:20 PM ET
Sunday’s New York Times Magazine featured a colorful, upbeat profile of Rick Steves, the man “in the aviator-style eyeglasses” who is behind the Europe Through the Back Door travel empire. Writer Sara Corbett tailed Steves around Portugal as he updated one of his guidebooks, “blitzing” into hotels for undercover inspections, ensuring his tips and observations were still up to par. Corbett’s story covers a lot of ground, from Steves’ humble travel beginnings to “Ricknicks,” the legions of followers who spot him in Europe as he makes his rounds and dote over him as though they have met the Buddha. Corbett also delves into Steves’ politics. “He is anti-Bush and antiwar, and in this time of high patriotism, some have even accused him of being anti-American,” she writes. “For the most part, though, Steves is careful to be outspoken about only his conviction that travel, done his way, can transform the most narrow-minded American into a citizen of the world. ”
Alex Garland’s “The Coma”
by Michael Yessis | 06.25.04 | 9:24 PM ET
The author of the “The Beach,” the most talked about backpacker travel novel of our time, has written a new novel entitled “The Coma.” Don’t look for another travel tale here. “The Coma” is about a man who is knocked unconscious, and any journey is inward. The London Telegraph features a story about Garland, who discusses his “intellect anxiety,” the new novel and the fact that “The Beach” began as a comic book.
What Would Mark Twain Make of Disneyland’s Tom Sawyer’s Island?
by Jim Benning | 06.25.04 | 9:22 PM ET
That’s but one of the questions cultural historian Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom ponders in a thoughtful article in the journal Common-Place. Wasserstrom focuses on Twain’s classic travel memoir “Innocents Abroad” and the way we travel in the Age of Simulation. “Since rereading ‘Innocents Abroad,’ I have been asking myself…‘what if’ questions about Twain’s voyages across the globe and on the page,” Wasserstrom writes. “What would he make of his birthplace in Hannibal, Missouri, becoming a heritage site? Would he be flattered, annoyed, or simply amused by Tom Sawyer’s Island?” Wasserstrom never really answers the questions, which he raises in the fourth part of the article. But his exploration of the issues is at times compelling.
One Giant Leap for Space Tourists
by Jim Benning | 06.22.04 | 9:29 PM ET
For the first time in history, a privately built aircraft rocketed into space Monday, soaring 62 miles above the earth, bringing the prospect of space tourism ever closer. The media, including CNN, are all over the story.
America’s 10 Best Travel Books
by Jim Benning | 06.22.04 | 9:27 PM ET
With the summer road trip season underway and travelers looking for good beach reading material, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel’s Thomas Swick suggests they try one of his 10 favorite U.S. travel books published in the last century. Author Jonathan Raban makes the list twice. Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley” is there, of course.
Interestingly, Swick included a couple of novels, including Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.” Writes Swick: “Only people who’ve never read this novel think it’s about sex with a minor. Everyone else knows that it’s the sublimely told story of the seduction of a donnish European by the nymphetish New World. And at its heart is a spot-on evocation of roadside America, where even some of our natural attractions are turned into kitsch which, in the hands of a transplanted Russian genius, is transformed into art.”
Bill Bryson: Award-Winning Travel Writer
by Jim Benning | 06.18.04 | 9:32 PM ET
That’s right. According to Reuters, the author of “A Walk in the Woods” and other travel memoirs has won the highest award in Britain’s Aventis Prizes for Science Books for his recent tome, “A Short History of Nearly Everything.” What can’t Bryson write about successfully?
Newman: “I Did Not End Up Making Out with Catherine Zeta-Jones”
by Michael Yessis | 06.15.04 | 9:37 PM ET
McCormick: Addicted to Globe Trekker
by Michael Yessis | 06.15.04 | 9:35 PM ET
Megan McCormick, one of the three primary hosts of the television show Globe Trekker (known outside the U.S. as Pilot Guides), recently got the feature treatment from CNN’s Kevin Drew. McCormick believes her experiences traveling in Asia and Europe helped her get the job. She tells Drew: “I had a lot of respect for them when they did hire me because I thought, Well, they’re hiring someone who loves to travel, not somebody who has just acting experience.”
100 Years of Bloomsday
by Jim Benning | 06.11.04 | 9:42 PM ET
Cheers to USA Today’s Laura Bly for pointing out that this coming Wednesday, June 16 will mark the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, the annual celebration of James Joyce’s classic novel, “Ulysses.” (The book’s entire narrative, with Leopold Bloom at its center, takes place in Dublin on June 16, 1904.) Ever since I took a seminar on “Ulysses” as an undergrad—a course in which the “Ulysses Annotated” book assigned to help make sense of the novel was twice as thick as the novel itself—I’ve sought out pub readings on Bloomsday. Not that I begin to understand all the nuances of the novel. I just like the idea that people get together once a year to toss back pints of Guinness and celebrate a book. Or, at the very least, they use the book as an excuse to drink. For those interested in observing the anniversary, Bly highlights Bloomsday celebrations and gatherings planned in Ireland and around the United States.
The Atlanta Hotel: Accommodations for Writers Not on the Bestseller List
by Jim Benning | 06.07.04 | 9:42 PM ET
Thomas Swick’s excellent two-part series on Bangkok’s Atlanta Hotel concluded Sunday. “All over the world I have visited famous literary hotels—the Ritz in Paris, Raffles in Singapore—that today have rates prohibitive to any author not on the best-seller list,” he writes in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “The Atlanta, in yet another cap feather, was a writers’ hotel that writers could actually afford.”
Travel Trend Watch: Bookstore Tourism
by Michael Yessis | 06.04.04 | 9:47 PM ET
Here’s a travel trend we can get behind: Travel in support of independent booksellers. Larry Portzline started the venture last year as a “grassroots campaign to promote and support independent bookstores by marketing them as a travel and tourist destination.” “It all started last July, when Portzline organized another group of 45 book lovers to travel from Harrisburg to Manhattan to visit 18 bookstores in Greenwich Village,” writes Jane Van Ingen in Poets and Writers magazine. “During the four-hour bus ride to the city, Portzline gave a presentation about competition in the bookselling industry. During the day, travelers visited landmark bookstores such as the Strand and Three Lives and Co., as well as niche stores that sell only cookbooks, foreign-language titles, children’s books, or mysteries.” Next trip: A June 12 excursion, also from Harrisburg, where Portzline works at the local community college, to New York City. Through his Web site, Portzline encourages others to coordinate trips in their own areas. “Wouldn’t it be great,” he writes, “to see busloads of book-lovers pulling up in front of independent bookstores on a regular basis?”
What Ever Happened to Songs About the Road?
by Michael Yessis | 06.04.04 | 9:45 PM ET
“The road is disappearing,” writes Dan Neil in Thursday’s Los Angeles Times. “Fading from popular music is the body of imagery, the poetic conventions that evoke the Mythic American Road.” Neil’s terrific essay—he recently won the Pulitzer for criticism—traces the history of the road song and, unfortunately, it’s available only to subscribers on the Times Web site. Also included in the package: Times music critic Robert Hilburn’s picks for the top 25 road songs. Among his choices: (18) Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Sweet Hitch-Hiker,” (7) Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” (3) Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” and (1) Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.”
