1) "Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before" by Tony Horwitz
Pulitzer-winning journalist and travel-writer Horwitz (Confederates in the Attic, 1998, etc.), dogging the wake of Captain Cook, discerningly braids Cook’s long-ago perceptions with his own present-day inquiries into the lands the Captain encountered.
Cook made three epic voyages, sailing from Antarctica to the Arctic, from Australia to Alaska, and to many of the islands that lie between. Fascinated by the man and his accomplishments, Horwitz visits those far-flung lands where the impact of Cook’s arrival was more profound and lasting than the news of the lands’ existence was upon the Europeans back home. The author travels by sailboat and ferry, often in the company of his Australian chum Roger, an odd-fellow and contrarian of rare stripe who adds a comic counterpoint to Horwitz’s probings into attitudes toward Cook in the places he set anchor—attitudes that run the gamut from loathing to reverence. Natives for the most part revile him, though it’s a quirk of fate that the captain’s logs are now helping New Zealand’s Maori establish land claims. Horwitz’s portraits of the lands can be dispiriting: Bora Bora on the brink of environmental collapse, Tahiti gripped by ennui, Tonga feudal with feudal squalor and ill temper. But there are also innocent Niue and vibrant Hawaii and Australia—where Cook is sooner forgotten by all concerned. Of the navigator himself, Horwitz says that “his journals allow us to chart almost every one of his steps and sails, right down the minutest degree of latitude. But [he] left us no map to his own soul.” Still, he rises from these pages as a thoughtful and humane character sensitive to the men who served him and to the local populations he met, though “mutual incomprehension over notions of property and justice [plagued him] throughout his Pacific voyages” and in fact led to his death.
Tandem voyages taken 200 years apart: filled with history and alive with contrasts.
2) "The Places In Between" by Rory Stewart
Just after the fall of the Taliban, a doughty Scot walks across Afghanistan from Herat to Kabul, observing, studying, starving, freezing, encountering poverty, cruelty, ignorance, generosity, warmth and terror.
Published in the U.K. in 2004, this remarkable text paves the way for Stewart’s account of his subsequent adventures in Iraq, The Prince of the Marshes, to be released in the U.S. in August. His stroll through Afghanistan was part of an extensive peregrination across Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal, and the author confesses that he can’t really explain why he did it. Instead, he records in plain prose a frightening journey across a land only the naïve could call a nation. Stewart passed from the control of one “big man” to another, plagued by dysentery and always in danger from the elements. But the locals’ repeated warnings to not travel alone had less to do with the weather than with the whims of the Afghans he was likely to meet, armed and governed by only the most primitive moral codes. In various harrowing moments, Stewart was roughed up by young warriors, had to listen while armed men discussed raping young women (or one another) and kept walking while fully expecting a bullet in the back. His keen sense of when to persist and when to yield enabled him to survive. Stewart generally found shelter and simple food along his tortuous route, though often only with much complication. (It helped that he spoke several Persian dialects and was familiar with the region’s history, mythology and religious customs.) He saw unspeakable poverty and encountered deep ignorance of the outside world. Along the way, a huge, nearly feral earless dog joined him after being tormented in its village. Their eventual parting is only one heartbreaking moment in a narrative of painful poignancy.
Gripping account of a courageous journey, observed with a scholar’s eye and a humanitarian’s heart.
3) "Paris to the Moon" by Adam Gopnik
A talented essayist for the New Yorker pens a love letter to the City of Lights, praising Paris to the moon (though that’s not the original meaning of the title).
Gopnik, who lived with his family in Paris for a few years, gets a grip on the grandeur and travails of the capital’s shopping, cuisine, haute couture, and architecture, as well as French procedures for faxes, exercise, reckoning with war criminals, enjoying civilized general strikes, and arguing over “the best restaurant in the world.” Quotidian activities and objects are rendered wonderful simply by the locale, as our correspondent revels in the mutual misunderstandings, the bureaucratic pigheadedness, the lofty attitudes, and the journalists’ turtleneck jerseys. He interprets, as well as any interloper can, the Parisian (or, if you like, the French) mind. To Gopnik, big buildings in the capital stand for official culture, while French civilization is represented by the small shops: opting for civilization, he takes us through the happy little shops of his arrondissement and embraces a culture invisible to the camera-laden tourist. How that culture greets the birth of his daughter—a French child, he maintains—is recounted nicely. Conversely, in an effort to guide his soccer-wise Gallic son, Luke, into the boy’s American heritage, he concocts a charming bedtime story about baseball. Explaining life in Paris is, of course, a monumental task; it is, perforce, politico-emotional, socio-literary, formidable, and philosophical. But it is Gopnik’s métier and he’s quite good at it. With a text marked by facile wit, he draws lessons from a variety of things.
