Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and books on tape. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
Last week, ek hornbeck pointed out that other worlds were not found just in science fiction and fantasy stories. He is absolutely right. One of my favorite "other world" categories is travel stories. I love to travel the world from my rocking chair. Not only are there lots of interesting books, but many diarists on Daily Kos have written about places they have visited.
My husband and I traveled before we had children and we enjoyed it very much. We rented a house from people who wanted to come home from Florida in the summer. We were teachers so when school ended we packed up the car and left the house to the owners. The first two years we traveled to the West and then north into the Canadian Rockies and we had a wonderful time. But years before, I had dipped my toes in the Atlantic Ocean somewhere north of Kennebunkport, Maine, and said to myself, "On the other side of this ocean is Europe."
I also want to praise James Michener for my yearnings to travel to Spain because he wrote Iberia in 1968 which is a travel story about Spain and he built it around some amazing photos by Robert Vavra.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/...
Synopsis
"Massive, beautiful...Unquestionably some of the best writing on Spain...The best that Mr. Michener has ever done on any subject...Stunning...Memorable."
We spent eight weeks in Europe in 1972 riding the trains with an Eurorail Pass and carrying pages from Frommer's Europe on Ten Dollars a Day book. We did the whole trip for two, including gifts and airplane tickets, for $2000 total. We arrived home late at night to a cottage we had just purchased, slept on the floor in sleeping bags, and went to school to teach the next morning having missed opening instruction's day. What can I say? We were young.
I have never forgotten the trip and I am so glad we did it when we could. It seemed that everything was on the top of a hill and when we went to bed my feet hurt all night despite having good walking shoes with thick soles.
I had been for a ride in a four seat plane once in high school and on a train for twenty minutes in second grade. Hubby had not done even that. In the first twenty-four hours, we flew to New York and then to Amsterdam, rode a train to the coast, got on what looked like a big ship (to us) to cross the English Channel, took a train to Victoria Station in London and used the underground there and it was a bit of a cultural shock. To seasoned travelers this sounds funny, I know.
We saw London and the Lakes District, Paris, Versailles, Madrid, Segovia, Barcelona, Carcassonne Castle in France, the Riviera, and stopped in the train station at Monte Carlo. We spent time in Rome and saw Rigoletto at the Baths of Caracolla, visited Ostia Antica, Florence, Venice, the Dolomites, Vienna, Innsbruck, Salzburg, Basel, Heidelberg, and rode the Rhine boat on a foggy day. We saw Bonn, Cologne, Delft, Gouda, Amsterdam and then flew home.
The soup in Austria and the bread in France were unforgettable and there were flowers everywhere. I was not disappointed in any way. The Eiffel Tower is much better than the pictures show. Big Ben, seen after emerging from the underground, was awesome. The organ in the church of the Madeleine in Paris, David in Florence, Moses in Rome, the Sistine Chapel before the ceiling was cleaned, the Etruscan statues, another opera at Schönbrunn Palace, the art museums and science museums were wonderful. The cathedrals were breath-taking. The people all were very friendly, too.
Other travel books that I have enjoyed very much and that I recommend:
River-Horse by William Least-Heat Moon is one which I have placed in my top ten best books list. He and a friend joined by others travel in a small boat from the Atlantic to the Pacific with many dangerous adventures on the way.
Life on the Road by Charles Kuralt
Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux, a trip from Egypt to Cape Town.
8:55 to Baghdad by Andrew Eames who was following in the steps of Agatha Christie
Off the Road by Jack Hitt, a walking pilgrimage to Santiago, Spain
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson, a memoir of the Appalachian Trail (both sad and hilarious, mostly hilarious)
The Canoe Boys: From the Clyde Past the Cuillins: Rediscovering Scotland by Alastair Dunnett, a memoir of a dangerous journey in the 1930’s by two adventurous young Scotsmen. Yes, this is Dorothy Dunnett's husband.
