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Gail Pool

TraveLit--A blog about travel literature. 

     Even with the best of maps and instruments, we can never fully chart our journeys.

Book Review

December 9, 2015

Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic Alaska.
By Seth Kantner. Milkweed Editions, 2008, 240 pp.

Many years ago, a student in my writing seminar, a young woman who had grown up in Barrow, Alaska, said that she wanted to write a memoir—but not about herself: she wanted to write a memoir about the tundra. I didn’t fully get it at the time, and she didn’t get far with her project, but after reading Kantner’s book and seeing his spectacular photographs—of wildlife, ice, and tundra—I now understand the grip this powerful landscape had on her.

Kantner was born in Arctic Alaska—in an igloo—the younger son of Howie and Erna, both originally from Ohio, who felt the pull of that landscape and moved there in the sixties to live, like the natives, off the land.  Read More 

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Links of Interest

November 28, 2015





Goodreads Book Giveaway




Lost Among the Baining by Gail Pool




Lost Among the Baining



by Gail Pool





Giveaway ends January 07, 2016.



See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.







Enter Giveaway



 Read More 
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Links of Interest

November 24, 2015
Singapore Old and New
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Book Review

November 17, 2015

North to Katahdin
By Eric Pinder. Milkweed Editions, 2005, 178 pp.

Katahdin—a name derived from the Abenaki Indian words kette adene, which is said to mean “greatest mountain”—is the highest point in Maine. It is also one end—for most thru-hikers, the endpoint—of the Appalachian Trail which extends 2160 miles to Georgia. In North to Katahdin, Eric Pinder rambles throughout the Katahdin region, ruminating on the mountain’s history and symbolism, and meditating on America’s relationship with wilderness.

Pinder takes as his starting point Henry David Thoreau’s 1846 visit to Katahdin, which he intended to climb but decided to abandon instead. Throughout the book, the author returns to this naturalist-philosopher, as he reflects on the popularity of mountain hiking today—an activity rare in Thoreau’s day—and wonders about the draw. “What is it—philosophically, aesthetically, and biologically—that attracts us to nature in the first place?” he asks. “Can the natural world still satisfy crowds in search of solitude?” Read More 

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Links of Interest

November 13, 2015

For some excellent,and beautifully illustrated, articles on tribal art and anthropology--a distinctive kind of travel--take a look at Detours des Mondes

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Travel Quotation

November 10, 2015

I have traveled widely in Concord."
―Henry David Thoreau

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Links of Interest

October 23, 2015

For some excellent travel book recommendations, check out Longitude Books: Recommended Reading for Travelers.

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Book Review

October 19, 2015

Wrong About Japan: A Father’s Journey With His Son
By Peter Carey. Knopf, 2005, 158 pp.

I turned to Wrong About Japan with great curiosity. Many reader reviews on both Amazon and Goodreads were negative, even hostile, to the book. Yet the ABE included it in its list of “50 Essential Travel Books.” So which was it? “Boring,” “shallow,“nauseating”? Or “essential”?

The book chronicles a short trip to Japan that Carey took with his 12-year-old son, Charley, to explore manga and anime, with which Charley was obsessed. Carey himself, through his son, became interested in these art forms—the extraordinary Japanese comics and animated films—which he briefly defines for the uninitiated reader. Before leaving the States, where the Australian writer now lives, he contacts people he knows in Japan—and, needless to say, the famous author, a two-time Booker Prize recipient, has terrific contacts, who set up interviews with celebrated directors, including the most celebrated of all, Miyazaki. Read More 

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Travel Quotation

October 13, 2015

“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”
―Aldous Huxley

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Book Review

September 26, 2015

One Boy's Boston 1887-1901
By Samuel Eliot Morison. With a Foreword by Edward Weeks. First published in 1962, by Houghton Mifflin. Northeastern University Press, 1983, 81 pp.

This charming book about a charmed boyhood provides an occasion for time travel. In 81 pages filled with historical detail, anecdotes, even limericks, the historian Samuel Eliot Morison takes us back to a Boston where horses, not cars, rode the streets, where houses were lighted by gas, not electricity, and where—hard to imagine in our own time—telephones were rare.

Morison, the author of more than 25 books—including The Maritime History of Massachusetts and Admiral of the Ocean Sea, a recreation of Columbus’s voyages—paints a portrait of the city as well as one of his own childhood, and he finds delight in both. As a boy, he loved the horses, the colorful trolleys, the winter sledding, and his rambles downtown with friends. He also takes great pleasure in depicting the eccentricities of the adults who surrounded him.  Read More 

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