Essays & Travelogues Books - Page 12

Bill Bryson's African Diary

Bill Bryson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 54 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

A Brilliant Entry and for a Great Cause 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Bill Bryson is the funniest travel writer working today, I believe, and even when he takes on what is an unpleasant task - visiting one of the most depressed areas of the world in order to raise funds for CARE, he does it in a hilarious way.

In this short little book, Bryson not only shares with us his (by turns) funny and heartbreaking journey, we also get to meet some amazing people. The lady who works twelve-hour days in order to get a profit of some $7 or $8 - the farmer who has made a fantastic farm and is very proud of it - the villagers who come out to welcome the visitors with open arms because of a well that was built, eliminating the need for the women of the village to make a seven-hour roundtrip journey to the nearest water source. This is what it's all about - this is the magical work that CARE does with the funds that are donated.

Bryson is his usual, witty self, freely confessing that the homework he did in preparing for his trip was watching Out of Africa numerous times, and he thought that he was going to be on an estate being served coffee for most of the trip. The reality was somewhat different, but still far afield from what he expected. That I not only laughed out loud but insisted on reading choice bits aloud to my husband is a testament to the talent and humor that Bryson brings to everything he does.

When Wanderers Cease to Roam: A Traveler's Journal of Staying Put

Vivian Swift

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Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A charming, illustrated celebration of puttering, doodling, daydreaming, and settling down after years on the road.

Following a lifetime of trekking across the globe, Vivian Swift racked up twenty-three temporary addresses in twenty years, finally dropped her well-worn futon mattress and rucksack in a small town on the edge of the Long Island Sound. She spent the next decade quietly taking stock of her life, her immediate surroundings, and, finally, what it means to call a place a home.

The result is When Wanderers Cease to Roam. Filled with watercolors of beautiful local landscapes, seasonal activities, and small, overlooked pleasures of easy living, each chapter chronicles, month by month, the beautifully mundane perks of remaining at home—from curious notices in the local paper to the variations of autumnal clouds. At once gorgeously rendered and wholly original, this delightful and masterfully observed year of staying put shows us how the details of travel and the details of our lives remain with us—how they can nurture and sustain us, and how the past and the present become, in the end, intertwined.

The Log from the Sea of Cortez (Penguin Classics)

John Steinbeck

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 21 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Journal of travel and research 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

This nonfiction book is an account of a research/specimen collecting trip Steinbeck made with his friend and marine biologist Edward Ricketts off the coast of Baja California in 1940. They rent a boat, a purse-seiner called the "Western Flyer," stock her with supplies, hire a crew, and set sail on the afternoon of March 11, 1940.

The raison d'etre of the trip is collecting sea specimens, but Steinbeck is interested in more than just recording scientific data. The men go ashore at various ports along the way, and encounters with other men are related (in one, the inspiration for what later became THE PEARL is told). Both Ricketts and Steinbeck have a philosophical bent, and they discuss in detail teleological vs. nonteleological ways of interpreting the world. Likewise, ecology and their theory that everything in nature has its place and makes a contribution to the whole world system is examined. Both men enjoy drinking, and that becomes a topic of conversation at one point. It's plain from Steinbeck's writing that they are having a good time in addition to the successful collecting. At one stop, at which they are given an icy welcome, they believe they've come amongst gun smugglers. The trip comes to a happy end on April 13 as they head for Monterey Bay and home.

The books initial publication coincided with the attack on Pearl Harbor and was virtually forgotten. Only recently have critics studied the book carefully, especially in terms of what it has to say about the environment. Regardless of that, the book is entertaining and informative. His prose is at times lyrical, at other times outright funny (after talking to other boat captains over the radio about how much fish was caught, he says after they found out they were on a collecting mission the other boats paid no attention to them: "We were obviously ridiculous"). Included is Steinbeck's lengthy and lively biographical portrait of Ricketts, who was killed in a train accident. Worth checking out.

