Travel Books

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

Elizabeth Gilbert

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1699 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Couldn't finish it... 2 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

... cause it was just plain naive! I don't want to give it 1 star because parts of it at least made me interested. But overall (until I stoped reading it)this book really didn't do it for me. I think first of all it was too spiritual to suit me and secondly I got really annoyed with the selfishness of Gilbert. I blame myself for the second part though - I should have realized that reading some other reviews and given the fact that the book is about one woman's life crisis. However I just found it bland and annoying. The part in Italy was ok (I think that this is because I have lived in Rome myself before) but it is the India part that made me give this book away. So many people recommended this book to me and I would too... if the person in question is really spiritual, to me it just got wierd.

Editorial Review:

This beautifully written, heartfelt memoir touched a nerve among both readers and reviewers. Elizabeth Gilbert tells how she made the difficult choice to leave behind all the trappings of modern American success (marriage, house in the country, career) and find, instead, what she truly wanted from life. Setting out for a year to study three different aspects of her nature amid three different cultures, Gilbert explored the art of pleasure in Italy and the art of devotion in India, and then a balance between the two on the Indonesian island of Bali. By turns rapturous and rueful, this wise and funny author (whom Booklist calls “Anne Lamott’s hip, yoga- practicing, footloose younger sister”) is poised to garner yet more adoring fans.

Into the Wild

Jon Krakauer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1206 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"God, he was a smart kid..." So why did Christopher McCandless trade a bright future--a college education, material comfort, uncommon ability and charm--for death by starvation in an abandoned bus in the woods of Alaska? This is the question that Jon Krakauer's book tries to answer. While it doesn't—cannot—answer the question with certainty, Into the Wild does shed considerable light along the way. Not only about McCandless's "Alaskan odyssey," but also the forces that drive people to drop out of society and test themselves in other ways. Krakauer quotes Wallace Stegner's writing on a young man who similarly disappeared in the Utah desert in the 1930s: "At 18, in a dream, he saw himself ... wandering through the romantic waste places of the world. No man with any of the juices of boyhood in him has forgotten those dreams." Into the Wild shows that McCandless, while extreme, was hardly unique; the author makes the hermit into one of us, something McCandless himself could never pull off. By book's end, McCandless isn't merely a newspaper clipping, but a sympathetic, oddly magnetic personality. Whether he was "a courageous idealist, or a reckless idiot," you won't soon forget Christopher McCandless.

I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away

Bill Bryson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 226 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In the world of contemporary travel writing, Bill Bryson, the bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods, often emerges as a major contender for King of Crankiness. Granted, he complains well and humorously, but between every line of his travel books you can almost hear the tinny echo: "I wanna go home, I miss my wife."

Happily, I'm a Stranger Here Myself unleashes a new Bryson, more contemplative and less likely to toss daggers. After two decades in England, he's relocated to Hanover, New Hampshire. In this collection (drawn from dispatches for London's Night & Day magazine), he's writing from home, in close proximity to wife and family. We find a happy marriage between humor and reflection as he assesses life both in New England and in the contemporary United States. With the telescopic perspective of one who's stepped out of the American mainstream and come back after 20 years, Bryson aptly holds the mirror up to U.S. culture, capturing its absurdities--such as hotlines for dental floss, the cult of the lawsuit, and strange American injuries such as those sustained from pillows and beds. "In the time it takes you to read this," he writes, "four of my fellow citizens will somehow manage to be wounded by their bedding."

