Two weeks--and it’s only two weeks!!--of watching the Trump administration systematically loot and then destroy the country has brought a lot of stress, so I thought I would pamper myself with a nice travel narrative: On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer, by travel writer Rick Steves, best known for his Europe Through the Back Door series of guidebooks. The book came out today, but I’ve been perusing an advance digital copy.
The reading didn’t provide the complete escapist relaxation I was hoping for—what with the daily news telling the tale of Musk and Trump laying waste to the the Agency for International Development (AID) which has helped so many countries like the ones traversed in this book in fighting poverty and disease—but that was no fault of the book itself. It is a very genial, evocative tale, one I would thrill to losing myself in if only the real world did not keep intruding.
The bulk of the book is taken directly from the journal the then-twenty-three year old Steves kept on his 1978 journey. Here’s how he describes the genesis of the book (quotes are from the advance copy; there may be differences in the final published book):
I also packed a journal—a hard-bound empty book ready to collect all my travel memories. I was determined to chronicle the trip, grabbing a stream-of-consciousness-parade of impressions, and I did—writing a thousand words a day.
After the trip, this journal was packed away, never read...forgotten for 42 years. Then, stuck at home during the pandemic, I stumbled across it. And as if on an anthropological dig into my own past, I entered the world of 23-year-old me and relived my coming-of-age trip.
The journal you’re about to read has been lightly edited by my Hippie Trail partner Gene (who became my frequent collaborator in the decades since). With Gene’s help, I’ve condensed some of the more mundane and redundant entries—transportation logistics, meals, waking, sleeping, and hurried trips to the toilet—and rearranged a few itinerary details for a better flow and readability. But we are determined to share a candid, unvarnished snapshot of our trip, and we’ve been careful to not make me sound older, wiser, or more culturally sensitive than I was at the time.
I’ve been to both ends of the Hippie Trail—the beginning in Istanbul, and the end in Kathmandu. Steves, who had traveled a lot already in Europe and usually finished those trips in Istanbul, decided to take a deeper dive into the city, as it now was not the end of a European adventure, but the beginning of something very different. I laughed out loud at his visit to a traditional Turkish haman, or bathhouse, as it reminded me very much of my own. The warmth and relaxation of lying on the huge circular slab of heated stone was delightful, but oh, that massage…! Here is Steves’ experience from 1978:
My unshaven Turk said, “okay, merhaba,” and put me belly-up on the big, round, marble slab, where I was allowed to lie, sweat, look up at the cloudy sun rays spraying through little holes in the domed roof, and worry about my body-ripping massage I was about to get. I prayed that my joints would all survive.
Then with a loud slap in my chest, he landed on me like a beast and worked me over good. He was a credit to his gender. Smashing and stretching each of my tight muscles, I was in lovely pain.It hurt but, in a strange way, I wanted it—just with no lasting damage. Then came the joint stretching. He flipped me over, face down. Bouncing my feet to my back, walking on me, cracking my neck with surely enough power to break it, I’d call the massage an all-out attack.
Yeah, that’s pretty much how I remember my experience. But I have to admit I felt great afterward.
Kathmandu comes much later in the trip, and was the city refered to as the ‘Promised Land’ of the Hippie Trail. By the time I first visited in 1998, the Hippie Trail center of activity in the city, nicknamed Freak Street, was just a pale vestige of those crazy days, with the center of tourist activity having moved to the Thamel neighborhood. Just a cafe or two made a sad attempt to recreate that earlier era. My Kathmandu of 1998 and again in 2000, while still very exotic and evocative, had by then gained many modern tourist conveniences. In Steves’ visit, Kathmandu had only opened up to tourism in the previous ten years and was still quite raw.
I lost myself in Durbar Square. This was a tangled, medieval-ish world of tall, terraced temples, fruit and vegetable stands, thin, wild, and hungry people praying, begging, and going through rituals; children, oblivious to it all, playing tag among the frozen Buddhas; rickshaws, and bread carts. Ten years ago, the only blemishes of our modern world—cars and tourists—weren’t there and the sight would have been pure. But even with long, straggly-haired, lacy, baggy-clothed freaks lounging on the stony pagoda steps, and the occasional honking taxi, this was a place where I could linger. It’s like a living museum, a cultural circus, a story that doesn’t need a plot.