Editorial Review:

Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America’s greatest writers and cultural figures. Over the next year, his many works published as black-spine Penguin Classics for the first time and will feature eye-catching, newly commissioned art.

Penguin Classics is proud to present these seminal works to a new generation of readers—and to the many who revisit them again and again.

There is a River: The Story of Edgar Cayce

Thomas Sugrue

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 35 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Life changed 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I've glanced at some of the other reviews, and I see that the book gets mixed reviews. I can only say what it did for me. It changed my life, because it shifted how I view life. It motivated me to read other books that further convinced me that Edgar Cayce was right on. Personally, I enjoyed reading the book. I don't read many books more than once, but I enjoyed re-reading this one. I saw in it a man of unwavering honesty and steadfast ethics. Because of this I found him to be exceptionally credible. This is why I was shaken from my comfortable 20-year mindset. This book gets my nod of approval.

Editorial Review:

From his birth on a small Kentucky farm in 1877 to his decades in Virginia Beach, Virginia, the life of the extraordinary psychic, Edgar Cayce, unfolded with the air of a man destined to impact the world in a quiet but profound way. His simple beginnings and the necessity for him to quit school to help support his family helped prepare him for a life of service to others. Then, his accidental discovery of his psychic ability to diagnose illness and specify health treatments for others set him on a life direction that he, at first, approached reluctantly. In spite of his reluctance, however, his success in healing himself, family members, and hundreds of other people, most of whom he never met, made him a medical phenomenon. Edgar Cayce was a man whose contributions to our knowledge of health and spiritual development continue to transform lives around the world.

Fielding's the World's Most Dangerous Places (Robert Young Pelton the World's Most Dangerous Places)

Robert Young Pelton, Coskun Aral, Wink Dulles

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Total reviews: 107 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The long-awaited fifth edition of Robert Young Pelton's The World's Most Dangerous Places comes fresh from the danger zones. An underground classic among the CIA, mujahadeen, special forces, NGOs, and savvy adventurers, DP has now become the de facto standard in understanding the groups, the players, the places, and tensions that fuel conflicts around the world. Pelton and his contributors tell it like it is in a brutally honest and personal style that delivers crisp, insightful, and useful information. DP5 gives the scoop when the media and guidebooks -- and even governments -- won't dare. The ground truth and hard-won experience inside DP5 will open your eyes and may save your life.

In addition to the exclusive first-person reports, DP5 also includes thousands of hard-to-find contacts, Web sites, e-mails, survival tips, travel ideas, adventures, and even safety schools for war journalists. No walls, no barriers, no bull. The most dangerous countries from five stars (Hell on Earth) to one star (dangerous rep).

A Year in the World: Journeys of A Passionate Traveller

Frances Mayes

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Total reviews: 54 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

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The author who unforgettably captured the experience of starting a new life in Tuscany in bestselling travel memoirs expands her horizons to immerse herself—and her readers—in the sights, aromas, and treasures of twelve new special places.

A Year in the World is vintage Frances Mayes—a celebration of the allure of travel, of serendipitous pleasures found in unlikely locales, of memory woven into the present, and of a joyous sense of quest. An ideal travel companion, Frances Mayes brings to the page the curiosity of an intrepid explorer, remarkable insights into the wonder of the everyday, and a compelling narrative style that entertains as it informs.

With her beloved Tuscany as a home base, Mayes travels to Spain, Portugal, France, the British Isles, and to the Mediterranean world of Turkey, Greece, the South of Italy, and North Africa. In Andalucía, she relishes the intersection of cultures. She cooks in Portugal, gathers ideas in the gardens of England and Scotland, takes a literary pilgrimage to Burgundy, discovers an ideal place to live in Mantova, and explores the essential Moroccan city of Fez. She rents houses among ordinary residents, shops at neighborhood markets, wanders the back streets, and everywhere contemplates the concept of home. While in Greece, she follows the classic Homeric voyage across the Aegean, lives in a bougainvillea-draped stone house in Crete, and then drives deep into the Mani. In Turkey with friends, she sails the ancient coast, hiking to archaeological sites and snorkeling over sunken Byzantine towns. Weaving together personal perceptions and informed commentary on art, architecture, history, landscape, and social and culinary traditions of each area, Mayes brings the immediacy of life in her temporary homes to the reader. An illuminating and passionate book that will be savored by all who loved Under the Tuscan Sun, A Year in the World is travel writing at its peak.