The book also reflects the sweet side of small-town USA, with columns about post-office parties, dining at diners, and Thanksgiving--when the only goal is to "get your stomach into the approximate shape of a beach ball" and be grateful. And grateful we are that the previously peripatetic Bryson has returned to the U.S., turning his eye to this land--while living at home and near his wife. Under her benevolent influence, he entertains through thoughtful insights, not sarcastic stabs. --Melissa Rossi

Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road

Neil Peart

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 204 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

masterpiece! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

i don't know what more i can say, book more than worth reading, if you love music, RUSH, adventure, bikes, just to name a few and i you can appreciate what it takes for soul to lose everything an want to keep moving forward this is a worth wild read for you.

i personally love it for all that and the way he speaks so painfully honest of eventing, himself included. not to mention his amazing ability to be perfectly descript and yet it inst my method of choice to fall asleep, if you have ever read those kind of books im sure you can relate. and as you go you will see more and more of who Niel Peart is, much of it being hi sense of humor, all be it subtle r dark at times always there. all i can say is buy it and read it, i did it on a whim simply cuz i love Rush and always like to hear what fellow drummers have to say.

Editorial Review:

In less than a year, Neil Peart lost both his 19-year-old daughter, Selena, and his wife, Jackie. Faced with overwhelming sadness and isolated from the world in his home on the lake, Peart was left without direction. This memoir tells of the sense of loss and directionlessness that led him on a 55,000-mile journey by motorcycle across much of North America, down through Mexico to Belize, and back again. He had needed to get away, but had not really needed a destination. His travel adventures chronicle his personal odyssey and include stories of reuniting with friends and family, grieving, thinking, and reminiscing as he rode until he encountered the miracle that allowed him to find peace.

Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story

Chuck Klosterman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 88 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Not What You Expect 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Whoever coined the phrase "you can't judge a book by its cover" saw this one coming. This book is a decent read if you're into first person narratives about contemporary pop culture.

I stumbled upon this book when some dude who had been reading it in a coffee shop suddenly stood up and angrily slam dunked it into a trash can. Intrigued by any piece of writing that could provoke such a visceral reaction I retrieved it and began to read.

It did not take long to discover the why some readers despise this book. As rock journalism goes it is basically an off topic response. When Klosterman does meander towards the genre his lack of objectivity is stunning. He openly despises almost all rock and roll born of the 60s (for example he says matter-of-factly that Eric Clapton sucks and his immense disdain for Jim Morrison pops up again and again) but he idolizes Kiss to the point that he sees the band as perfect ongoing metaphor for every meaningful relationship he has ever had with a woman. In a book that purports to be about death and rock & roll he spends dozens of pages on the mighty Kurt Cobain in his "Seattle" section without ever mentioning Jimi Hendrix.

Bottom Line: If you are interested in the relationship between mortality and rock & roll this book is very likely to let you down in the extreme. At best Klosterman pokes at the subject a bit here and there while lambasting you with his own personal biases. However, the book is actually a pretty fun read as long as you pretend its a Douglas Coupland novel. It is well written and is quite entertaining. If this was a novel about a guy from the sticks who somehow manages to become a sophomoric NYC rock critic it would be brilliant.

Editorial Review:

For 6,557 miles, Chuck Klosterman thought about dying. He drove a rental car from New York to Rhode Island to Georgia to Mississippi to Iowa to Minneapolis to Fargo to Seattle, and he chased death and rock 'n' roll all the way. Within the span of twenty-one days, Chuck had three relationships end -- one by choice, one by chance, and one by exhaustion. He snorted cocaine in a graveyard. He walked a half-mile through a bean field. A man in Dickinson, North Dakota, explained to him why we have fewer windmills than we used to. He listened to the KISS solo albums and the Rod Stewart box set. At one point, poisonous snakes became involved. The road is hard. From the Chelsea Hotel to the swampland where Lynyrd Skynyrd's plane went down to the site where Kurt Cobain blew his head off, Chuck explored every brand of rock star demise. He wanted to know why the greatest career move any musician can make is to stop breathing...and what this means for the rest of us.

A Thousand Days in Venice (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

Marlena De Blasi

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Total reviews: 77 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

He saw her across the Piazza San Marco and fell in love from afar. When he sees her again in a Venice café a year later, he knows it is fate. He knows little English; and she, a divorced American chef, speaks only food-based Italian. Marlena thinks she is incapable of intimacy, that her heart has lost its capacity for romantic love. But within months of their first meeting, she has packed up her house in St. Louis to marry Fernando—“the stranger,” as she calls him—and live in that achingly lovely city in which they met.

