Like Hemingway and Melville, Joseph Conrad transformed a life of adventure into gripping novels. As Adam Kirsch notes, he was “a ship’s captain, visiting ports from Malaysia to Venezuela. He attempted suicide in Marseilles, had a ship blown up under him in Sumatra, almost died of dysentery in the Belgian Congo, and fell in love with a mademoiselle in Mauritius.” A biography, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, by John Stape, explores the many facets of Conrad’s character. In recent weeks, it’s been receiving mixed reviews.

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Release. Praise. Bestseller. Julia Roberts. End-of-year lists. Oprah. Juggernaut. Now, two years after its debut, comes the next phase: Reconsideration of—and backlash against—Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love.”

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A few months back I wrote about Sylvester Stallone’s latest addition to the “Rambo” series. Sly had wrapped up filming on the Thai-Burmese border right around the time that the military junta began cracking down on protesting monks, and he told the media that he wanted his new flick to help expose the cruelty of the ruling generals. “It would be a whitewashing not to show what’s over there,” he said at the time. “I think there is a story that needs to be told.”

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Paul Theroux is back, right on schedule, with a new book of fiction, this time a collection of three novellas about Westerners in India called The Elephanta Suite. Pico Iyer gives it a glowing review in Time, calling it “a set of brilliantly evocative and propulsive novellas.”

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After a couple months of hype, including an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Sean Penn’s adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s book “Into the Wild” opens today in New York and Los Angeles. The big-screen telling of Christopher McCandless’s self-imposed exile from mainstream society and tragic journey into the Alaskan wilderness is Penn’s “warmest, most celebratory and most completely realized film and, though you might not guess it from the material, it is also arguably his most personal,” writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. 

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We’ve spent the week celebrating the 50th anniversary of “On the Road.” By now, some have had more than enough. Actually, some had already had enough 50 years ago when the novel debuted. Herewith, a sampling of what Kerouac naysayers have been saying:

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Ouch. Slate’s media critic Jack Shafer took a swipe at conventional travel journalism yesterday, in a column that scolds the New York Times’s “Escapes” section for “lack of imagination” in running three stories on Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula this summer. Shafer uses the example to launch a broader plea for more bite in travel writing.

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Dwight Garner, Paper Cuts blogger for the New York Times and senior editor of The New York Times Book Review, calls Gilbert Millstein’s Sept. 5, 1957 review of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” “probably the most famous book review in the history of this newspaper.” The book, Millstein wrote, “is the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat,’ and who’s principal avatar he is.” Kerouac saw the book review shortly after midnight that day, accompanied by Joyce Johnson. In a Vanity Fair piece that recalls that night, Johnson writes that Kerouac had a “weirdly flat response” to the review. 

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Sean Penn lined up some impressive talent for his adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s beloved book Into the Wild, the story of twentysomething Christopher McCandless’s self-imposed exile from mainstream society and tragic journey into the Alaskan wilds. Penn wrote and directed the film, which stars Emile Hirsch, Vince Vaughn, Catherine Keener, Zach Galifianakis, William Hurt and others. Eddie Vedder and Gustavo Santaolalla contribute to the soundtrack. The movie opens Sept. 21, and already I’m getting that dueling “I can’t wait to see it/I can’t believe what an awful idea this is” feeling of seeing a favorite book get turned into a movie. 

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If you want to instill wanderlust in very young kids by traveling with them, read this. If you want to instill wanderlust in kids without taking them on the road, World Hum contributor and Washington Post travel book critic Jerry V. Haines has some books for you. He reviewed six travel books for kids in Sunday’s Post. In the books, Haines writes, “children can go to other lands and other centuries, unrestrained by logic, laws of physics or other unfortunate realities.” Among those he recommends: Angelina’s Island by Jeanette Winter and Hugo and Miles in I’ve Painted Everything! by Scott Magoon. 

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Now that it’s locked into bestseller lists and Julia Roberts is making a movie out of it, Elizabeth Gilbert’s travel book “Eat, Pray, Love” is a bona fide cultural phenomenon. It’s a fixture on the World Hum Travel Zeitgeist, it’s the celebrity must-read of the moment and a go-to summer book recommendation. It’s also getting a second look from critics such as Slate’s Katie Roiphe, who calls “Eat, Pray, Love” “precisely the sort of inspirational story of one woman’s journey to recovery that I would never expect myself to pick up in a bookshop.” Yet she reads it, and likes it.

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Many of us rely on guidebooks when we travel, whether for practical advice, personal insight or a bit of simple reassurance. Ryszard Kapuscinski, or “the legendary chronicler of anarchy” as he’s called in the July issue of Outside, apparently never made a trip without his copy of The Histories by the 5th century BC Greek polymath, Herodotus. Writing for the magazine, Patrick Symmes aptly describes the newish Travels With Herodotus—it was published in Polish in his native country in 2004—as a “final gift, a call to wander widely and see deeply” from the journalist. Since the appearance of an English edition on bookshelves earlier this month, lengthy reviews have peppered periodicals in Canada and England, as well as across the United States. World Hum’s review appears today. With one exception that I was able to find, all of them—perhaps knowing it was their last chance—nearly fall over themselves offering praise.

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