So many of the stories he relates of walking the exotic streets brought back many of
One of my pictures of the Kumari in Kathmandu
my own experiences. He also recounts his good fortune in catching a glimpse of that era’s Kumari, the prepubescent Living Goddess of Nepal. These chosen girls live a very sequestered life, though play an important ceremonial role in Nepali life. Once the girl reaches puberty, she is sent back out into normal life, replaced by a new Goddess. The post-Goddess lives of the Kumaris have generally not been good. But like Steves, I too had my glimpse of the Kumari of my era. She was being taken from her house to preside over a local festival, carried in an ornate palanquin borne by several hand-bearers (the Kumari’s feet are not allowed to touch the ground.) We happened to be passing by just as she was leaving her house. I raced through a couple back alleys to get ahead of the procession, and captured a number of photos, including this one where she is looking directly at me.
Near the end of this section of his journal, Steves writes: “We had “done” the Hippie Trail. Looking out over its promised land, I told Gene I can’t remember being more content, happy, and at such peace.” I have to say I have equally golden memories of my two visits to that magical city.
Ah, but in between Istanbul and Kathmandu, there was the long portion of the Hippie Trail that was largely off limits during the heyday of my travels, due to war and revolution. But Steves got to experience it all, and it is a delight reading his adventures in Iran and Afghanistan. I have to admit there have been a couple times over the decades when I was tempted to chance a visit to Iran, but never worked up the funds or the nerve. There is so much history and culture there. His trip also takes him through Pakistan, which I haven’t had the opportunity to visit, and India, where I have enjoyed two wonderful trips. He spends quite a bit of time in Kashmir.
I’ve been to Kashmir myself, though only for three days in 2000, when it was a pretty grim place, a hotspot of conflict between India and Pakistan, with lots of Indian soldiers and sandbagged streets. There had been a bomb set off in the capital of Srinagar not long before our visit. The photo at the top of this diary is one I took of a Srinagar streetscape. For Steves in 1978, the tension between India and Pakistan over ownership of the region seems almost nonexistent. There was a reference to the many Indians vacationing there, but none of any tension (there is a passing reference later on to “the disputed Kashmir of the Muslims” in the section on India.) His trip was just the lovely, relaxing houseboats, the city, the exploring the backwaters of Dal Lake, the meadows of Gulmarg. We enjoyed some of that as well, but Kashmir was a different place by 2000.
In all, the book was a lovely journey. Sometimes his dedication to “not make me sound older, wiser, or more culturally sensitive than I was at the time” produce some anachronisms that might seem cringe-worthy to the modern ear but for the most part it is an interesting and perceptive adventure, and the many photographs taken by the author back then add a lot of visual delight. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about cities as they were twenty years before I visited. Some has changed, but much has not. The scenes in Pokhara, Nepal, at the foothills of the Himalayas, of Delhi, Jaipur and Varanasi in India, really took me back. Like Steves, I spent some time on a terrace overlooking the cremation ghats along the Ganges in Varanasi, watching relatives pay homage as the shrouded bodies of their deceased relatives were placed upon the stacks of wood and turned to ash, which then were swept into the eternal river. It was a somber sight, and reminded me of my mortality.I resisted my Western temptation to try and disrespectfully sneak a photograph. Steves succumbed to the temptation:
Setting my exposure and shutter speed in advance, I snapped a picture. Even though I was quick, I was spotted...and had to exit early with some angry Indians on my tail.
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I hadn’t known this before, but YA favorite John Green has been active in the fight against tuberculosis. He has a book coming out about it in March: Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection.
Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.
In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, preventable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year.
In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world—and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.
