‘Naked Tourist,’ ‘The Places in Between’ in the New York Times

Travel Blog  •  Michael Yessis  •  06.11.06 | 6:37 PM ET

imageIt’s rare that the New York Times reviews a travel book, and even more rare when it reviews the same travel book twice. And I can’t remember the last travel book that made the cover of the Sunday Book Review. This weekend the paper hit the trifecta. Last Sunday, Lawrence Osborne’s The Naked Tourist: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall landed a spot in a roundup of summer travel books; yesterday it got a full review from William Grimes, who called it a “a biting, highly amusing and occasionally profound inquiry into travel and its discontents.” Today, the cover of the Book Review features Tom Bissell’s stellar review of Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between, which chronicles the writer’s walk across Afghanistan in 2002. “Even in mild weather in an Abrams tank, such a trip would be mane-whitening,” Bissell writes. “But Stewart goes in the middle of winter, crossing through some territory still shakily held by the Taliban—and entirely on foot. There are some Medusa-slayingly gutsy travel writers out there—Redmond O’Hanlon, Jeffrey Tayler, Robert Young Pelton—but Stewart makes them look like Hilton sisters.”

Bissell writes that, in “Places,” Stewart covers much of the same ground as The Road to Oxiana, which finished No. 2 in World Hum’s countdown of the Top 30 travel books last month.

The author and book to which he’s doomed to suffer comparison is Robert Byron, whose “Road to Oxiana” details a journey across Persia and Afghanistan in the 1930’s. (No doubt mindful of this, Stewart name-checks Byron twice.) But Stewart has little to worry about. In literary terms, he’s Byron’s equal, and in matters of temperament and compassion, he’s arguably Byron’s better. While Stewart’s chapters are typically short and episodic, every one has a haiku-like intensity.

An essay by Bissell about “Oxiana” can be found here, and the New York Times offers the first chapter of “Places.”



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