All the Tibetans wanted was to be left alone, to practice their ancient religion and live the feudal lives they had always lived. They were isolated, hemmed in by some of the world’s highest mountains, protected by tribes of bandits. It should have been easy for them to live in peace. But for more than a century [...]
Archive for the ‘Travel/ Exploration’ Category
Trespassers on the Roof of the World
Posted in History, Nonfiction, Travel/ Exploration on November 10, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Vanilla Beans and Brodo
Posted in Nonfiction, Travel/ Exploration on September 29, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Good food. Beautiful scenery. Dreadful writing. That’s Vanilla Beans and Brodo: Real Life in the Hills of Tuscany in a nutshell. In this book, Isabella Dusi, an Australian expat, takes us through a year in Montalcino, the Tuscan town where, at the time of writing, she had lived with her husband for five years.
By writing [...]
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (Audio)
Posted in Audiobooks, Nonfiction, Travel/ Exploration on September 28, 2009 | 11 Comments »
Savannah, Georgia, a small southern city known for its history and its hospitality, is both the setting and the subject for John Berendt’s 1994 book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. When this book was first released, it was a word-of-mouth sensation. Everyone I knew seemed to be reading it, but I let the [...]
The Lost City of Z
Posted in Biography, Nonfiction, Travel/ Exploration on June 24, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Percy Harrison Fawcett was utterly convinced that there was evidence hidden in the Amazon jungle of an ancient civilization. He had found shards of pottery and rock paintings, he had spoken to Indians who had oral histories of their ancestors, and he himself had been farther into that ”green hell” than any other European man, and had survived. [...]
A High Wind in Jamaica
Posted in Fiction, Travel/ Exploration on May 18, 2009 | 6 Comments »
In Richard Hughes’s amazing novel A High Wind in Jamaica, six English children from two different families are growing up in the lush wet heat of Jamaica. Despite the fact that they are quite young (ranging in age from twelve to three), they are more or less independent of their parents, ranging wherever they want to [...]
Three Men in a Boat
Posted in Classics, Fiction, Travel/ Exploration on May 10, 2009 | 6 Comments »
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome is a charming comic novel that tells of three friends (and a dog) who have had enough of their workaday life and decide to spend a fortnight in a boat on the Thames.
The book, first published in 1889, has a timeless humor, mostly because the characters’ [...]
News From Tartary
Posted in Memoir, Nonfiction, Travel/ Exploration on April 21, 2009 | 2 Comments »
In One’s Company, Peter Fleming described his more-or-less solo journey across Manchuria and Mongolia in 1933. He was only 26 years old, avid for adventure, going because the going was good (for certain values of “good” — difficult, intrepid, and sometimes dangerous travel across country where few European people have ever been isn’t for everyone.) His [...]
One’s Company
Posted in Memoir, Nonfiction, Travel/ Exploration on April 20, 2009 | 3 Comments »
At the beginning of this book, there is a Warning to the Reader:
The recorded history of Chinese civilization covers a period of four thousand years. The population of China is estimated at 450 millions. China is larger than Europe.
The author of this book is twenty-six years old. He has spent, altogether, about seven months in [...]
In Search of London
Posted in Nonfiction, Travel/ Exploration on April 3, 2009 | 2 Comments »
One of my favorite things about traveling is the anticipation. I love making plans, imagining what I’ll see, and deciding how I’ll fit everything in—even if I end up abandoning all plans once I arrive. Almost as much fun is reflecting on the trip after I get back. The whole business just thrills me to pieces, [...]
Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu
Posted in Biography, History, Nonfiction, Travel/ Exploration on February 28, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Marco Polo, a history of that well-traveled Venetian gentleman by Laurence Bergreen, is simultaneously one of the most interesting and one of the most irritating books I’ve read in a long time. During the whole course of reading it, I couldn’t decide whether I most wanted to find out what happened next, or throw the [...]