The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan by Ben Macintyre
Passenger to Teheran by Vita Sackville-West and the quote that made the book worth reading:
"But, for my part, I would not forgo the memory of an Egyptian dawn, and the flight of herons across the morning moon."
Places in Between (Walking across Afghanistan) by Rory Stewart
Three Cups of Tea about Greg Mortenson by David Relin. I consider this a kind of travel story and another for my top ten best ever book list.
Walking the Trail (of Tears) by Jerry Ellis
Voyager, the story of an around the world journey in a tiny plane with no stops by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yaeger written with Phil Patton
West with the Night by Beryl Markham
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/...
Synopsis
Growing up in East Africa, the author describes her life as a pioneer aviator, a horse breeder, pilot of passengers and supplies in a small plane to remote corners of Africa, and she became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west.
Prince Borghese’s Trail or Peking to Paris: 10,000 Miles over Two Continents, Four Deserts and the Roof of the World in the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge by Genevieve Obert
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/...
Synopsis
Two women who scarcely know each other, but with a common love of exotic landscape, vintage wheels, and high adventure (one a well-heeled Pacific Heights motorcycle enthusiast, the other a Santa Cruz-based automotive journalist, car fanatic, and mother of two small children) join forces to tackle an arduous endurance rally, driving a classic car over ten thousand miles of rough and exotic terrain in the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge. Prince Borghese's Trail is a classic travel adventure narrative in the tradition of Alexandra David-Neel and Beryl Markham.
A Pirate of Exquisite Mind, the bio of William Dampier by Diana and Michael Preston
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
William Dampier (5 September 1651 (baptised) – March 1715) was an English buccaneer, sea captain, author and scientific observer. He was the first Englishman to explore or map parts of New Holland (Australia) and New Guinea. He was the first person to circumnavigate the world three times...
Dampier influenced several figures better known than he:
His observations and analysis of natural history helped Charles Darwin's and Alexander von Humboldt's development of their theories,
He made innovations in navigation technology that were studied by James Cook and Horatio Nelson.
Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, was inspired by accounts of real-life castaway Alexander Selkirk, a crew-member on Dampier's voyages.
His reports on breadfruit led to William Bligh's ill-fated voyage in HMS Bounty.
He is cited over a thousand times in the Oxford English Dictionary notably on words such as 'barbecue', 'avocado', 'chopsticks' and 'sub-species'. That is not to say he coined the words, but his use of them is the first known example in English.
His travel journals depicting Panama influenced the undertaking of the ill-fated Darien Scheme, leading to the Act of Union of 1707.
His notes on the fauna and flora of northwestern Australia were studied by naturalist and scientist Joseph Banks who made further studies during the first voyage with Cook. It helped lead to the naming of and colonization of Botany Bay and the founding of modern Australia.
He is mentioned in the Gabriel Garcia Marquez short story The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship.
He is considered the inspiration for Jonathan Swift in his Gulliver's Travels and is believed to have influenced Samuel Taylor Coleridge with his poem "Ancient Mariner".
A Sense of the World about James Holman by Jason Roberts. James was blind, but had incredible adventures in the early 1800’s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
...a Grand Tour from 1819 to 1821 when he journeyed through France, Italy, Switzerland, the parts of Germany bordering on the Rhine, Belgium and the Netherlands. On his return he published The Narrative of a Journey through France, etc. (London, 1822).
He again set out in 1822 with the incredible design of making the circuit of the world from west to east, something which at the time was almost unheard of by a lone traveler, blind or not - but after traveling through Russia as far east as the Mongolian frontier of Irkutsk. There he was suspected by the Czar of being a spy who might publicize the extensive activities of the Russian American Company should he travel further east, and was conducted back forcibly to the frontiers of Poland. He returned home by Austria, Saxony, Prussia and Hanover, when he then published Travels through Russia, Siberia, etc. (London, 1825).
