I loved Rose George’s, The Big Necessity about toilets and the lack of them around the world. I’m also fascinated by the sea and even once talked my way onto a container ship transiting the Panama Canal so I had high hopes for “Ninety Percent of Everything.” Unfortunately, the title just about says it all, and the subtitle finishes the task: “Invisible shipping, the invisible industry that puts clothes on your back, gas in your car, and food on your plate.” The rest of the book consists of George’s multi-week trip aboard a freighter traveling from England to Singapore. Along the way she scrounges up facts about shipping with a particular focus on the unusual and dangerous pointing to particularly heinous acts of piracy, unscrupulous ship owners, and wrecked cargo vessels, their poor workers abandoned to the sea. But it all feels like a stretch, as if someone wrote a book about the airline industry largely overlooking the hundreds of thousands of uneventful daily flights to focus instead on the one crash decades ago in the Andes where the passengers cannibalized one another to survive. In the end, shipping is a business and working aboard ships is no more glamorous than driving a truck, slaughtering beef, or manufacturing sneakers. We demand the products and Rose George makes us think hard about where they come from and how they get to us, but it never quite amounts to a full book’s worth of information.
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Paris to the Pyranees by David Downie * (of 4)
So much promise, so little delivery. David Downie sets his mind to walking the old pilgrim trail of Saint James. He’s trying to recover from overeating for a lifetime. He wants to find himself without succumbing to spirituality, which he cynically despises. He does like Gauls, Caesar, good coffee, and pretty scenery, however. Only problem is the book sucks. Mostly he gives us self-important field notes. Thus, no section is longer than a couple of pages. He is so intent on dissing pilgrims and their spiritual journeys the reader is left to suspect he is establishing a strawman right from page one. His recounting of history appears to be coming from a single guidebook he is carrying with him. I could have read my own guidebook it that was the level of discovery I was hoping for. He is self-consciously snarky. Probably served him well has a food writer for magazines, but not here. -
Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff **** (of 4)
Detroit, once the nation’s industrial capital, is forty percent vacant. Politicians are corrupt, robbing what little money still flows through the city. Murderous thugs roam the streets. Homelessness, hunger, despair, lawlessness, and unbridled fear imprison law-abiding citizens inside their homes. Everyone else appears to be hanging onto street corners, jobless, self-medicating their misery. Certainly, there are worthy people in Detroit, pockets of revival, attempts to replace the rotten timbers of a city already mostly submerged, so why read a book that is simultaneously so depressing and unflinchingly focused on the negative? Because LeDuff can write like nobody’s business. After ten years as a New York Times reporter, he returns to his city to write for the Detroit Free Press, covering the city with the guts of a war journalist and the keen eye of a native son. Read the book because it will take you somewhere you would never go yourself and because no one could write this story any better. -
The Woman Who Fell from the Sky by Jennifer Steil * (of 4)
If a book is this bad I ordinarily just leave it off my list, but this one deserves to be panned, partly because it received such a flourishing review in the New York Times. Author, Jennifer Steil, gives up her day job as a NYC journalist to manage a newspaper in Sanaa, Yemen. While few topics could be more timely than to learn about daily life in Yemen, Steil eschews the opportunity to let her staff of Yemeni reporters gather information for us, her American readers, that might otherwise be hidden from a western reporter. Instead, in breathless, purple prose she focuses on herself and her blossoming affair with Britain’s (married) ambassador to Yemen. She drinks, she parties, she works too hard, and she frets, but her writing does nothing to make me care about any of it. Feh. -
Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux **** (of 4)
Fresh out of college in the mid 1960s, just before he became famous as one of the great travel writers of a generation, Paul Theroux worked as a Peace Corps volunteer and then teacher in East Africa. Forty years later, nearing the age of 60, wiser, crankier, and more critical Theroux returned to Africa to travel by land from Cairo to Cape Town. He recounts a series of countries worse off politically, environmentally, socially, and economically than they were when he worked there. He makes no bones about the fact that fault lies with aid agencies that have created an industry of fostering dependence and Africans unwilling to help themselves. Missionaries, too, receive a hammering for their self-righteous self-assuredness and their adding a level of misery to hardened lives by calling so many Africans sinners to their faces. While I don’t agree with all of his assessments — his level of political acumen seems shallow — his willingness to call it as he sees it and the unflinching accuracy with which he brings us to Africa make this book a must read. -
The Tenth Parallel by Eliza Griswold ** (of 4)
Griswold travels the around the globe hanging out approximately 10 degrees north of the equator. In Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines it’s the abrasion zone between Muslims who have spread from the north and Christians arriving by boat from the coasts and the south. In some aspects Griswold makes more of a religious conflict than probably really exists; she simplifies culture to unidimensional religious identification when most people carry ethnic, tribal, historic, and family identities, too. She focuses on the cities where conflict is most pronounced, sidestepping communities where coexistence and intermarriage are prevalent. What does jump out, however, is how tenacious and aggressive American-born, Christian missionaries are in their drive to save souls from damnation. It is easy to see how Muslim people and governments perceive American intervention (say in Iraq or Afghanistan) as a continuation of a long history of western, Christian, first British and now American, colonial domination. Anyone who has ever confronted a Christian missionary knows how unrelenting and self-confident they can be. Unfortunately, the book isn’t an easy read. Somehow Griswold makes history and conflict more complicated rather than less. By mentioning every actor from local to national with a relationship to a particular zone she confused me. My mind wandered and eventually I could hang on no longer. -
Schlepping Through the Alps: My Search for Austria’s Jewish Past with Its Last Wandering Shepherd by Sam Apple
A journalist who traveled from childhood memories to adult memories from urban NY to Austria’s highest peaks in search of Hans Breuer, Yiddish folk singer and “last wandering shepherd of Austria.” Apple manages to seamlessly tie shepherding and Yiddish into his questions about post-war Austria and contemporary anti-semitism in Europe suspensefully and full with satisfaction.
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Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson **** (of 4)
This was my first Bryson. It’s his description of walking the Appalachian trail. I can think of no other book that made me laugh out loud. This book made me do it several times.
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Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron ** (of 4)
The Dean of British travel writers takes the Silk Road from China to Turkey and the NY Times says, “Thubron goes to places most other sojourners can’t — because they’re not so much geographic locations as states of mind.” It’s true: Thubron is so elegaic I could barely follow him. There are periods of great lucidity that bring to focus western China in ways I’ve never seen them and then there’s the majority of the book, which requires heavy slogging through knee-deep prose and ankle twisting constructions that make the book exhausting. I only got as far as Kyrghistan. October 2007.
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The Lost City of Z by David Grann ** (of 4)
Percy Fawcett, one of the last of the iconic British explorers, ca. 1920, khaki get-up, pith helmet, and scraggly beard spends most of a lifetime searching for a purported grand, abandoned city in the Amazon until he finally gets lost never to be heard from again. The author searches for Fawcett and all the other explorers who have searched for Fawcett, but never quite builds much in the way of suspense. Maybe it is because I have spent time in the Amazon, but I was left with an overwhelming sense of despair for the obvious loss of one of the world’s last great ecosystems and the decimation of the natives who live there, a sideline in Grann’s account.
