“A hard journey makes you curiously tender to even your most maddening companions.”
―Peter Fleming, News from Tartary
TraveLit--A blog about travel literature.
Even with the best of maps and instruments, we can never fully chart our journeys.
Travel Quotation
August 8, 2014
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Book Review
August 2, 2014
Here is New York
By E. B. White. With a New Introduction by Roger Angell. Origally published 1948 in Holiday magazine. First published as a book in 1949. The Little Bookroom, 1999, 56 pp.
Among the many long and sometimes longwinded books about New York, E. B. White’s Here is New York—at 7500 words—occupies an outsize space. Widely admired since it first appeared more than fifty years ago, this slender essay manages to capture the essence of the city—or The City, as it is known to those who live there.
Describing the origins of the work in his introduction, Roger Angell—a New Yorker writer and White’s stepson—explains that it was commissioned in 1948 by Holiday magazine. With travel surging in the postwar years, the publication began assigning travel pieces to topnotch writers, artists, and photographers. The editor asked White, who was then living in Maine, to revisit New York, where he had lived in the twenties.
Book Review
July 29, 2014
News from Tartary: A Journey from Peking to Kashmir
By Peter Fleming. Foreword by Heinrich Harrer. First published in 1936. J. P. Tarcher, 1982, 384 pp.
In 1935, Peter Fleming, a special correspondent for The Times (London), set out with Kini Maillart to travel from Peking to India. Their route would take them through North Tibet and Sinkiang, a region recently besieged by civil war and closed to foreign travelers. In the end their journey took around 7 months, covered some 3500 miles, and cost about 150 pounds each.
Most people—even those who have traveled rough—would consider this an extremely difficult journey. The pair had long hauls over tough terrain on camels, donkeys, horses, or on foot. They slept in a tent, and endured extremes of heat and cold. They ate quantities of tsamba (parched barley meal which could be mixed with tea and rancid butter), and they often drank brackish water, plain or in their tea, the salt fighting it out with the sugar. They bathed out of a frying pan. And they dealt with a slew of agents from the various groups trying to control the area—nationalist, Soviet, rebel—who demanded papers they didn’t possess.
But Fleming didn’t see this as a hard life, and anyone seeking insight into the makeup of the true traveler will find it in News from Tartary. Read More
Book Review
July 2, 2014
Writing Blue Highways: The Story of How a Book Happened
By William Least Heat-Moon
University of Missouri Press, 2014, 164 pp.
In 1978, his marriage failing and his teaching job discontinued, William Least Heat-Moon set off from Missouri on a journey through the back roads of America. His means of transport—and mobile home—was a small van he called “Ghost Dancing.” His destination: “Any Damn Place Else.” Four years later, at the age of 42, he published the story of his three-month journey across some 13,000 miles: Blue Highways, as I imagine most travel readers know, was a huge success.
But that success did not come easily. In Writing Blue Highways, Heat-Moon recalls the years that followed his return, as he struggled through draft after draft, trying to transform his journey into a book. This was, after all, his first book. Not only did he have to find some way to earn a living that would also allow him the time he needed to write, he had to learn to write. Indeed, it was only in his seventh draft—after he had encountered rejections from publishers and the disappointment of his good friend and best reader—that he saw what was missing from his narrative: the right narrator. Read More
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Travel Quotation
June 16, 2014
"There are two kind of adventurers: those who go truly hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won't."
―William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways
Book Review
June 10, 2014
Three Rivers of France: Dordogne-Lot-Tarn
By Freda White. Photographs and Commentary by Michael Busselle. First published in 1952. Revised in 1962, 1972. Arcade, 1989, 207 pp.
Traveling in Southwest France in 1987, the photographer Michael Busselle took along Freda White’s Three Rivers of France, by then reissued twice since its first publication in 1952 and considered, he says, “the definitive book on the subject.” Struck by how “useful” the work remained after more than 30 years, he conceived the idea of retracing White’s journey and photographing the places she described. The book that emerged is superb, combining White’s erudite yet entertaining text with Busselle’s beautiful photos of one of the most beautiful regions of France. Read More
Travel Quotation
June 9, 2014
"We go to foreign lands to enjoy their good food, not to whimper for the meals of home."
―Freda White, Three Rivers of France
Travel Quotation
May 23, 2014
"You got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there."
―Yogi Berra
Book Review
May 14, 2014
North-West by North: A Journal of a Voyage
By Dora Birtles. With a New Introduction by the Author. Originally published as A Journal of a Voyage in 1935. Beacon Press, Beacon/Virago Travelers, 1985, 432 pp.
Although it was first published in 1935, Dora Birtles’s North-West by North reads like a more contemporary work. This is mainly because her tale of a voyage from Australia to Singapore gives us the personal story—travel as exploration of self—that nowadays, in a world where so much has already been described, travel narratives are expected to provide. Read More
Book Review
May 8, 2014
Into the Heart of Borneo
By Redmond O’Hanlon. Vintage Departures, Random House, 1987, 192 pp.
Into the Heart of Borneo fits into a venerable tradition in travel literature: the narrative written by a traveler who is happy to mock his fears, his near-disasters, and his general lack of suitable skills for his journey. An adventure cast partly as farce, the book is also an appreciation of a place, its wildlife, and its people, and it is thoroughly entertaining throughout. Read More