The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca

Tahir Shah

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Total reviews: 48 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

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In the tradition of A Year in Provence and Under the Tuscan Sun, acclaimed English travel writer Tahir Shah shares a highly entertaining account of making an exotic dream come true. By turns hilarious and harrowing, here is the story of his family’s move from the gray skies of London to the sun-drenched city of Casablanca, where Islamic tradition and African folklore converge–and nothing is as easy as it seems….

Inspired by the Moroccan vacations of his childhood, Tahir Shah dreamed of making a home in that astonishing country. At age thirty-six he got his chance. Investing what money he and his wife, Rachana, had, Tahir packed up his growing family and bought Dar Khalifa, a crumbling ruin of a mansion by the sea in Casablanca that once belonged to the city’s caliph, or spiritual leader.

With its lush grounds, cool, secluded courtyards, and relaxed pace, life at Dar Khalifa seems sure to fulfill Tahir’s fantasy–until he discovers that in many ways he is farther from home than he imagined. For in Morocco an empty house is thought to attract jinns, invisible spirits unique to the Islamic world. The ardent belief in their presence greatly hampers sleep and renovation plans, but that is just the beginning. From elaborate exorcism rituals involving sacrificial goats to dealing with gangster neighbors intent on stealing their property, the Shahs must cope with a new culture and all that comes with it.

Endlessly enthralling, The Caliph’s House charts a year in the life of one family who takes a tremendous gamble. As we follow Tahir on his travels throughout the kingdom, from Tangier to Marrakech to the Sahara, we discover a world of fierce contrasts that any true adventurer would be thrilled to call home.


From the Hardcover edition.

My Mercedes is Not for Sale: From Amsterdam to Ouagadougou...An Auto-Misadventure Across the Sahara

Jeroen Van Bergeijk

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“Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?”
—Janis Joplin

A journalist’s intrepid endeavor to sell his used car abroad results in a high-spirited and revealing look at West Africa.

“Look, there’s my car,” I say, pointing at my Mercedes in the parking lot.
“Where?” a fellow desert traveler asks.
“There, that Mercedes,” I say.
He looks at me, questioning. “You want to drive that through the Sahara?”
 
Jeroen van Bergeijk came up with what seemed like a great scheme for making a quick profit: buy a clunker of a car in his native Amsterdam and resell it in the Third World, where a market even for jalopies still thrives. His chariot of choice is a rusted-out 1988 Mercedes 190D with 220,000 kilometers on its odometer; his route will take him from Holland through Morocco, across the Sahara, and into some of the least trodden parts of Africa.
My Mercedes Is Not for Sale is a rollicking tale of an innocent abroad. The author finds himself facing a driving challenge akin to the Dakar Rally but encounters obstacles never dreamed of by race-car drivers: active minefields, occasional banditry—mostly by the border guards—and a teenage, chain-smoking desert guide with a fondness for Tupac lyrics. Food and water are scarce, sandstorms are frequent, and all he has to patch up his many car breakdowns thousands of miles from civilization is a bar of soap, some duct tape, and a pair of women’s nylons. Then there’s the coup he survived.
My Mercedes Is Not for Sale captures more than the adventure—it vividly portrays the impact of globalization on Africa through a surprise-filled journey into its thriving car culture, while asking the question: is the white man’s burden really a used car?

Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History

Robert D. Kaplan

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Total reviews: 121 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Excellent and broad sweeping introduction to the Balkans 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts is more than a travel book for most of his experiences in the Balkan's were far from tourism. Rather, like Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, his book explores time and place with the precision of an anthropologist.

