Book Buzz for Thursday, July 9, 2009
Carolyn Larson – Special to The Garden Island
From Homer to Marco Polo, Captain Cook and Jack Kerouac, readers have been enchanted for centuries by the tales of travelers. Classic voyage raconteurs like Joshua Slocum, Jack London, Ernest Shakleton, Beryl Markam and Isabella Bird continue to interest and educate readers. Modern traveler favorites include Robert Pirsig, Che Guevara, Bill Bryson, Peter Mayle and Tony Horwitz. From adventurers and explorers, to soul searchers and epicures these travel writers create works that both inspire and inform travel.
This week’s Book Buzz offers a few new travel reads for both the hearty voyagers and the armchair traveler.
Happy reading.
Angry Wind: Through Muslim Black Africa by Truck, Bus, Boat, and Camel
By Jeffrey Tayler.
916.60433
This engrossing narration of crossing the Sahel- the southern region of the Sahara Desert-by tortuous and frequently hair-raising local conveyances finds a barren, wind-scoured region, wracked by hunger, tribal conflict, animosity between Muslims and Christians and an infuriatingly corrupt and high-handed bureaucracy. Appreciative of the generosity and patience of the region’s long-suffering inhabitants, the author also sees their cultures as bogged down by dogma and fatalism. Tayler’s vivid account opens an everyday window on a world that the West normally confronts only in crisis. In another African tale try Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart by Tim Butcher in which the author retraces the steps of 19th-century explorer H.M. Stanley’s Victorian-era travels through the present-day Republic of Congo.
A Camera, Two Kids, and a Camel: My Journey in Photographs
By Annie Griffiths Belt
779.092 Be
A National Geographic photographer for three decades, Griffiths Belt discloses the secrets of a peripatetic life…revealing in often hilarious detail how she managed to juggle two children, bulky cases of camera equipment and everything needed for a nurturing family life as she traveled to far-flung destinations around the world. When her children were born, she kept right on going-and this book is a loving compendium of the wisdom she gained. A collection of emotionally rich photographs, it chronicles three decades of international travel, a moveable family, and the art she created along the way. Her quirky sense of humor and many touching stories will delight and excite readers. For another photographic journey and an engaging travelogue by a Kauai resident try John Wehrheim’s Bhutan: Hidden Lands of Happiness.
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen
By Christopher McDougall
796.42409 McD
Full of incredible characters, amazing athletic achievements, cutting-edge science, and, most of all, pure inspiration, Born to Run is an epic adventure and an engaging and picaresque account of humankind’s innate love of running. McDougall sets off to find a tribe of the world’s greatest distance runners and learn their secrets, and in the process shows us that everything we thought we knew about running is wrong.
Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
By Elizabeth Gilbert
910.4 Gilbert Gi
In this sprawling yet methodical travelogue of soul-searching and self-discovery, 30-something author Gilbert is plagued with despair after a nasty divorce. She divides a year equally among three dissimilar countries, exploring her competing urges for earthly delights and divine transcendence: pleasure in Italy, devotion in India, and on the island of Bali, a balance between worldly enjoyment and communion with the divine. Sustaining a chatty, conspiratorial tone, Gilbert fully engages readers in the year’s cultural and emotional tapestry as she details her exotic tableau with history, anecdote and impression. To search for more happiness try The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner.
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar
By Paul Theroux
914.02245 Th
Get on board Theroux’s fast-moving travelogue, which features some of the most astute commentary on our distorted notions of time, space, and each other in the age of jet speed, broadband connections, and cultural extinction. The well-known travel writer gets mixed reviews for this saga of retracing his original 1975 Orient Express journey about which he wrote: The Great Railway Bazaar. You can also get off the train and do some harrowing nomadic wandering with the extraordinary sixty-three-year-old adventurer, Helen Thayer in Walking the Gobi: A 1600-Mile Trek Across a Desert of Hope and Despair.
Into Thick Air: Biking to the Bellybutton of Six Continents
By Jim Malusa
910.4 Ma
Delightful debut travelogue by botanist Malusa, who cycled to the lowest point on each of six continents. This peculiar quest sent him along routes connecting areas as diverse as Cairo and the Dead Sea, the Australian outback and Lake Eyre. Locals from Darwin to Djibouti constantly approached him, offering tea or pastries or just respite from the elements. They were probably responding to the same likable quality that comes across in Malusa’s text. Steeped in sarcasm and alive to the irony of any situation, observant and wry, omnivorous in the scope of its details and utterly subjective.
