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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 27, 2014

Last Places: A Journey in the North
By Lawrence Millman. Introduction by Paul Theroux. First published in 1990. Houghton Mifflin, 2000, 242 pp.

“In travel, as in food, one man’s caviar is another man’s soggy dumpling,” writes Lawrence Millman, whose own taste for bleak, forsaken places led him to the cold waters of the North Atlantic. The pull, it seems, was magnetic. “Glacially scoured boulders put my feet in an inspirational mood,” he says. “Resolutely barren islands made my soul sing; the more barren, the more rollicking the song.”

Curious to investigate this attraction, Millman set out to travel the entire breadth of the North Atlantic, from Norway to Newfoundland. He would follow the route the Vikings took as they sailed out in search of “space, autonomy, elbowroom,” choosing places that were “unkempt, forbidding, or just plain empty,” “the last places at the very rim of the globe.” Read More 

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Book Review

December 15, 2014

Long Ago in France
By M. F. K. Fisher. Introduction by Jan Morris. A Touchstone Book, Simon & Schuster, 1992, 159 pp.

As its title suggests, Long Ago in France is a memoir that looks back to another era, both in France and in the author’s life. Fisher was young and newly married when she arrived in Dijon in 1929 with her husband, Al, who was a graduate student at the university, where she also studied French.

Fisher’s three years in Dijon proved to be seminal in her life, setting her on the path to become the food writer and prose stylist she would become. It was there, she says, that she “started to grow up, to study, to make love, to eat and drink, to be me and not what I was expected to be.” But this is not a nostalgic trip back through time. It isn’t sentimental, nor does it suggest a yearning to return to that earlier age: it is much more an effort to recreate it, for us and also, I think, for herself.  Read More 

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Book Review

December 8, 2014

First Contact: New Guinea’s Highlanders Encounter the Outside World
By Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson. Viking, 1987, 317 pp.

For most Americans, the story told in First Contact will be new. Apart from anthropological works, few books have been written about New Guinea, a country we hear little about. Indeed, although I lived in New Britain—a part of Papua New Guinea—I was unaware of the fascinating history of the first white exploration of the Highlands recounted here. Read More 

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Books you might like: Reader recommendations

October 27, 2014

Jeremy Pool (Recollector) recommends Peter Freuchen's Arctic Adventure: My Life in the Frozen North, published in 1935, which he calls "an engrossing account of a lifetime among the Inuit of Greenland."

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Travel Quotation

October 19, 2014

“I doubt whether I ever read any description of scenery which gave me an idea of the place described.”
―Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, 1873

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Book Review: The Amateur Emigrant

October 12, 2014

From Scotland to Silverado

By Robert Louis Stevenson. Edited by James D. Hart. The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1966.

In 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson left his native Scotland on a journey to California to meet up with Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, a married woman whom he had met and fallen in love with several years before, and whom he would eventually marry. In The Amateur Emigrant, he describes his three-week journey, by boat to New York and by emigrant train to Monterey, an arduous trip that left him seriously ill.

At the time, observes James D. Hart in his informative introduction to this volume, the two most important works Stevenson had written were An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. Both of these were “records of pleasure trips, undertaken in part simply to provide material for books,” and they were known for their charm.

The Amateur Emigrant is an altogether different kind of work. Read More 

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Book Review

September 24, 2014

Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes
By Robert Louis Stevenson. First published 1879.

In 1878 Robert Louis Stevenson, then in his twenties, set out from the village of Le Monastier to travel south through the Cevennes, the mountain range of south-central France. Determined to try to camp out, he had a sleeping sack constructed and then acquired a donkey to carry it.

The sleeping sack was a novelty—“a child of my invention,” as he calls it. But he himself, as he observes, was a novelty. “A traveller of my sort was a thing hitherto unheard of in that district. I was looked upon with contempt, like a man who should project a journey to the moon, but yet with a respectful intent, like one setting forth for the inclement Pole.” Read More 

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Travel Quotation

September 21, 2014

"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints."
―Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes

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Book Review

September 13, 2014

In A Sunburned Country
By Bill Bryson. Broadway Books, 2000, 307 pp.

In A Sunburned Country is too new to be considered a classic and Bill Bryson certainly can’t be called a “little-known” writer, but I enjoyed this book so much I feel compelled to recommend it. I’ve long wanted to return to Australia, having visited only briefly, and Bryson’s book intensified my longing to go back and see everything I missed—or some of what I missed, at least. As the author’s journey makes clear, this country is so huge that even traveling for weeks over many miles, you will still manage only a small portion of the continent’s vast territory. Read More 

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Book Review

August 25, 2014

Scrambles Amongst the Alps
By Edward Whymper. Revised and Edited by H. E. G. Tyndale. With additional illustrations and material from the author’s unpublished diaries. With photographs by John Cleare. First published in 1871. Peregrine Smith Books, 1986, 262 pp.

Recent climbing fatalities in the French Alps drew me back to Edward Whymper’s classic work, an account of his many excursions and victories in the Alps and most notably the story of the first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865 and the expedition’s tragic descent. Read More 

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