Kaplan points out that this area of the world seems to have a talent for starting wars and once was called `ethnic trash' by Karl Marx. Serbia is the area where Habsburg Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated, an event that sparked World War I. From here come the 20th century's first terrorists. Kaplan points out that the Balkans are not just the area where Communism meets capitalism. It is also the place where Roman Catholic meets Eastern Orthodox, where Christian meets Islam, where Rome meets Constantinople, where Habsburg Austria-Hungarian empire meets the Ottoman empire. Kaplan identifies the principal illness of Balkans which he sees as conflicting dreams of lost imperial glory. Each nation demands that its borders expand to the point at which their empire reached its heights in ancient or medieval times.

Croatia's unique history is explored, its alliance with Hapsburg Austria, and its history of conflict between Catholic and Orthodox Serbs. A fascinating part of the book is the rise of Croatia as a small nation only to become a puppet of the German Nazis. During this time murders against both Orthodox Serbs and Jews occurred. The figure of Catholic Cardinal Stepinac remains controversial to this day, for he appeared to support the fascist nationalists until their murder of Jews and Orthodox Serbs reached terrible proportions. He chastised the fascist around the fall of Nazism in World War II but was later tried as a war criminal by the communist Tito. Tensions remain to this day between Catholic Croatia and the mixed ethnic state of Bosnia where Catholics, Jews, Orthodox Serbs, and Muslims all live in suspicion of each other.

Kaplan repeatedly praises the work of Dame Rebecca West in her Black Lamb Grey Falcon. West indicates that the Turks ruined the Balkans so greatly that it has never been repaired.

Albanians descended from Illyrian tribes and their language bears no similarity to other languages. Kosovo has gone back and forth between Serbian and Albanian control. Enver Hoxha was a young Communist freedom fighter against the Nazis. At the end of World War II, Albania had lost more than 7% of their population.

Macedonia is a mix of ethnic groups. Turks, Albanians, Serbs, Rumanians, Greeks, and Bulgarians live there side by side since the days of St. Paul. Czar Alexander II's war to liberate Bulgaria from Turkey in 1877 was the first spark of modern Great Power conflict. Russians occupied the Bulgarian capital of Sofia and dictated to the defeated Turks the Treaty of San Stefano. The union of Macedonia and Bulgaria created a pro-Russian state. Germany's Bismarck set out to revise the Treaty in the Congress of Berlin. Macedonia was returned to Turkish rule upon pressure by Germany and Great Britain on the Russians. To balance the powers, Turkey got Macedonia, Austria got Bosnia, an arrangement leading to World War I. The Russian forces in Bulgaria drove the Muslims into Macedonia whereas the Austrian advance into Bosnia also drove the Muslims south into Macedonia, where the enraged Turks began terrorizing the Orthodox Christians. The relationship between Bulgaria and Macedonia has been one where Bulgaria wishes to incorporate Macedonia within their borders but has always been on the losing side of world conflicts, never allowing for integration.

Apart from forcing Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid to accept a liberal constitution, the "Young Turks" led by Pasha had no well-defined program. As with Gorbachev, Pasha and the Young Turks were determined to conserve in a loser more liberal form the Empire, which they perceived as threatened primarily by a reactionary Sultanate and near total resistance to change. The Ottoman Empire's disintegration enraged fundamentalists Muslims within Turkey. The increasingly authoritarian Young Turk regime culminated in the 1915 mass murder of 1.5 million Armenians, the century's first holocaust. This genocide was perpetrated because the Armenians demographically threatened the Muslim Turks.

Romania's language is Latinate, closer to ancient Roman. Roman legions conquered this territory in 101 AD. Romanians are closer in appearance to the Latins than to Slavs. In 325 AD Roman Christianity was brought to Romania. However invasion by Bulgarians brought in the Eastern Orthodox religion. Geographically Romania lies vulnerable between the Ukrainians and Russians and Turks. For the 14th century onward the Turks kept Romania in fear. There were uprisings against the Turks, for example Vlad the Impaler (the historical "Dracula") was a rebel against Turkish rule. In the 18th and 19th centuries the Russians invaded over a dozen times. In the 1860's the Romanians elected Karl Hohenzollern as their king. Carol I abdicated to his nephew Ferdinand, who married Princess Marie of Edinburgh, granddaughter to Queen Victoria. Queen Marie was a force behind the throne during World War I and died before her son Carol II caused havoc.