Thanks for the postcards, Adam. Sounds like a wonderful time. Wish we were there.
4) "Bella Tuscany" by Frances Mayes
Yes, la dolce vita—but only for some. In the nearly 40 years since Fellini’s film first ushered the expression into our lexicon, said vita has been drained of all its original sardonic content, its biting irony, and its social criticism. This sequel to Mayes’s bestselling Under the Tuscan Sun, about her second home and life reborn in Tuscany, doesn—t preserve Fellini’s spirit, either—though her account is inevitably charming. Sometimes, too, a tad annoying. For the author does occasionally come off (along with her husband) as cantankerous or supremely unself-conscious. Not appreciating the cold spring rains in Tuscany, for instance, the lucky pair decides, on a whim, to fly to balmy Palermo; on arriving in a hotel room without a view of that city’s justly famous palm trees, gli Americani just march down to the lobby and demand one. To the accidental Italophile tourist, gathering water at a scenic town’s small fountain may appear a quaint and rustic practice—yet for the ancient women who must daily fetch and carry large jugs of water balanced atop their heads, the habit is laborious and boring, alleviated only slightly by the prospect of gossip. Yet we are finally won over by Mayes. Who could fail to affirm this poet’s lush descriptions of the rolling Tuscan hills, with their timeless olive trees and patient oxen? Equally beautiful are Mayes’s evocations of Italians as sincere and welcoming. She realizes that, despite their fame for sweets, the natives actually enjoy foods with a bitter taste—or, as husband Ed remarks, they “seem to have acquired more tastes than many of us.” Other factual tidbits include a survey of the etymology of the Sangiovese grape—used for Chianti, Brunello, and Vino Nobile—as deriving from the “blood of Jove.” Lovely, and no small consolation to anyone who’s far from Tuscany.
5) "Travels in Siberia" by Ian Frazier
The peripatetic author of Great Plains (1989) and On the Rez (2000) returns with an energetic, illuminating account of his several trips to Siberia, where his ferocious curiosity roamed the vast, enigmatic area.
Veteran New Yorker contributor Frazier (Lamentations of the Father: Essays, 2008, etc.) begins bluntly. “Officially,” he writes, “there is no such place as Siberia.” It is not a country, nor a province, yet the region bearing the name is extensive, comprising eight time zones. Throughout, the author confesses to a long love affair with Russia, a relationship that has waxed and waned over the decades but in some of its brightest phases sent him back repeatedly to see what few have seen. Here Frazier records several visits: a summer’s trip via cantankerous automobile across the entire region, in the company of a couple of local companions; a winter’s journey by train and car, during which the car sometimes used frozen waterways for roads; and a return visit to see the effects of the emerging Russian energy industry. He prepared in a fashion familiar to readers of his previous works—read everything he could, talked with anyone who knew anything, planned and schemed and made it happen. He also studied Russian extensively and tried gamely to engage local people he encountered along the way. On the road, he visited local museums and monuments and natural wonders, and he pauses frequently for welcome digressions on the historical background. He camped, fished and ate local delicacies (and indelicacies). Endearingly, he freely admits his inadequacies, fears (during one perilous icy trip he actually composed a farewell message to his family), blunders, dour moods, regrets and loneliness. The contrasts are stark—one day, he walked through the ruins of a remote, frozen Soviet-era prison camp and later saw a ballet in St. Petersburg—and the writing is consistently rich.
A dense, challenging, dazzling work that will leave readers exhausted but yearning for more.
6) "McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland" by Pete McCarthy
7) "Seven Years in Tibet" by Heinrich Harrer
When Harrer, a German prisoner in India during WW II, escaped, he chose Tibet as a route- but stayed at Lhasa- not only to be won over from his master-race beliefs by the simple Tibetan ways, but to become tutor to the Dalai Lama. Psychologically unique, this is at once first rate adventure and a strong plea for an adopted country.
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