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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

September 15, 2015

The Way Winter Comes: Alaska Stories
By Sherry Simpson. Photographs by Charles Mason. Sasquatch Books, 1998, 164 pp.

For the armchair traveler, books about place provide a kind of journey, and in The Way Winter Comes, Sherry Simpson takes readers deep into Alaska. In these 8 essays, she writes her way through an icy landscape, describing, reflecting, and pondering.

Alaska, of course, is not all one place. As Simpson observes in the title essay, a meditation on winter, “The fundamental grammars of darkness and cold seem familiar enough throughout Alaska, but the idioms of climate and geography make each place exotic and difficult in its own way.” Growing up in Juneau, now living in Fairbanks, she finds that in the high Arctic—Barrow—where she is visiting an archaeological dig, she is a “stranger.” Read More 

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Book Review

August 31, 2015

On the Narrow Road: Journey into a Lost Japan
By Lesley Downer
Summit Books, 1989, 280 pp.

In travel literature there is a strong tradition of writers following in the footsteps of earlier travelers: to try see what they saw, to in some sense share their experience, perhaps to see what has changed. In On the Narrow Path: Journey to a Lost Japan, Lesley Downer enters this tradition, following the path of the great Japanese poet, Matsuo Basho, who in 1689 set off on a 5-month, 800 mile journey to the “wild north” of Japan and in 1693 published The Narrow Path to the Deep North, a book studied and loved throughout Japan.

Basho’s purpose, Downer says, was poetic: he wanted to visit places that had inspired poets in the past. His journey was also “a pilgrimage to the places associated with Yoshitsune, the greatest and most loved of Japanese heroes.” Traveling nearly 300 years later, Downer’s own aims were to see if the old “wild” north—said to have disappeared—could still be found, and also to get close to Basho himself. Read More 

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Travel Quotation

August 13, 2015

“But we are all travelers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world.”
―Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes

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Book Recommendation

July 25, 2015

Under African Sun

By Marianne Alverson. University of Chicago Press, 1987, 233 pp.


In 1972, Alverson went to live in Botswana with her anthropologist husband, Hoyt, and their two young sons. Unlike most expatriates in the region, the family lived on the lands, in the homestead of the village elder Rre Segalthe, who adopted them. Alverson, who learned the Setswana language, immersed herself in the lives of her neighbors, adapting to their customs and in time starting a school. Her memoir is perceptive, entertaining, and so rich in detail that I too found myself immersed in the community and in the author's moving experience. Read More 

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Travel Quotation

July 23, 2015
"Take more time, cover less ground."
―Thomas Merton
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Book Review

July 23, 2015

Travels with Epicurus:
A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life
By Daniel Klein. Penguin, 2012, 164 pp.

In his early seventies, faced with the prospect of devoting an entire year to major dental surgery, Daniel Klein decided it was time to deal with the realities—and conceptions—of old age. Questioning what he calls the “forever young” movement prevalent in America—where the elderly keep striving for new goals and submitting to cosmetic surgery—he determined to find a better philosophy.

Having spent time previously on the Greek island of Hydra, where he found the elderly “uncommonly content with their stage of life,” he thought this was the place to find some answers. Packing up a load of philosophy books, he set off on his quest.

In Travels with Epicurus, Klein takes us on his philosophical journey.  Read More 

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Book Review

July 3, 2015

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
By Laurie Lee. Drawings by Leonard Rosoman. Atheneum, 1969, 248 pp.

The opening of this wonderful book reminded me of one of those fairy tales where the youngest son sets out with his small bundle of possessions to seek his fortune in the world. Laurie Lee was just 19 when he left his small village in Gloucestershire to see the world, and among his few possessions—which included a tent, a blanket, a change of clothes, and a tin of treacle biscuits—was a violin, which he planned to play to earn his living. Like those storybook figures, he was very young, and everything lay before him. As he says, recapturing the wonder many years later, “Everything I saw was new.”

As you would expect of an English youth, Lee heads for London, though his main destination is Southampton, to see the sea. But after working at a buildings job for a year, his journey takes him to Spain, where he trudges through hot fields, wanders into strange villages, takes in cities—Madrid, Toledo, Seville—and at last, wintering in tiny Castillo, finds himself amidst the beginnings of the Spanish civil war.  Read More 

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Book Review

May 22, 2015

Journeys
By Stefan Zweig. Translated and with an Introduction by Will Stone. First published 1902-1940. Modern Voices, Hesperus, 2011, 109 pp.

“Stations and ports, these are my passion,” writes Stefan Zweig. “For hours I can stand there awaiting a fresh wave of travellers and goods noisily crashing in to cover the preceding one…Each station is different, each distils another distant land; every port, every ship brings a different cargo.”

Best known for his fiction and biographies, Zweig also wrote extensively about travel, which, observes Will Stone in his fine introduction to this book, was not merely important to the Austrian writer, but central to his being, “the fulcrum of his entire adult life.” This selection of his essays, arranged chronologically, moves from 1902, when the young author travels to immerse himself in the larger European literary and intellectual world, through the 20s, when he travels through a land recovering from the decimation of WWI, to 1940, and the onset of WWII.  Read More 

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Book Review

May 7, 2015

To a Mountain in Tibet
By Colin Thubron. HarperCollins, 2011, 227 pp.

Mt. Kailas, in Tibet, says Colin Thubron is “the most sacred of the world’s mountains—holy to one fifth of the earth’s people.” To believers, “the earthly Kailas is a ladder between light and darkness—its foundations are in hell—and a site of redemptive power.” Indeed, to Hindus, “‘departure for Kailas’ is a metaphor for death.”

Death is very much on the author’s mind as he makes his way through Nepal to join the many pilgrims who will circumambulate the mountain. Not long ago, his mother died, and he is now the last of his family; he lost his father earlier, and his sister was killed years ago, at 21,in an avalanche in the mountains of Switzerland. He is going to Mt. Kailas to mark their passage. He is also going because he is a traveler: travel is his profession, it is what he does.  Read More 

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Travel Quotation

April 26, 2015


“Sometimes journeys begin long before their first step is taken.”
―Colin Thubron

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