King Carol II is a colorful character, having deserted from the army, eloped with a Romanian aristocrat, then was forced to abdicate since Romanian law requires him to marry a foreigner. He marries Princess Helen of Greece and deserts her for Lupescu, his Jewish mistress. He abdicates a second time rather than return to his wife and leave his mistress. He extorted funds from casinos and deposited $50 million in foreign banks. He declared dictatorship. He supported the Legionnaires of the Archangel Michael until they turned against him because of his Jewish mistress. Hitler also told Carol that he preferred to have Codreanu as dictator of Romania rather than Carol. Carol had Codreanu and the legion leaders killed which angered Hitler. Corneliu Zelea Codreanu formed the Legion around secret nests of 13 men who drank each other's blood and vowing to commit murder if ordered. Carol formed his own Nazi party and repressed his countries 800,000 Jews. Stalin demanded Bessarabia and Hitler demanded Transylvania. Carol tired to play a double game and lost. He left Romania in 1940 in a train full of gold bound for Mexico. His 18 year old son, Michael became king. The Legion struck back, primarily at Romania's Jewish population, killing thousands. Hitler wished to obtain Romania's oil reserves. In 1947 King Michael also abandoned Romania in a train full of treasures as his father had done.

The fall of King Carol II Hohenzollern and the rise of reactionary forces in 1941 in Romania are a frightening tale. The rise of the Legionnaires of the Archangel Michael, a terrorist group that committed murder against the Jews in their country, is a terrible story and helps us realize the degree of anti-Semitism throughout Eastern Europe.

Nicolae Ceausescu ruled Romania for a quarter-century until the army executed him. Ceausescu outlawed abortion and birth control so that the Romanians could outbreed the Hungarians. However poverty and semi-starvation increased infant mortality rates. Badly urbanized peasants worked in factories and lived in dorms where only alcohol and propaganda were readily available. Romania was allowed to fall under Stalin's domain at the peace discussions at Yalta.

In World War II, the Romanians were on the side of the Nazis while the Jews in Romania supported the Russians. The Romanian army killed 4,000 Jews in Jassy and then the army evacuated another 12,000 that dies of thirst and asphyxiation in railroad cars. Then in 1941 and 192 15,000 Jews were deported from Moldavia into Romanian run concentration camps. In 1944 when the Russians invaded Romania, the Romanians switched sides and began fighting the Nazis. The Romanians have always fallen between three empires, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Turkey, and Russia.

The Bulgars were a Tartar tribe. In the medieval period, Bulgaria was among the powerful kingdoms in Europe. Kings carved out empire from Albania to the Black Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains to the Aegean. In 865 Bulgaria became the first of the Slav peoples to embrace Orthodox Christianity. Byzantine Emperor Basil defeated King Samuel and had 14,000 prisoners blinded - the most horrific moment in Bulgarian history. Bulgaria then endured 500 years of Ottoman occupation. Turkish rule was bloodier in Bulgaria than anywhere else. In 1876 Turks encouraged band of Bulgarians converted to Islam to hack to death 5,000 Orthodox Christians. A Russian army swept through Bulgaria in 1877 liberating Bulgaria from Ottoman rule.

Kaplan argues that Greece must be understood through the eyes of the Balkans rather than through a Hollywood lens. He tells of Salonika - Thessaloniki in Greek -a community of Spanish Jews. In 53 AD St. Paul preached from the Synagogue. Jews from Hungary and German arrived in 1373. Following the conquest of Salonika by the Ottoman Turks, 20,000 Spanish Jews received permission to move there in 1492. By 1913 half the population of the city was Jews. The Nazis captured the city in 1941 and in five months had sent almost all the Jews to concentration camps. Of all the cities in Nazi-occupied Europe, Salonika ranked first in the number of Jewish victims: out of a population of 56,000, 54,0505 - 96.5%- were exterminated at Auschwitz.