Shortly afterwards he again set out to accomplish by a somewhat different method the design which had been frustrated by the Russian authorities; and an account of his remarkable achievement was published in four volumes in 1834-1835, under the title of A Voyage Round the World, including Travels in Africa, Asia, Australasia, America, etc., from 1827 to 1832.
Holman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (UK), and of the Linnaean Society (UK). Charles Darwin, in The Voyage of the Beagle, cited Holman's writings as a source on the flora of the Indian Ocean. On Fernando Po Island, now part of Equatorial Guinea, the British Government named the Holman River in his honor, commemorating his contributions to fighting the slave trade in the region during the 1820s.
His last journeys were through Spain, Portugal, Moldavia, Montenegro, Syria and Turkey. Within a week after finishing an autobiography, Holman's Narratives of His Travels, he died in London on the 29th of July 1857. This last work was never published, and likely has not survived.
This book I read years ago:
A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Lucy Bird
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/...
Synopsis
In 1872, Isabella Bird, daughter of a clergyman, set off alone to the Antipodes 'in search of health' and found she had embarked on a life of adventurous travel. In 1873, wearing Hawaiian riding dress, she rode her horse through the American Wild West, a terrain only newly opened to pioneer settlement. The letters that make up this volume were first published in 1879. They tell of magnificent, unspoiled landscapes and abundant wildlife, of encounters with rattlesnakes, wolves, pumas and grizzly bears, and her reactions to the volatile passions of the miners and pioneer settlers. A classic account of a truly astounding journey.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Isabella Lucy Bird (October 15, 1831 – October 7, 1904) was a nineteenth-century English traveler, writer, and a natural historian...
She then moved on to Colorado, then the newest member of the United States, where she had heard the air was excellent for the infirm. Dressed practically and riding not sidesaddle but frontwards like a man (though she threatened to sue the Times for saying she dressed like one), she covered over 800 miles in the Rocky Mountains in 1873.
Her letters to her sister, first printed in the magazine Leisure Hour, comprised her fourth and perhaps most famous book, A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains.
Bird's time in the Rockies was enlivened especially by her acquaintance with Jim Nugent, a textbook outlaw with one eye and an affinity for violence and poetry. "A man any woman might love but no sane woman would marry", Bird declared in a section excised from her letters prior to their publication. Nugent also seemed captivated by the independently-minded Bird, but she ultimately left the Rockies and her "dear desperado". Nugent was shot dead less than a year later.
At home, Bird again found herself pursued, this time by John Bishop, an Edinburgh doctor in his thirties. Predictably ill, she went travelling again, this time to the far east: Japan, China, Vietnam, Singapore and Malaysia. Yet when her sister died of typhoid in 1880, Isabella was heartbroken and finally accepted Bishop's marriage proposal. Her health took a severe turn for the worse but recovered by Bishop's own death in 1886. Feeling that her earlier travels had been hopelessly dilettante, Bird studied medicine and resolved to travel as a missionary. Despite her nearly sixty years of age, she set off for India.
Arriving on the subcontinent in February 1889, Bird visited missions in India, crossed Tibet, and then traveled in Persia, Kurdistan and Turkey. The following year she joined a group of British soldiers traveling between Baghdad and Tehran. She remained with the unit's commanding officer during his survey work in the region, armed with her revolver and a medicine chest supplied - in possibly an early example of corporate sponsorship - by Henry Wellcome's company in London.
Featured in journals and magazines for decades, Bird was by now something of a household name. In 1892, she became the first woman inducted into the Royal Geographical Society. Her final great journey took place in 1897 where she traveled up the Yangtze and Han rivers which are in China and Korea, respectively.
Later still, she went to Morocco, where she traveled among the Berbers and had to use a ladder to mount her black stallion, a gift from the Sultan. She died in Edinburgh within a few months of her return in 1904, just shy of her seventy-third birthday. She was still planning another trip to China.
These books I have not read, but they sound good:
This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland by Gretel Ehrlich
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/...
