• Deep South by Paul Theroux **** (of 4)

    This is Paul Theroux’s only travel book wherein the act of traveling is intentionally easy. Unlike his other books – taking the railroad across Siberia, traveling from Cairo to Cape Town by public transport – in this one, he heads from his home in New England to the Black Belt of the southern U.S. in his personal car. He returns several times, responding to the siren, “Y’all come back, now.”

    The driving is easy but the landscape is just as poor, but less tended to by national and international aid organizations, as anyplace he has seen in Africa, and Theroux has spent years in rural Africa. What emerges from a book written in the early 2000-teens is that Black people in the southern United States continue to face economic segregation that is so severe as to leave families living in tar paper shacks, on degraded farmland, facing an inability to get loans or federal assistance more than a century after Reconstruction.

    Making the book even more unique is Theroux’s discourse on other travel writers and especially to famous southern writers, most notably William Faulkner. It’s like taking a roadtrip with a particularly informative English professor, albeit a driver who keeps asking how it is possible that former President Clinton’s multi-billion dollar foundation (and others like it) can provide aid to villages in Africa, but won’t pay attention to desperate hollers in his Arkansas backyard or impoverished cotton farmers with leaking roofs in Mississippi.

  • Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne **** (of 4)

    In 1939, Raymond Chandler wroteThe Big Sleep featuring, Private Investigator Philip Marlowe. Marlowe was the original world weary, cynical PI: hard drinking, self-mocking, and a womanizer. He wore a fedora and could only have existed on a black and white screen played by Humphrey Bogart. In Only to Sleep, it is now 1988 and Marlowe is called out of retirement to traipse across Mexico for an insurance company that thinks one of its clients has just duped them out of a couple of million dollars.

    Marlowe takes the job because he’s bored and wants one more run at his old job. Only his knees and arthritis are bothering him and he’s old enough that the appeal of femmes fatales is more instinctual than physical. Osborne’s Marlowe is a deep philosopher with insights about human nature, decadal changes in Mexico, loneliness, landscape, and growing old. He is also funny and difficult and Osborne’s joy at turning out this novel is infectious. The audiobook is excellent.

  • American Gods by Neil Gaiman *** (of 4)

    Neil Gaiman, a British author, has written an Icelandic saga about American gods. Equal parts fantasy, history, sociology, and Americana, Gaiman’s protagonist, and our guide to the gods, is called Shadow. Shadow is only recently released from prison, and about to embark on a roadtrip of epic dimensions. Sometimes traveling by Buick and sometimes upon the back of a flying Thunderbird (an eagle-like deity) through a violent thunderstorm, Shadow finds himself betwixt the old gods of North America and the new ones. The old gods were brought to North America by natives crossing the Bering Straits in the last Ice Age, by Vikings, by Irish immigrants and others arriving on the great continent.

    The new gods are threatening to displace the old ones, who are being forgotten with increasing rapidity. The new gods came to the country on televisions, computers, and the internet, and they take as much devotion and as many offerings as their predecessors. As is true with all sagas, there are twists, hairpins, treachery, violence, and love. Gaiman, though he apologizes for his presumptuousness, is just the man to write about Americana. He can see us as we appear in our roadside attractions as only an outsider can.

  • To a Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron *** (of 4)

    Mount Kailash in Tibet is a mountain revered and sanctified by Hindus and Muslims. Walking around its base cleanses the soul and brings respect and understanding to our dead ancestors. The mountain is reached from Nepal into Tibet, but is now monitored by China, intent upon Sino-fying the ancient kingdom of Tibet. Colin Thubron is one of Great Britain’s preeminent travel writers, barely a hare’s breadth away from nineteenth century British explorers, bedecked in pith helmets and khaki shorts, who preceded him.

    Thubron, already in his 70s, made his own pilgrimage immediately following the death of his mother, his last remaining relative and does so bathed in introspection. He pays exquisite attention to details noting interesting stones along a path made nearly entirely of stones. He shows us prayer flags worth looking at, discarded flashlights, exhausted acolytes crawling their way toward Nirvana, icy torrents, and armed Chinese soldiers anxiously hunting for protestors. He takes notes by the light of yak-butter lanterns and provides enough religious, spiritual, and political history to inform without overwhelming. He hikes to 18,000 feet in elevation meditating on his mother, who, like him, at the end, was gasping for oxygen, and his long-lost sister buried by an avalanche at the age of 21. Thubron’s adjectives cut like razors to the heart of every description. His account on life, death, and walking should be taken one step at a time, with concentration.

  • The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles **** (of 4)

    Steinbeckian in scope and style, The Lincoln Highway is equal parts coming-of-age story, travelogue, American history, rumination on the inalienable properties of heroism, and inevitable flaws hidden behind the armor of heroic characters.

    The book opens as Emmett is released from a 1950s work-farm that doubles as juvenile detention center for wayward teens. At eighteen years old he heads home because his father has just died and his 8-year-old brother, Billie, is in need of a caretaker. Billie insists they take the Lincoln Highway from the middle of the U.S. to San Francisco to find their mother who left without explanation many years earlier.

    Just before heading west in Emmett’s light-blue Studebaker, two of Emmett’s roommates from the work farm appear outside his father’s foreclosed house, having taken the liberty of stowing away in the warden’s trunk on his delivery run with Emmett. Duchess, Woolie, Emmett and Billie (map of America carefully laid across Billie’s lap) head for The Lincoln Highway whereupon misadventure followed by heroic escapes send the foursome step by step eastward toward Times Square in New York City, the highway’s point of origin, rather than it’s terminus.