Lois on the Loose: One Woman, One Motorcycle, 20,000 Miles Across the Americas
By Lois Pryce
This bright, funny travelogue from the witty and sociable Pryce will charm anyone who longs for adventure and a stretch of the open road. Non-stop action and adventure from Anchorage, Alaska to Ushuaia, Argentina. An it-ain’t-the-destination-so-much-as-the-ride book.
No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach
By Anthony Bourdain
910.4092
Planes, trains, hotels, longboats, jungle lodges, helicopters…and the many wonderful places in between. Chef and TV host Bourdain has crisscrossed the globe in search of adventure and great food. This illustrated journal features story-telling pictures and commentary on his world tour of food and mayhem in exotic places. An opinionated guide to the best and worst places to visit and to eat. Find another travel-and-taste in Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives: An All American Road Trip-With Recipes!
Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape
By Raja Shehadeh
915.69404 Sh
A work of passionate polemic, journeying, history, and autobiography, this highly original consideration of the Palestinian-Israeli issue is structured around a series of vigorous, attentive hikes through the occupied territories. It reveals the pernicious impact that decades of warfare have had on the contested land. Shehadeh, a lawyer and human-rights activist who lives in the West Bank city of Ramallah, gives the reader, accustomed to the point-counterpoint of daily journalism, a personal sense of one man’s attachment to his land and of a people’s feelings of loss and uncertainty as more settlements are constructed and reconciliation drifts farther from view.
Previous Convictions: Assignments from Here and There
By AA Gill
910.4092 Gi
In this boisterous and profane travelogue, British author and columnist Gill unleashes caustic opinions from 32 spots, both “Here” (the UK) and “There” (everywhere else). From Haiti to Oman, Brazil to Vietnam, the author’s vivid, vigorous prose-especially in his uproarious verb choices-enchants and enthralls.
The Ridiculous Race: 26,000 Miles. 2 Guys. 1 Globe. No Airplanes.
Steve Hely and Vali Chandrasekaran
910.41 He
By all accounts, a very funny tale sure to make readers laugh. Friends, TV comedy writers, and 20-something Los Angelinos decide to circle the globe and make a race of it, starting in LA and going in opposite directions. The hook: no planes. Told in alternating voices, the narrative becomes a slave to its subject, racing from antic to antic without slowing for reflection or a sense of the world’s impact on the travelers. But did we mention funny?
Travels with My Chicken: A Man and His Companion Take to the Road
By Martin Gurdon
914.10486 Gu
There’s something wonderfully British about Gurdon’s wry little memoir about traveling around the United Kingdom, chicken named Tikka in tow, promoting a book he’d just written called Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance about his adventures with his backyard chicken flock. Along the way, he was routinely asked why chickens cross the road. Illustrated with the author’s drawings, this droll book is perfect reading for appreciators of the mildly offbeat.
Twenty Chickens for a Saddle: The Story of an African Childhood
By Robyn Scott
968.8302 Scott Sc
For a white child in Botswana in the 1980s and 1990s, home is an adventure in paradise, with horses, snakes, crocodiles, baobab trees, starry nights, and more. Growing up “on the fringe,” Robyn and her siblings are home-schooled by their independent mother, who argues all the time with her physician husband, who flies around to rural clinics and argues with his eccentric dad. But nature is the story in this idyllic memoir, and not as background. Happy stories are hard to tell, but Scott succeeds in this engaging recreation of a child’s Botswana, apolitical and Eden-like. She has no sordid revelations, no shocking surprises-just a raconteur’s talent for making any story she tells interesting. For more romantic Africa try the classic The Flame Trees of Thika:
Memories of an African Childhood by Elspeth Huxley or Isak Dinesen’s I Had a Farm in Africa.
Venice is a Fish: A Sensual Guide
By Tiziano Scarpa
945.31 Sc
Scarpa writes a chain of linked essays about the one of the world’s most unusual and historical cities which captures Venice as only words and language on the tongue of a native can. He focuses each chapter of his guide through different parts of the body beginning with the feet before moving up to the legs and heart. Eventually the author moves on to the more obvious senses of sight, sound, taste and smell. His approach from the soul, not the mind produces a lovely literary introduction to a magical city.
• Carolyn Larson is head librarian at Lihu‘e Public Library. Her weekly column brings you the buzz on new, popular and good books available at your neighborhood library. Book annotations are culled from online publishers’ descriptions and published reviews.
