Travelogue Books

Michael Checchio is one of the nation's best writers about nature. This volumn is, in fact, a concise and beautiful evocation of the Southwest, full of paradox. In a passage about the San Juan River in New Mexico, for instance, Checchio describes how a well-intentioned environmental approach -- catch-and-release -- can produce bizarre results: huge, docile trout that give up virtually without a fight. That might be a metaphor for what is happening to much of the Southwest. And yet, Checchio evokes the beauty and timelessness of the place. This is a wonderful book.

Michael Checchio is one of the nation's best writers about nature. This volumn is, in fact, a concise and beautiful evocation of the Southwest, full of paradox. In a passage about the San Juan River in New Mexico, for instance, Checchio describes how a well-intentioned environmental approach -- catch-and-release -- can produce bizarre results: huge, docile trout that give up virtually without a fight. That might be a metaphor for what is happening to much of the Southwest. And yet, Checchio evokes the beauty and timelessness of the place. This is a wonderful book.

Sunset Boulevard lives large in legend and lore (did I say that?), and this book presents myriad facets of the long and meandering street, one of the most famed in America. From interesting anecdotes (including the story of how an entire school was buried beneath what is now Dodger Stadium) to hundreds of elucidating and entertaining photos and illustrations, some historical and many contemporary, the book is a compelling and engaging treatise. While some of the subject matter isn't of inherent interest to me, the author's writing pulled me in to many a tale, and rewarded my attention handsomely. The maps and address/phone information are useful for touring the boulevard and its many neighborhoods, as listings present to the visitor and native alike lots of places to eat, drink and otherwise acculturate. Sunset Boulevard itself is, of course, but one stretch of asphalt, but there's a wealth of history -- and plenty of current interest -- that lies along its 23-mile length.

From start to finish, this remarkable book captures the essence of the legends that have shaped both the lore and the reality of Los Angeles. Sunset Boulevard literally crosses the heart of Los Angeles, touching along its route to the Pacific Ocean many neighborhoods that define the city's diversity and drama both past and present. This book culls stories of the past and ties them to the present, explaining every step of the way how Sunset Boulevard helped make Los Angeles what it is today. The maps of each neighborhood show both present-day landmarks as well as those gone-but-not-forgotten. Each chapter is devoted to a specific neighborhood along the 23-mile route and contains lists (including, happily, addresses and phone numbers!!) of restaurants, museums, nightclubs and hot shopping sites worth visiting. All in all, this is a book for both tourists and locals alike.

Of all the books my brother, Bill has written, I most love this one. SUNSTRUCK is about the area of the world on which he is an expert, a remote area of the Sonoran Desert, but more importantly, these are thought-provoking essays on life and living. Even if, like me, you don't usually read essays about the natural world I think you'll appreciate his writing style and world outlook. Bill shares anecdotes about the outdoor life, hiking, those he meets and gets to know in the desert (including la migra and people escaping the border patrol, mountain lions, rattlesnakes, bighorn sheep) that make the reader feel as if they are there with Bill at the moment of encounter.

So I hope you'll enjoy a book about a wondrous place in the world that few people visit, and even fewer understand: El Gran Desierto, the Devil's Highway. Yes, this review is written by the author's sister, but don't hold that against me. Given my proclivity to reading fiction, I might not have picked up this book if my brother hadn't written it. I am so glad I had the opportunity to enjoy his vivid use of language and to vicariously experience some of Bill Broyles' adventures in the desert.

It is officially called El Camino del Diablo-The Devil's Highway. It's also known by a variety of other names best left out of this review. It stretches for some 130 miles of desert from Sonoyta, in Mexico's state of Sonora, to Yuma, Arizona, on the Colorado River. There is precious little permanent water and ground temperatures can, and do, reach 150 degrees and more. It includes parts of two national monuments, a national wildlife refuge, and a gunnery range in Arizona not to mention various intities in Mexico. The are can be explored via foot or four-wheel drive vehicle. It can be done. It's done every year by experts and fools, lots of fools, legal and illegal. Many don't make it. It is a killer. If you are intrigued by scorpions, drug smugglers, sidewinders, bandits, illegal aliens, rattlesnakes, sand storms, unbearable heat, lack of water, a military gunnery range, and a host of other unbelievable challenges this is the trip for you. I don't know of any typical travel or guide book that will prepare you for this trip but this book comes as close as any to providing one with a sense of what to expect and when to go. It is probably the very best book ever published about this special place. The author and photographer have a knack of presenting a highly readable, visually accurate account of the dangers and beauty that await the visitor to a place noted author Charles Bowden says "...we finally get to face ourselves because we are alone with life itself." I have done this trip in a four-wheel drive vehicle and can only say be careful...very careful. This is a must read both for the armchair traveler and boots on the ground type.