THIS WEEK’S NOTABLE NEW NONFICTION
- Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, by Eoin Higgins. Owned is the story of the underreported and growing collusion between new wealth and new journalism. In recent years, right-wing billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and David Sacks have turned to media as their next investment and source of influence. Their cronies are Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi—once known as idealistic and left-leaning voices, now beneficiaries of Silicon Valley largesse. Together, this new alliance aims to exploit the failings of traditional journalism and undermine the very idea of an independent and fact-based fourth estate. Owned examines how this shift has allowed spectacularly wealthy reactionaries to pursue their ultimate goal of censoring critics so to further their own business interests—and personal vendettas—entirely unimpeded while also advancing a toxic and antidemocratic ideology. “Owned is a vital account of the deeply troubling influence tech moguls wield over the news industry. Higgins expertly tells the story of how thin-skinned hostility to scrutiny and criticism led a clique of right-wing billionaires to subvert journalism by capturing or silencing critical voices. Anyone who wants to understand the media landscape of the 21st century needs to read this book. They want us to live in a world where we only hear what they want us to hear. But in Owned, Higgins does what really fearless independent journalists do best: tells us what we need to know.” —Mike Duncan, New York Times bestselling author and award-winning podcaster
- Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion, and the Global Fight for Democracy, by Ronald J. Deibert. Chasing Shadows provides a front-row seat to a dark underworld of digital espionage, disinformation, and subversion. There, autocrats and dictators peer into their targets’ lives with the mere press of a button, spreading their tentacles of authoritarianism through a digital ecosystem that is insecure, poorly regulated, and prone to abuse. The activists, opposition figures, and journalists who dare to advocate for basic political rights and freedoms are hounded, arrested, tortured, and sometimes murdered.
From the gritty streets of Guatemala City to the corridors of power in the White House, this compelling narrative traces the journey of the Citizen Lab as it evolved into a globally renowned source of counterintelligence for civil society. As this small team of investigators disarmed cyber mercenaries and helped to improve the digital security of billions of people worldwide, their success brought them, too, into the same sinister crosshairs that plagued the victims they worked to protect. “[Chasing Shadows] will chill the blood of any journalist, human rights worker, or civil society activist. Or, come to think of it, any ordinary citizen who believes that criticizing your own government does not merit extra-judicial execution, and that private communications should remain private. . . an utterly gripping, petrifying read.”
— The Spectator
- How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying: Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko's Fight for Ukraine, by Lara Marlowe. Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko, a commander in the Ukrainian army serving on the front line of battle, embodies her country's resistance to the Russian invasion. When her father self-immolated on Maidan Square in central Kyiv in an act of protest, she held a press conference to explain to journalists that he acted “in sound mind.” Later, in battle on the front line, she would learn via radio-phone that her husband had been killed nearby.
In 2023, veteran war correspondent Lara Marlowe met Mykytenko while covering the war, and found her to be “one of the most extraordinary people I have interviewed in 42 years of journalism.” From their months of conversations, Marlowe stitched together Mykytenko’s accounts into a riveting revelation of what modern warfare is really like. Told entirely in Mykytenko's first person voice, it is an urgent story of a besieged nation, a vivid look at the changing face of warfare, and the stirring tale of an inspirational woman fighting for her country's survival. "What an extraordinary, spectacular book! As long as there are women like Mykytenko in the world, human society will be okay. The combination of courage and love in a single person is an ancient story and one that we must hear over and over again to know that it’s possible. And Marlowe’s prose is so powerful and compelling that I was at a loss as to when to put the book down... It may well be one of the best and most important books to come out of this brutal war that Russia has inflicted on Ukraine." — Sebastian Junger, author of the New York Times bestseller The Perfect Storm
- Gettysburg: The Tide Turns: An Oral History, by Bruce Chadwick. In late June of 1863, one month after his victory over Union forces at Chancellorsville, Virginia, General Robert E. Lee, head of the Army of Northern Virginia, invaded the North. He would cross the Potomac River and head towards Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with the goal of seizing the trains which would then take his army into Philadelphia and perhaps even New York City. He hoped that these victories would force U.S. President Abraham Lincoln to surrender.
As he pushed north, Lee was operating without his cavalry leader, J.E.B. Stuart, whom he had allowed to go on a useless scouting mission. At the same time, the Union army, now led by little known commander George Meade was tracking Lee and his men. Both sides clashed at Gettysburg, a tiny Pennsylvania farm village on July 1 in what would be a three-day battle that would change the course of the war. Using letters, diaries, journals, newspaper articles, and other written sources, Bruce Chadwick has crafted another masterful oral history.
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Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families, by Judith Giesberg. Of all the many horrors of slavery, the cruelest was the separation of families in slave auctions. Spouses and siblings were sold away from one other. Young children were separated from their mothers. Fathers were sent down river and never saw their families again.