Synopsis
For the Last Decade, Gretel Ehrlich has been obsessed by an island, a terrain, a culture, and the men and women who long for and love the complex frailties and treacherous beauty of a world defined by ice.
Greenland, the world's largest island, 840,000 square miles in extent, is covered by the largest continental ice sheet in the world.
Only the rocky fringe of its coast is habitable. There, the Inuit, the Arctic's first explorers, have survived and thrived in the harshest of climates.
For the Inuit, an ice-age, ice-adapted people who first traveled from Siberia across the polar North six thousand years ago, weather is consciousness. In a world composed of ice and darkness, water and light, where skins of dog, seal, bear, even hare and eider duck, are sewn into clothes, tents, and sleeping bags as protection, where transport is by dogsled and kayak, the only rein for the uncontrollable force of weather is an unbending self-discipline. The blend of physical endurance and psychological perseverance required for daily existence first drew Ehrlich to this terrain...
Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback by Robyn Davidson
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/...
Synopsis
A cult classic with an ever-growing audience, Tracks is the brilliantly written and frequently hilarious account of a young woman's odyssey through the deserts of Australia, with no one but her dog and four camels as companions. Davidson emerges as a heroine who combines extraordinary courage with exquisite sensitivity. 16 pages of photos.
Afghan Amulet: Travels from the Hindu Kush to Razgad by Sheila Paine
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/...
Synopsis
In 1990, armed with five kilos of luggage, a camera, and a liter of vodka, Sheila Paine set off for the high valleys of the Hindu Kush in northern Pakistan, looking for an interesting amuletic pattern relevant to her work as a textile expert. It remained elusive, always to be found "in the next valley."
Undeterred, she followed traces of it on tribal costumes and in fabric amulets into increasingly dangerous and remote territories. Over two years, her quest took her into Makran, an area split by the Pakistan/Iran border and totally closed to outsiders, then into Iran itself, once she was able to escape the watchful eye of a suspicious government official. She was smuggled into Afghanistan and continued her journey through Iraqi and Turkish Kurdistan before reaching the Black Sea and the last link in the chain, the small town of Razgrad in eastern Bulgaria.
Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle by Dervla Murphy
1963 solo journey
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/...
Synopsis
Braving hunger, heat exhaustion, unbearable terrain and cultures largely untouched by civilization, Dervla Murphy chronicles her determined trip through nine countries, through snow and ice in the mountains and miles of barren land in the scorching desert. With indomitable spirit and her special brand of Irish understatement and wit Murphy revels in the unpredictability of her journey and the challenging grandeur of her surroundings.
Full Tilt is a highly individual account by a celebrated travel writer based on the daily diary Murphy kept while riding through Yugoslavia, Persia, Afghanistan, over the Himalayas to Pakistan and into India. Murphy's charm and gracious sensitivity as a writer and a traveler reveals not only civilizations of exotic people and places but the wonder of a woman alone on an extraordinary adventure.
Other books by this author:
Eight Feet in the Andes: Travels with a Mule in Unknown Peru by Dervla Murphy
Silverland: A Winter Journey Beyond the Urals by Dervla Murphy
South from the Limpopo by Dervla Murphy
Through Siberia by Accident by Dervla Murphy
Transylvania and beyond: A Travel Memoir by Dervla Murphy
Muddling Through in Madagascar by Dervla Murphy
One Foot in Laos by Dervla Murphy
On a Shoestring to Coorg: A Travel Memoir of India by Dervla Murphy
In Ethiopia with a Mule by Dervla Murphy
Ukimwi Road: From Kenya to Zimbabwe by Dervla Murphy
Waiting Land: A Spell in Nepal by Dervla Murphy
Where the Indus Is Young by Dervla Murphy
Cameroon with Egbert by Dervla Murphy
Of course, so many fiction books also give us the sense of another world and travels, too.
It is your turn to mention favorite travel books or tell of your own adventures.