Now that the book is out of print, you can still get the Swimmer's guide information on a CD-rom for Windows 95 called the Swimmer's Guide Off-line.

This book contains thousands of locations for lap swimming in the US. It is a great travel companion for the traveling business man or the person on vaction. The book is great for finding pools on the road and staying in shape while traveling.

Jerry R. Davis takes us on a fifty-year journey with his latest memoir, "Tales of the Road: Essays on a Half Century of Travel."

Beginning with a 1953 trip to Germany, and ending in 2003 with a tour on the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, Davis shares twenty-one stories of his experiences traveling at home and abroad.

His first essay recounts his experience as a twenty-year-old American foreign exchange student in post war Germany. His details about life in Europe after World War II provide a fascinating look at this time in history.

Not all of his stories deal with momentous events. In another essay, Davis tells of a trip to Rome where he smuggles stolen tiles from Julius Caesar's estate in his pants, and later brings home questionable reading material from Denmark.

Some of his American travel stories include a four thousand mile cross-country trip car trip in 1959 that ends a friendship, a couple of disturbing incidents on Amtrak trains, and a disastrous visit to San Francisco.

In a chapter on his 1996 trip to the Orient, Davis adapts to cultural differences in a Hong Kong bank, sees the sights in Beijing, and takes an unforgettable taxi ride to the Great Wall of China.

Perhaps the most touching essay is about his 2001 vacation to France where Davis visits the memorial of his uncle, a sailor who was lost at sea during the 1944-Allied invasion of Normandy. At the end of the trip, he flies back to the United States less than twelve hours before the 9/11 disaster.

Like his first book, "Home on the Farm: Essays on a Michigan Childhood," each chapter of "Tales of the Road" begins with a black and white illustration by the author. His American Primitive drawing style perfectly captures the essence of each story.

Memoirs give us a personal glimpse into another time and place. Davis shows us regardless of where we travel on the road of life; it is our attitude that makes the difference.

This book took me to places I probably will not be able to visit from a passengers point of view. I laughed out loud and enjoyed every chapter.

Briton Harry Pearson's long travels to virtually every nook and cranny of Belgium provide a nuanced and enjoyable portrait of a little known culture. Longstanding ethnic and linguistic differences between Wallonia and Flanders are carefully explained, as are major episodes of the country's history, from colonialism in Africa under King Leopold II to the new status of Brussels as the bureacratic heart of the European union. Though Pearon's travel itinerary often meandered, he covers much ground with dry wit and a close eye for seemingly eccentric behaviour. Long regarded as the poor cousin of France and the Netherlands, Belgium and its people are the punchline of many European jokes. Yet for all his chronicles of dubious Belgian aesthetic tastes and futile do-it-yourself construction projects, Pearson's bemused affection for the nation yields a pleasurable and informative read.

...could fill a library. And this would be a good place to start. Slightly surreal, slightly baroque, very funny. If you enjoy this odd travelogue as much as I did, you might also like Tim Moore's "Frost on My Moustache."

Terence White, for more than 15 years one of the kings of the Afghanistan press corps, writes a thriller that has the additional advantage of being true.

He starts by being gut-shot with shrapnel while covering a Kabul mortar attack gone wrong, survives Afghan hospitals and returns a few years later to see what's become of the country. All in all, White gives you a perceptive insider's look at the country from the fall of the Soviet-backed regime until the recent days of the US-led incursion.

Throughout this genuinely exciting page-turner, his wry, self-deprecating, Kiwi humour, and his often ironic take on the deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan, make it the best book on Afghanistan that I've seen in the past decade or more. Gripping stuff and well written. If he starts writing fiction, order that too.

The 9/11 attacks prompted not just US military intervention in Afghanistan, but -- even more swiftly -- the descent of a Western-style media circus upon that benighted and war-torn land. In its turn, the 2001 media invasion yielded a spate of books by newly minted experts. Some were newcomers to Afghanistan: They pasted over the gaps in their experience with secondhand 'analysis' rooted in a conventional wisdom that was always mostly nonsense. Others were pseudo-'old hands' whose claims to expertise, or even marginally useful experience, were undermined by a variety of factors. Foremost among these were a refusal to spend serious time in-country, instead 'parachuting' in on brief trips to score a swashbuckling dateline; consequent ignorance of local languages and customs, and confusion over basic politico-military issues; and most of all, a profound lack of intellectual rigor.