The Greek Church was the mother of all Eastern Orthodox churches, which are treasure houses of their culture that survived the Ottoman rule. Hagia Sophia built in the sixth century AD by Emperor Justinian became the prototype for all Orthodox cathedrals, for St. Marks in Venice, and for mosques throughout Turkey. Byzantium, an empire created in AD 324, as the successor of Rome, and destroyed 1,100 years later by Ottoman Turks in 1453. During these eleven centuries, the Byzantine Empire was a Greek empire. Ottoman Turks ejected the Byzantine Greeks from Constantinople in the fifteenth century but large Greek communities survived in Istanbul and along the western shore of Asia Minor - particularly Smyrna. In 1921 the Greek army advanced into Asia Minor beyond the Greek occupied coastal areas. In 1922 Kemal Ataturk, in the midst of developing a new Turkish republic, drove the Greek army back. Greek dead numbered 30,000. Then 400,000 Turks from Greek Thrace moved into Turkey and 1,250,000 Greeks from Asia Minor went into exile in Greece, increasing the population by 20%. Refuges tripled the size of Athens. The Nazi invasion left 8% of the population dead, followed by the Greek Civil War which saw more destruction than the war against the Nazis.

Constantinople is a Greek word for a historically Greek city. The Cyrillic alphabet, used in Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, and Russia, emerged from the Greek alphabet when two monks, Cyril and Methodius, left Salonika in the ninth century AD to proselytize among the Slavs. The ultimate achievement of Periclean Athens was to breathe humanism - compassion for the individual - into the inhumanity of the East. Classical Greece of the First Millennium BC invented the West by humanizing the East.
This well written book taught me much about the Balkans and gave me an appreciation for these boiling nationalistic forces that run against each other century after century.

Editorial Review:

From the assassination that triggered World War I to the ethnic warfare in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, the Balkans have been the crucible of the twentieth century, the place where terrorism and genocide first became tools of policy. Chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, and greeted with critical acclaim as "the most insightful and timely work on the Balkans to date" (The Boston Globe), Kaplan's prescient, enthralling, and often chilling political travelogue is already a modern classic.

This new edition includes six opinion pieces written by Robert Kaplan about the Balkans between l996 and 2000 beginning just after the implementation of the Dayton Peace Accords and ending after the conclusion of the Kosovo war, with the removal of Slobodan Milosevic from power.

Annapurna

Maurice Herzog

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Total reviews: 42 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

An Amazing Story of Incredible Human Endurance 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Wow! This is one of those real life adventure stories that has you wondering how much more the people can endure before they collapse and die. These guys climbed one of the world's most difficult mountains with old climbing technology. What they lacked in modern equipment, they made up for with strength and fitness. The more I read about mountaineering, the more I agree that it is 75% mental and 25% physical. Being in the best physical condition possible definitely gives you a better opportunity for success on high ground. If you liked this book, I encourage you to read my book "Rocky Mountain Adventure Collection". Best wishes on your adventures in life!

Editorial Review:

In 1950, no mountain higher than 8,000 meters had ever been climbed. Maurice Herzog and other members of the French Alpine Club had resolved to try. Their goal was a 26,493-foot Himalayan peak called Annapurna. But unlike other climbs, which draw on the experience of prior reconnaissance, the routes up Annapurna had never been analyzed before. Herzog and his team had to locate the mountain using sketchy, crude maps, pick out a single, untried route, and go for the summit. Annapurna is the unforgettable account of this dramatic and heroic climb, and of its harrowing aftermath. Although Herzog and his comrade Louis Lachenal reached the mountain's summit, their descent was a nightmare of frostbite, snow blindness, and near death. With grit and courage manifest on every page, Herzog's narrative is one of the great mountain-adventure stories of all time.