As soon as slavery ended in 1865, family members began to search for one another, in some cases persisting until as late as the 1920s. They took out “information wanted” advertisements in newspapers and sent letters to the editor. Pastors in churches across the country read these advertisements from the pulpit, expanding the search to those who had never learned to read or who did not have access to newspapers. These documents demonstrate that even as most white Americans—and even some younger Black Americans, too—wanted to put slavery in the past, many former slaves, members of the “Freedom Generation,” continued for years, and even decades, to search for one another. These letters and advertisements are testaments to formerly enslaved people’s enduring love for the families they lost in slavery, yet they spent many years buried in the storage of local historical societies or on microfilm reels that time forgot. “Last Seen is a powerful, wrenching, and necessary work that shows us how central family histories are to understanding American history. The stories of parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, desperately seeking and mostly not finding one another in the wake of slavery's violence reveal the indelible horrors of family separation. They also show that, rather than a recent or isolated phenomenon, family separation has been a recurring consequence of politics and policy.” —Karin Wulf, Director of the John Carter Brown Library and Professor of History, Brown University
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Hollywood Blackout: The Battle for Inclusion at the Oscars, by Ben Arogundade. On 29 February 1940, African American actor Hattie McDaniel became the first person of color, and the first Black woman, to win an Academy Award. The moment marked the beginning of Hollywood's reluctant move toward diversity and inclusion. Since then, minorities and women have struggled to attain Academy Awards recognition within a system designed to discriminate against them. For the first time, Hollywood Blackout reveals the untold story of their tumultuous journey from exclusion to inclusion; from segregation to celebration.
Author Ben Arogundade interweaves the experiences of Black actors and filmmakers with those of Asians, Latinos, South Asians, indigenous peoples and women. Throughout the decades their progression to the Oscars podium has been galvanized by defiant boycotts, civil rights protests and social media activism such as #OscarsSoWhite.
Whether you are a film fan, history lover or diversity advocate, Hollywood Blackout is the quintessential choice for all those who wish to know the real story of Hollywood, the Oscars and the talents who fought to make change.
- Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future, by Neil Shubin. Renowned scientist Neil Shubin has made extraordinary discoveries by leading scientific expeditions to the sweeping ice landscapes of the Arctic and Antarctic. He’s survived polar storms, traveled in temperatures that can freeze flesh in seconds, and worked hundreds of miles from the nearest humans, all to deepen our understanding of our world.
Written with infectious enthusiasm and irresistible curiosity, Ends of the Earth blends travel writing, science, and history in a book brimming with surprising and wonderful discoveries. Shubin retraces his steps on a “dinosaur dance floor,” showing us where these beasts had populated the once tropical lands at the poles. He takes readers meteor hunting, as meteorites preserved in the ice can be older than our planet and can tell us about our galaxy’s formation. Readers also encounter insects and fish that develop their own anti-freeze, and aquatic life in ancient lakes hidden miles under the ice that haven’t seen the surface in centuries. It turns out that explorers and scientists have found these extreme environments as prime ground for making scientific breakthroughs across a vast range of knowledge.
- How the World Eats: A Global Food Philosophy, by Julian Baggini. How we live is shaped by how we eat. You can see this in the vastly different approaches to growing, preparing and eating food around the world, such as the hunter-gatherer Hadza in Tanzania whose sustainable lifestyle is under threat in a crowded planet, or Western societies whose food is farmed or bred in vast intensive enterprises. And most of us now rely on a complex global food web of production, distribution, consumption and disposal, which is now contending with unprecedented challenges.
The need for a better understanding of how we feed ourselves has never been more urgent. In this wide-ranging and definitive book, philosopher Julian Baggini expertly delves into the best and worst food practices in a huge array of different societies, past and present. "A refreshingly balanced and nuanced survey of the complexities and realities of food today. Baggini explores the global reach of what we eat and weighs up competing voices to give some clarity of thinking amongst the clamor and crises." — Hattie Ellis, author of What to Eat: 10 Chewy Questions About Food
- Counterculture: The Story of America from Bohemia to Hip-Hop, by Alex Zamalin. This entertaining, intellectual history fulfills the growing appetite for marginalized narratives. Counterculture brilliantly interrogates the diversity of counterculture and the interwoven relationship between each individual legacy. From Anarchism to the Harlem Renaissance, Alex Zamalin unveils the humanity behind these romanticized figures and popularized movements to capture revolutionary freedom in action. “Zamalin approaches these countercultures from multiple perspectives so that his book is not only the white, male, heteronormative history of the movements but a more inclusive account. VERDICT: A good introduction to the process of culture making in the 20th century.” —Library Journal
- On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer, by Rick Steves. In the 1970s, the ultimate trip for any backpacker was the storied “Hippie Trail” from Istanbul to Kathmandu. A 23-year old Rick Steves made the trek, and like a travel writer in training, he documented everything along the way: jumping off a moving train, making friends in Tehran, getting lost in Lahore, getting high for the first time in Herat, battling leeches in Pokhara, and much more. The experience ignited his love of travel and forever broadened his perspective on the world.