'A Taste for Hot Steel' is not of that genre, and its author utterly not of that ilk. That alone makes Terence White's memoir a must-read for anyone hoping to grasp how things really were in Afghanistan when the Taliban and al-Qaeda rose to power. Among other differences, 'Hot Steel' saw print at a decent interval: far too late to capitalize on the post-9/11 window of publishing opportunity. White, it appears, has too much respect for Afghans to exploit them as a stepping-stone to fame. Moreover, this is a memoir first and foremost. Beyond providing a brief historical summary, 'Hot Steel' does not really set out to explain Afghanistan -- a refreshing break in itself. Lesser reporters and 'analysts' have lectured us (and Afghans) ad nauseam about the place, and have mostly gotten it wrong. White, on the other hand, clarifies much without really trying.

'Hot Steel' engagingly documents White's New Zealand childhood and his adventures in Southeast Asia, Indonesia and elsewhere, both before and after his time in Afghanistan. But his account centers on the years that he spent reporting from Kabul for Agence France Presse, from 1992 through 1997. No Westerner spent more time there, under more dangerous conditions.

Today Kabul is occupied and patrolled by Western troops. It is home to a community of perhaps 6,000 extremely sheltered foreigners, whose creature comforts include poolside parties and French restaurants. So it must be explained that reporting from Kabul in the 1990s involved daily legwork along the front lines that would have tested the nerve and eardrums of a trained soldier. The city was split violently down the middle: government loyalists on one side, a renegade alliance backed by unfriendly neighboring countries -- notably Pakistan -- on the other. Many frontline neighborhoods were left in ruins. Most neighborhoods were wracked by artillery, rocket and small-arms fire. Today's Western hacks -- glued all day to their computer screen while their Afghan stringers gather what passes for news -- could hardly have imagined, much less endured the conditions in which White immersed himself. Yet he did so day after day, year after year, through five years of warfare and political upheaval. In the end, he left only because paranoid Taliban officials kicked him out.

In those days, when Kabul was quiet, action often erupted in the countryside. One of White's more hair-raising war stories opens on an autumn day in 1993. The beleaguered Afghan Defense Ministry offered to fly journalists to a strategic rural district by helicopter, to prove they had just beaten back an attack by a particularly nasty renegade faction. White jumped at the chance. A gaggle of other journalists -- many of them based in the West, in Afghanistan only for a few days -- boarded rather more reluctantly. When the choppers touched down in Tagab district, sure enough, the enemy had abandoned the district headquarters. Hearing the rumble of artillery fire many miles to the south, White climbed aboard a government ammo truck headed down to the front -- just to find out what was really afoot. All the other hacks save one boarded the choppers to fly back to town. White and his colleague -- unsure when and how they would return to Kabul; with no interpreter, no entourage, no minder, and no 'security' except government troops defending tenuous forward positions -- arrived at the front line in the teeth of a renegade counterattack. Few reporters have survived adventures as terrifying as what ensued ...

Much of the narrative revolves around an even more harrowing incident that nearly cost White his life, and left him hors d'combat for several months: A Defense Ministry mortar tube malfunctioned, blowing itself and its crew to bits almost in his face, while he was photographing them in October 1995. Experienced Afghan surgeons at Kabul's military hospital saved White's life. (By 1995 they had been operating on wounded Afghans for nearly two decades.) They also understood that, while they could stabilize White, they could not protect him against the infections that would likely ensue. He was medevacked to France promptly after the Afghans pulled him back from the brink. It speaks volumes of both the man and his subject matter that it never occurred to him to steer clear of embattled Kabul after he recovered. Yet White avoids the self-conscious swashbuckling of certain Western 'adventurists' who have milked Afghanistan for fame and fortune.

