“North Korean Journal” by Michael Palin
Former Monty Python’s star Michael Palin aims with North Korean Journal to do for Pyongyang what The Life of Brian did for the New Testament. He almost succeeds.
“So it Goes: Travels in the Aran Isles, Xian and Places in Between” by Nicolas Bouvier
The great Swiss travel writer Nicolas Bouvier began his career in 1963 with L’Usage du Monde, an account of a journey from Geneva to the Khyber Pass. Published in English as The Way of the World, the book earned him cult status amongst travel-writing aficionados, its distinctive sensibility and supremely elegant prose elevating it well…
“Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale” by Adam Minter
Globalization usually means manufacturing. But globalization reaches into other realms, even waste disposal as Adam Minter wrote in his debut book, Junkyard Planet. In his new book, Secondhand, he investigates what happens to material goods we donate after we’re done using them and travels throughout North America, Asia, and Africa to explore how different countries…
New Book Announcement: “An American Bum in China” by Tom Carter
An American Bum in China: Featuring the bumblingly brilliant escapades of expatriate Matthew Evans is the remarkable but true story of an Iowan misfit. At the age of twenty-one, cancer survivor Evans flees his Mississippi River hometown of Muscatine and heads to China in pursuit of love. He ends up destitute, deported, working as a…
“Wanderlust: The Amazing Ida Pfeiffer, the First Female Tourist” by John van Wyhe
What exactly is a tourist? Briefly, it means someone who travels not for a particular purpose such as exploration, pilgrimage, missionary work or archaeology, but a person who does it for fun. Tourists may have specific places in mind or specific things they want to see, but the overall “purpose” of their travels is pleasure….
“Surfacing” by Kathleen Jamie
Robert Macfarlane and Kathleen Jamie are the two most critically vaunted practitioners of the wildly fertile British publishing phenomenon known as “new nature writing”—though both reportedly resist that genre designation, and both are as much writers of history and human culture as of nature. Both explore these themes in similarly exquisite prose, but their tones…
“An English Made in India: How a Foreign Language Became Local” by Kalpana Mohan
While one might expect a text on linguistics from the title, An English Made in India is fact rather closer to travel-writing: no bad thing, for Kalpana Mohan in an engaging writer and the result is a pleasant and often erudite ramble around India. Along the way, she talks to school teachers in the hills,…
“Ottoman Odyssey: Travels through a Lost Empire” by Alev Scott
Much of early-modern history, up until the early 20th century, was characterized by empire—not just or even particularly the colonial projects of Britain and Spain, but contiguous empires of Russia, Austria-Hungary, China and the Ottomans. These latter were multi-ethnic and—using modern sensibilities—in some ways multinational edifices. They all came to an end around the time…
“A Savage Dreamland: Journeys in Burma” by David Eimer
There is sometimes a feeling—it may even be a sort of implied ASEAN policy—that Southeast Asia will, or at least should, converge: that the countries of the region will develop economically and differentials in standards of living will lessen, that the military will ease itself out of politics, that civil society will strengthen. This has,…
“Epic Continent: Adventures in the Great Stories of Europe” by Nicholas Jubber
Perhaps all travel writers should come home in the end.
“Not a Hazardous Sport: Misadventures of an Anthropologist in Indonesia” by Nigel Barley
Each generation of British travel writers has its preeminent court jester. In the 1930s Robert Byron did much to forge the genre’s comic tradition; Eric Newby began his long career in the 1950s; and in the 1980s it was Redmond O’Hanlon who gained the highest profile with travel-writing-for-laughs.
“Women’s Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home” by Megan K Stack
A war correspondent and overseas bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, Megan K Stack never had much occasion to concern herself with gender equality even when she married another foreign correspondent and the two moved to Beijing a decade ago. But their marital dynamics changed when Stack became pregnant. She quit her job and…
“Bandit Saints of Java: How Java’s eccentric saints are challenging fundamentalist Islam in modern Indonesia” by George Quinn
Commentaries on Islam in Indonesia—especially those attached to major political events such as the recent presidential election—often deal in simplistic binary terms: a uniform mass of apparently ascendant “conservative Muslims” is ranged against similarly uniform blocks of embattled urban liberals or rural traditionalists.
“The Shanghai Free Taxi: Journeys with the Hustlers and Rebels of the New China” by Frank Langfitt
In 2006, the New York Times columnist Tom Friedman penned a now-notorious column titled “The Taxi Driver”. In it, Friedman recounts a cab ride from Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport in which, to Friedman’s disappointment, the driver neglects to engage in conversation with his eminent passenger.
“See You Again in Pyongyang: A Journey Into Kim Jong Un’s North Korea” by Travis Jeppesen
When Travis Jeppesen, 37-year-old writer and art critic, spotted the ad offering a one-month study program in North Korea, he didn’t hesitate. Not that he was any wide-eyed naif: he’d visited four times before. But he was done with package tours, with being shuttled from monument to tedious monument. If he were to return to…