Vibrant but vaguely baffled by this bold move, Marlena is overwhelmed by the sheer foreignness of her new home, its rituals and customs. But there are delicious moments when Venice opens up its arms to Marlena. She cooks an American feast of Mississippi caviar, cornbread, and fried onions for the locals . . . and takes the tango she learned in the Poughkeepsie middle school gym to a candlelit trattoría near the Rialto Bridge. All the while, she and Fernando, two disparate souls, build an extraordinary life of passion and possibility.

Featuring Marlena’s own incredible recipes, A Thousand Days in Venice is the enchanting true story of a woman who opens her heart—and falls in love with both a man and a city.

A Walk Across America

Peter Jenkins

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 97 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

OK, let's not be too harsh -- at least it was an easy read 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

To me, Peter Jenkins comes across as a very selfish, self-centered person. At the beginning, he abandoned his young wife for no apparent reason (he does not really explain what happened except by saying things got unbearable between them), in the end, he dragged another girl to walk across the country with him, even though he realized that this would totally disrupt her career. Even his treatment of his dog shows that he is obsessed with himself -- he thought his dog could think like a human (actually, like him) and he used plural to describe what he and his dog think (we remembered, we liked or did not like this place, etc.), which is completely ridiculous, mildly irritating and totally laughable. I guess that what long, lonely walks do to people, and if you get stranded on an island, you may also talk to a volleyball.

Even though he tried to distance himself from the hippies, he really is just another hippie who cares only about himself and his "spiritual journey" rather than the people who care about him. How his whole walk started is still not very clear to me, he said it was because he hated his country and wanted to see it for himself, but from the book I did not get a strong impression of this. Instead, I got the impression that it was just another excuse for him to walk away from responsibility.

But, I guess we shouldn't be too harsh on the author. Despite the somewhat juvenile writing style, irksome overuse of exclamation marks, the absurdity of using plural to describe himself and his dog, the trite story of how he found god in some southern evangelical congregations, and the adolescent and melodramatic love affair at the end, walking and working his way from upper state New York to New Orleans is no small feat, neither is writing a book about it. Overall, it was an easy, mostly enjoyable (though occasionally irritating) read.

The parts about the mountain hermit and when he lived with a black family are the highlights of the book. I also think the author did an adequate, if not excellent, job of recording the conversations of people with different background and origins. The part about "The Farm" (a place where a group of hippie cult people lived) is kind of confusing. Why did he go back and in the process got his dog killed? Why didn't he just walk away?

I also found some of his self-confessed "preconceptions" about southerners are so stereotypical that they do not appear very believable anymore; they sound more like what he made up afterwards to build a contrast between his preconceptions and reality in order to tell the story ("I thought they were just undereducated rednecks, but wait, they are actually nice folks"). More importantly, The religious undertone almost got out of hand at the end and was in danger of ruining the book. Had it happened earlier in the book, it must have made it intolerable. Fortunately that was not the case.

I wavered between giving it a 3 or 4 stars (truthfully I would give it a 3.5 stars), but considering he walked the walk and wrote the book, both are no small feats, I will give it 4 stars.

Editorial Review:

Twenty-five years ago, a disillusioned young man set out on a walk across America. This is the book he wrote about that journey -- a classic account of the reawakening of his faith in himself and his country.

"I started out searching for myself and my country," Peter Jenkins writes, "and found both." In this timeless classic, Jenkins describes how disillusionment with society in the 1970s drove him out onto the road on a walk across America. His experiences remain as sharp and telling today as they were twenty-five years ago -- from the timeless secrets of life, learned from a mountain-dwelling hermit, to the stir he caused by staying with a black family in North Carolina, to his hours of intense labor in Southern mills. Many, many miles later, he learned lessons about his country and himself that resonate to this day -- and will inspire a new generation to get out, hit the road and explore.

Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World

Rita Golden Gelman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 118 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

When Rita Golden Gelman traveled to Mexico during a two-month separation from her husband, she hoped to satisfy an old craving for adventure and, in the process, rejuvenate herself and her marriage. Little did she know it was the beginning of a new life, not just as a divorcée, but as a nomad of the world. Since 1986, Gelman has had no permanent address and no possessions except those she can carry. She travels without a plan, guided by instinct, serendipitous opportunities, and a remarkable ability to connect with people. At first her family and friends accused her of running away, but Gelman knew she had embarked on a journey of self-discovery and a way of life that is inspiring and enviable.

We know Gelman is not your typical middle-aged housewife from LA when, on that first trip to Mexico, she randomly picks a Zapotec village and decides to live there for a month, knowing nothing about the culture or the language. When she arrives, the villagers run away from her, terrified. By the time she leaves, there are hugs and tears. From there she travels to Guatemala and Nicaragua, Israel and the Galapagos Islands. But the heart of the book--and her 15-year journey--is Indonesia, where she lives for eight years. It is Bali that forever changes how she looks at the world, facilitated by her friendship with an aging prince. Tu Aji not only invites her to live with his family but decides that the education of Rita will be his final duty in life. Wherever she goes, Gelman has an uncanny ability to slip into other ways of life and become part of a community. And she is a person for whom doors open widely--her seatmate on the plane to Bali scrawls the prince's name on a piece of paper, she talks her way into a sojourn at Camp Leakey in Borneo where orangutans are studied, and an entire village in a remote part of Irian Jaya prays for the clouds to clear so her plane can land--and they do! Gelmen's secret is her passion for people. That being the case, the book is short on descriptions of place, but long on the rarer inside view of the peoples and customs of those places. This in itself is treat enough, but Gelman's animated and intimate story comes with a kicker--it's never too late to fulfill those dreams. --Lesley Reed

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.

Editorial Review:

“Here is a man who suffers so his readers can laugh.” — Daily Telegraph

Bill Bryson travels to Kenya in support of CARE International. All royalties and profits go to CARE International.

Bryson visits Kenya at the invitation of CARE International, the charity dedicated to eradicating poverty. Kenya is a land of contrasts, with famous game reserves and a vibrant culture. It also provides plenty to worry a traveller like Bill Bryson, fixated as he is on the dangers posed by snakes, insects and large predators. It is also a country with many serious problems: refugees, AIDS, drought, and grinding poverty. The resultant diary, though short in length, contains the trademark Bryson stamp of wry observation and curious insight.

The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey

Ernesto Che Guevara, Cintio Vitier, Aleida Guevara

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Total reviews: 74 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

These travel diaries capture the essence and exuberance of the young legend, Che Guevara. In January 1952, Che set out from Buenos Aires to explore South America on an ancient Norton motorcycle. He encounters an extraordinary range of people-from native Indians to copper miners, lepers and tourists-experiencing hardships and adventures that informed much of his later life.

This expanded, new edition from Ocean Press, published with exclusive access to the Che Guevara Archives held in Havana, includes a preface by Che's daughter, Aleida Guevara. It also features previously unpublished photos (taken by Che on his travels), as well as new, unpublished parts of the diaries, poems and letters.

"A Latin James Dean or Jack Kerouac."-Washington Post

"For every comic escapade of the carefree roustabout there is an equally eye-opening moment in the development of the future revolutionary leader. By the end of the journey, a politicized Che Guevara has emerged to predict his own revolutionary future."-Time

The publication of this new, expanded edition of The Motorcycle Diaries coincides with the release of Robert Redford's new film based on the Diaries. This film and another forthcoming from Steven Soderbergh in Fall 2003 will provoke even greater "Che-mania" and increase sales of all Ocean's titles on Che Guevara.