    Duchess, Woolie, Emmett, and Billie are as true-to-life, and as likable, as any characters confined to a page can be, and long after the book has ended, readers will be pondering right and wrong, maturity and immaturity, accident and intention, good and evil, heroism and hubris.

  • In the Kingdom of Ice by Hamptom Sides **** (of 4)

    At the end of the nineteenth century, because no one had ever been there, the virtual consensus among geographers was that the North Pole resided in a warm, open sea.  One needed only to sail a ship through the ice surrounding it to reach the open ocean.  In 1879, Captain George DeLong and a crew of 30-plus sailors set off for the North Pole.  At end of the their first year, their ship, having failed to find open water, was instead frozen in place, where they remained out of communication with the rest of the world for three years. Half of their time was in near total darkness and nearly all of their days and nights were below freezing.  Finally, sheets of ice crushed and sank the U.S.S. Jeannette.  The crew walked and sailed for hundreds of days across ice floes and freezing oceans with hopes of reaching the coldest landmass on earth, the north coast of Siberia.  The  test of human physical and psychological endurance is simultaneously contemporary and otherworldly.  The relationship of European and American men to the environment, native people of the Arctic, to women, and stoicism is history not to be overlooked.

  • Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson **** (of 4)

    bill_bryson_notes_from_a_small_islandAfter a couple of decades of living in Britain, Bill Bryson decides to journey around the country one last time before moving with his family back to the U.S.  He takes seven weeks to do a grand loop stopping in towns large and small to describe the British Isles of the early 90s with special attention to beer, architecture, and people, in that order.  No doubt, the more you know of England the more you would appreciate his observations, but even without being able to fully appreciate the locales he was visiting, I was left with some rather wonderful impressions.  Firstly, Bryson reminds one of the value of seeing the world at walking speed.  That alone made me reevaluate the amount of daily energy I devote just to keeping up.  Secondly, tied as I am to the natural world, I don’t pay nearly enough attention to the power of buildings as individuals or in their collective.  Thirdly, this book is vintage early Bryson.  He is so funny on so many occasions I laughed aloud as if I was the one who had consumed one too many brews.  If you have a chance to listen to the audiobook.  It’s a remarkable read aloud.

  • Indonesia Etc. by Elisabeth Pisani *** (of 4)

    indonesiaIndonesia is the fourth largest country in the world comprised of more than 10,000 islands and hundreds of languages and cultures.  From west to east it stretches the equivalent of Anchorage, Alaska to Washington, D.C. In Java, where more than half the population lives you can find hipsters, international businessmen, ungodly traffic, and muslim women covered from head to foot.  In the east, in Papua, bushmen live in the jungles.  It’s a thriving democracy and an inefficient, bureaucratic, corrupt nightmare of decentralized governance.  Ethnic divisions lead to mass slaughters and average Indonesians may be the most welcoming people on earth.  In most places you can find decent cell coverage, but might have to wait an interminable week before a boat arrives to take you from one island to the next.  Elisabeth Pisani has lived in Indonesia off and on for decades and has done her best to travel from one side of the country to the other talking, cooking, sleeping on rattan mats in crowded huts, and waiting with locals wherever she could.  She does a remarkable job of tying personal experiences of the variety of cultures who have come to be ensnared in the modern country called Indonesia to the national experience of a country rattling its way into the global marketplace of ideas and commerce.  Pisani’s writing is strong and engaging, but somehow the length of her trip is as exhausting to read about as it must have been to undertake.

  • Talk to the Snail by Stephen Clarke *** (of 5)

    snailIt’s a standard genre.  Expat, in this case British, lives in France long enough to write an irreverent, comic, snarky account of French mannerisms.  He describes how the French eschew rules, scrum instead of queue, adore denying service to anyone and everyone, are hopeless romantics (at least with their mistresses), work fewer hours on job than any employees in the world, and insist that nothing — not war nor peace — interrupt their daily break for a two hour lunch.  Unfortunately, Clarke is neither sufficiently funny or nasty enough to be completely compelling.  On the other hand, my French cousins say his accounting of French behavior is spot on making it a worthwhile book for anyone who has been to France.

  • In an Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh *** (of 4)

    egyptGhosh recounts the life of a Medieval Jewish trader, Ben Yiyu, who transported goods by ship from India to Egypt.  Evidence of his trader emerge on scraps of paper from the famed Egyptian geniza, a millennial trove of sacred papers in Cairo’s synagogue.  In order to fill in the gaps in Ben Yiyu’s life, Ghosh moves to a small village in Egypt, and then a second nearby village, to live among the Felaheen, farmers on the Nile’s banks.  It is the early 1990s and rural Egyptians are being pulled from the timeless habits of sowing seeds and tending cows to the trappings of refrigeration, TVs, and urban colleges for able youth.  So with the aid of the eyes and ears of a trained anthropologist, we find ourselves immersed in the daily rhythms of growing children, greedy landlords, temperamental imams, ambitious businessmen, and village elders serving endless rounds of mint tea.  It is not lost on anyone that frequently we are observing a Hindu researcher explaining to his Muslim hosts his search for information about a Jewish trader.  Because men and women in traditional Islamic culture lead such separate lives, you will need to read Guests of the Sheik, if you want to get an insider’s view of female lives.