'Hot Steel' also avoids two common but unfortunate Western attitudes toward Afghans. These stem from a profound lack of cultural sensitivity among the Western pseudo-intelligentsia -- reporters, diplomats and aid workers, especially human-rights activists -- whose collective views inform most of what the outside world thinks it knows about Afghanistan. Such Westerners gravitate toward Afghan 'technocrats,' mostly either urbanites once affiliated with the brutal 1980s communist regime, or wealthy scions of the pre-communist feudal establishment who spent decades in exile in the West. These Afghans wear suits, speak English or other Western languages, enjoy their whiskey, and have assimilated (or at least know how to parrot) politically correct Western shibboleths. Therefore they must be the country's natural leaders, right?

The first tendency is to portray Afghan 'technocrat' values as mainstream, and everybody else's as 'extremist.' The second -- arising when reporters come to grips with the 95 percent of Afghans thus rendered 'extremists' -- is a tone that makes it clear the reporter regards his subjects as one-dimensional, barely human: like animals in a zoo, or role-playing actors at a theme park. Pirates of the Hindu Kush, anyone?

White's account is free of such dehumanizing overtones. He knows who the real Afghans are; he likes them (or not) on the same basis as he would a fellow Kiwi. He doesn't always approve of their customs or behavior. But he regards them as his fellow men and women, not curiosities in funny headgear.

Though his memoir leans more toward action than contemplation, White should consider trying his hand at a serious political analysis of Afghan affairs -- which he understands far better than, say, US or UN officials. If anybody were actually willing to listen to him (hardly a foregone conclusion, of course), his wisdom and experience might actually help the West avoid another 1842 in Afghanistan ... a country that could yet make the Iraq war look like a squabble in a kindergarten sandbox.

I've been doing a lot of research on ancient Rome for a book I'm writing and accidentally stumbled on this text (the 1985 edition) in a used bookstore. It's a fascinating read and an invaluable resource.

What I love about it is that it not only provides a very concise history of Rome, but explains how the Romans dressed, ate, worked, played, entertained themselves and lived day to day. It also covers the literature and religions of the time.

If you loved HBO's "Rome" series, Colleen McCullough's "Masters of Rome" books or are interested in the era for other reasons, this is a superb, well-written account of the people and the time. I couldn't recommend it more highly.

The Romans how can you not love them! This book gives you the reason why. It covers all aspects of the Roman livelihood, their homes, jobs, lands and customs. I think it is one of the better general informative books about the Romans out there, and would give a real good education for the general reader. For the skilled professional or student of the classics, this book will help touch up what you don't know and secure what you do. It is worth the read, and you will be able to tell why it is a standard classic used to teach in so many universities.

Among his Baby Boomer contemporaries, Al Kesselheim has distinguished himself as a gifted observer of the natural world, and an expert in reading the nuances of water, (both physically and metaphorically).While his previous books involve single nautical adventures, here he takes us on several. Not all of them, of course, involve life-changing encounters but each has meaning, meaning especially insightful for those of us whotoo often are bound to our offices and daydream of stealing away more time outdoors. Kesselheim'swriting is like the lakes and rivers he navigates--full of strong undercurrents that liehidden just beneath the surface of his narratives; pools and eddies colored with humility and reflection; big, sweeping landscapes that form an intriguing emotional backdrop. Threading the Currents is a fine read.

Among his Baby Boomer contemporaries, Al Kesselheim has distinguished himself as a gifted observer of the natural world, and an expert in reading the nuances of water, (both physically and metaphorically).While his previous books involve single nautical adventures, here he takes us on several. Not all of them, of course, involve life-changing encounters but each has meaning, meaning especially insightful for those of us whotoo often are bound to our offices and daydream of stealing away more time outdoors. Kesselheim'swriting is like the lakes and rivers he navigates--full of strong undercurrents that liehidden just beneath the surface of his narratives; pools and eddies colored with humility and reflection; big, sweeping landscapes that form an intriguing emotional backdrop. Threading the Currents is a fine read.

Woa what can I say , A book I can Actually read.....

If you're a fan of British comedy, you probably remember the television series "The Goodies" starring Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie, in which the trio had their wacky adventures and travelled around on a three-seater 'trandem' bicycle. The actual trandem was bought at a BBC props auction and ridden for charity through Africa...a hilarious travelogue of the collision between British eccentricity and adventure and African tradition and exploration. If you enjoy humorous travel books like those of Bill Bryson, Michael Palin, or 'Round Ireland with a Fridge' by Tony Hawks, this is the book to look for...IF it was in print! It's currently out of print in the US and even Amazon UK (www.amazon.co.uk) doesn't list it as available. Come on, US travel publishers...this should be a constantly in-print classic: get on yer bike and get it available again!