This book contains edited selections from Rick’s journal and travel photos with a 45-years-later preface and postscript reflecting on how the journey changed his life. Stow away with Rick Steves on the adventure of a lifetime through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal.
- Bibliophobia: A Memoir, by Sarah Chihaya. Books can seduce you. They can, Sarah Chihaya believes, annihilate, reveal, and provoke you. And anyone incurably obsessed with books understands this kind of unsettling literary encounter. Sarah calls books that have this effect “Life Ruiners”.
Her Life Ruiner, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, became a talisman for her in high school when its electrifying treatment of race exposed Sarah’s deepest feelings about being Japanese American in a predominantly white suburb of Cleveland. But Sarah had always lived through her books, seeking escape, self-definition, and rules for living. She built her life around reading, wrote criticism, and taught literature at an Ivy League University. Then she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, and the world became an unreadable blank page. In the aftermath, she was faced with a question. Could we ever truly rewrite the stories that govern our lives? Bibliophobia is an alternately searing and darkly humorous story of breakdown and survival told through books. "This heady, confiding memoir offers a refreshingly nuanced take on what books do to us. Sarah Chihaya has done something remarkable: written a book about losing yourself in books that you can lose yourself in.”—Ada Calhoun, New York Times bestselling author of Why We Can’t Sleep
- Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us, by Jennifer Finney Boylan. Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There was the first bestselling work written by a transgender American. Since its publication twenty years ago, she has become the go-to person for insight into the impact of gender on our lives, from the food we eat to the dreams we dream, both for ourselves and for our children. But Cleavage is more than a deep dive into gender identity; it’s also a look at the difference between coming out as trans in 2000—when many people reacted to Boylan’s transition with love—and the present era of blowback and fear.
How does gender affect our sense of self? Our body image? The passage of time? The friends we lose—and keep? Boylan considers her womanhood, reflects on the boys and men who shaped her, and reconceives of herself as a writer, activist, parent, and spouse. With heart-wrenching honesty, she illustrates the feeling of liminality that followed her to adulthood, but demonstrates the redemptive power of love through it all. “Boylan writes with great humor, wisdom, and warmth about what it means to be human—at different ages, and in different genders—in this confounding world. Compulsively readable and often outright hilarious, this book is a treasure.”—Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers and I Have Some Questions for You “For those who have never felt at home at home—and that’s a lot of us these days—Jenny Finney Boylan’s story is a story of faith, hope, and, above all, love.”
—Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street
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Rogues and Scholars: A History of the London Art World: 1945-2000, by James Stourton. On October 15, 1958, Sotheby's of Bond Street staged an "event sale” of seven Impressionist paintings belonging to Erwin Goldschmidt: three Manets, two Cézannes, one Van Gogh, and a Renoir. Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, and Somerset Maugham were there as celebrity guests. The seven lots went for £781,000—at the time the highest price for a single sale. The event established London as the world center of the art market and Sotheby's as an international auction house. It began a shift in power from the dealers to the auctioneers and paved the way for Impressionist paintings to dominate the market for the next forty years. In a vibrant and briskly-paced style, James Stourton tells the story of the London art market from the immediate postwar period to the turn of the millennium. While Sotheby's is the lynchpin of this story, Stourton populates his narrative with a glorious rogue's gallery of eccentric scholars, clever amateurs, brilliant emigrés, and stylish grandees with a flair for the deal. "A rare view into the art world, told wryly and authoritatively. This study will be of interest not just to art aficionados but also business-oriented readers who will want to know how a company creates a market, adapts to change, and thrives." — Kirkus Reviews
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