Here are some Daily Kos travelers:
with pictures of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the City Lights Book Store:
Road Trip: Photo Diary
by john de herrera
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bloomin' Arizona... heavy photo diary
by Brahman Colorado
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Must see: Postcards from a past journey in Mexico by roses
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://www.dailykos.com/...
If you missed Laughing Planets' travel diaries, here they are:
DKos Travel Board # 10 --- Northern Pakistan --- Muslim Mountains
by LaughingPlanet
http://www.dailykos.com/...
-------- Laos -------- : Communist Buddhists; DKos Travel Board #15
http://www.dailykos.com/...
- Holy Cities of India -- DKos Travel Board # 13
http://www.dailykos.com/...
DKos Travel Board # 8 --------- Tibet ----------- Imperiled Culture
http://www.dailykos.com/...
----- Cambodia ----- Agony to Angkor Wat - DKos Travel Board # 7
http://www.dailykos.com/...
If you have missed Haole’s diaries from Hawaii, just click on his name in this one.
Dolphins, False Killer Whales and Some Birds - A Photo Diary
by Haole in Hawaii
http://www.dailykos.com/...
He also traveled to Africa.
Here are Haole's African diaries in case you missed them:
Wildlife of the Okavango Delta - A Photo Diary
by Haole in Hawaii
http://www.dailykos.com/...
African Wildlife - A Photo Diary
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Okavango Delta Wildlife - A Photo Diary
http://www.dailykos.com/...
The Spotted Hyena - A Wildlife/Photo Diary
http://www.dailykos.com/...
same name, but different dates
Okavango Wildlife - A Photo Diary
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Okavango Wildlife - A Photo Diary
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Diaries and articles of the week:
Write On! Books about writing
by SensibleShoes
http://www.dailykos.com/...
New Ben Franklin Letters Discovered in London
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 24, 2009
A professor with his nose deep in a library archive in London has stumbled upon 47 previously unknown letters from, to and about Benjamin Franklin.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
In the article there is a famous quote we have heard before (I did the bold:
None of that ultimately helped Braddock. Franklin had warned him of the threat of Indian ambush. Braddock had replied that the "savages" might threaten raw Colonial militiamen but not the king's disciplined soldiers. The rest is history: Braddock lost a thousand men in the massacre near the Forks, and he fell mortally wounded, asking an aide, "Who would have thought it?"
Book Review: Two works on Edward Kennedy
by SusanG
Sun Apr 26, 2009 at 01:02:03 PM EDT
Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy
By the team at the Boston Globe with Peter S. Canellos, editor
480 pages, $28.00
Simon & Schuster, New York: February 2009
Ted Kennedy: Scenes from an Epic Life
By Photographers and Writers of The Boston Globe
208 pages, $28.00
Simon & Schuster, New York: March 2009
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Bacevich In Paperback
by FrankCornish
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Congratulations to our Kossack rider!
Fitness Monday - Hill Country Ride for AIDS ride report
by anotherdemocrat
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Godel, Escher, Bach series: English, French, German suite
by plf515
http://www.dailykos.com/...
plf515 has a wonderful book diary on Fridays early and all day.
sarahnity’s list of DKos authors has grown so much that she has her own diary.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
sarahnity says:
It turns out that we have quite a few authors hanging out here who have published books in the real world. A while ago, I started keeping a list of books by Kossacks, former Kossacks and Kossacks-once-removed. I was posting it each week to the diary series What Are You Reading and Bookflurries, but the list has grown long enough, that I've decided to turn it into a diary and post it as a weekly series on Tuesday evenings.
Not all Kossack authors may wish to lose their anonymity, so I am only including the author's UID if he has outed herself here (gender confusion intended). If you'd like to be included on the list, or if you know of an author who is left off, please leave a comment or email me.
(sarahnity@gmail.com)
Algebrateacher and plf have created The Tutoring Room. Algebrateacher says:
The Tutoring Room will always be open and updated weekly.