Review by New York Times Review
THIS season's pack of travel writers are all over the map - both transcontinental ramblers and more sedentary souls who find their inspiration within the confines of a few square miles. There are urban adventurers in Italy and India, American road warriors and a nomad who pursues every form of transportation imaginable to follow Africa's longest river from source to mouth. "Delhi, you see, . . . is a brutal city," a young woman in a cybercafe tells Sam Miller, a former BBC correspondent who was first based in the Indian capital in the early 1990s, then settled there permanently with his Indian wife a decade later. In DELHI: Adventures in a Megacity (St. Martin's, $25.99), Miller seems to wander through every hidden corner of this megalopolis, now grown to roughly 18 million people, and (no surprise) finds a globalized 21st-century capital existing alongside scenes of abject poverty and almost medieval squalor. Miller's walks through Delhi take him from the warrens of the walled city laid out by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan to the bowels of the ultramodern Metro system, from a backpackers' seedy cafe to the grand edifices of the Raj. Oddities confront him at every turn: a museum containing the shredded remains of the shirt Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was wearing when he was blown up by a suicide bomber in 1991, and perhaps "the only Jewish cemetery in the world where the presence of a swastika," which was a Hindu symbol long before the Nazis appropriated it, "would not be considered an act of desecration." He writes with relish of his frightening encounter with knife-wielding butchers in a back-alley slaughterhouse, and of an electric-powered crematorium whose owner laments Indians' attachment to traditional woodfire ceremonies. The Yamuna River, "Delhi's shameful, rancid secret," shadows Miller's journey, serving as home to the city's unbridled growth as well as its vestiges of rustic splendor. "From close up, it is as black as pitch," Miller observes, "with a gray-green scum where its viscous waters lap stodgily against the river bank, and a fog of minuscule midges flutter and hover above the filth." But "with a little imagination, and if you don't look too close" - and when the wind blows the stench in the other direction - "the place seems, momentarily, to have been transformed into an unlikely pre-urban pastoral idyll." Peter Ackroyd's VENICE: Pure City (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $37.50) examines a more aesthetically coherent metropolis, yet one with its own dark recesses and unsavory past. From its ancient origins as a settlement of 117 islands bordering the "remote and secluded waters" of a lagoon, Venice's rise to its onetime status as Europe's richest, most powerful city-state is authoritatively (if sometimes long-windedly) traced. Here an autocratic Council of 10, led by the doge, built Venice's great fleet of commercial vessels and armed galleys, extended its influence as far as Constantinople and dealt out ruthless punishment to those who challenged its authority. Ackroyd describes a Renaissance metropolis pulsating with wealth and luxury, yet swimming in sewage and periodically besieged by the plague. (Pope Pius II called the Venetians "traders," "barbarians" and "hypocrites," declaring that they "never think of God and, except for the state, which they regard as a deity, they hold nothing sacred, nothing holy.") Ackroyd also captures Venice's bewitching effect on the artists, writers and musicians who flocked there over the centuries, long after its decline in the face of a surging Ottoman Empire. The city in which Titian and Tiepolo were born and Browning and Wagner came to die is above all, Ackroyd writes, "the city of masks," its fantastically ornamented facades hiding decaying brickwork and evoking "the artifice and outwardness of the theater." In THE BLACK NILE: One Man's Amazing Journey Through Peace and War on the World's Longest River (Viking, $26.95), the American freelance journalist Dan Morrison buys a plank-board boat outside Kampala, Uganda, and starts paddling down the White Nile in the company of his bartender buddy, Schon. But the title of Morrison's memoir, inspired by Alan Moorehead's classic books "The White Nile" and "The Blue Nile," is somewhat misleading. Pummeled by the heat, fearful of attacks by the Lord's Resistance Army and discouraged by the difficulty of navigating the river's cataracts, the pair ditch their boat before they reach the Sudanese border. When Schon drops out in the southern Sudanese town of Juba - "a spread-out, starved and broken-down colonial construct straining under the weight of thousands of returning refugees and newly arrived aid workers" - Morrison continues alone, mostly by bus and truck. Minus the sour complaints of his companion, the adventure becomes an evocative piece of reporting from little-visited corners of a country lurching fitfully toward reconciliation after a decades-long civil war between the Islamic north and the mostly Christian and animist south. Morrison hitches a fide down river on a barge - "a diesel-powered dormitory" - through the swampy region known as the Sudd, then travels on to the torpid river port of Malakal, where he finds a "raft of gunmen" from the northern government's army, the former southern rebels and various tribal militias: "Aid workers were getting robbed at night, and minor barroom dustups threatened to become major battles because every aggrieved illiterate drunk had an army to back him up." (Shortly after Morrison's departure, the place erupted in a clash that left hundreds dead.) He also tries to investigate the stories of villagers displaced from their homes at gunpoint to make way for the multinational corporations set to exploit the region's oil reserves. By the time he takes the ferry into Egypt at the Aswan High Dam (Gamal Abdel Nasser's "act of creation to rival the pyramids"), Morrison has sketched a portrait of a fractured country just one spark away from a renewal of hostilities. Bill Barich opts for a more prosaic means of transportation in LONG WAY HOME: On the Trail of Steinbeck's America (Walker, $26). An expat who has lived in Ireland for the last decade, Barich rents a "humble Ford Focus" at Kennedy Airport and, on the eve of the 2008 presidential election, sets out on a transcontinental journey loosely modeled on Steinbeck's 1962 classic, "Travels With Charley in Search of America." With his fly-fishing rod in his trunk and a paperback copy of Steinbeck's book in his duffel bag, be heads down the New Jersey Turnpike, detours into the back roads of Delaware and Virginia, then veers west for the Great Plains and, ultimately, California. The book gets off to a slow start, marked by brief, unedifying conversations with the locals about politics and overly familiar riffs on bad buffet breakfasts at roadside motels: "rock-hard bagels, calorie-rich muffins, anachronistic slabs of Wonder Bread and syrupy fruit salad from a can." Gradually, however, the journey builds momentum. In the twilight of the Bush era, Barich encounters an anxious nation buffeted by recession, seeking solace in religion, given to patriotic displays that sometimes "smacked of aggression or defiance." "The streets were like palimpsests," he writes of near-deserted Parkersburg, W. Va., one of a string of economically depleted towns, "a faded sketch of an earlier and more vital form." In fact, Barich finds that "a sense of loss seemed to haunt much of the country, although its precise nature wasn't easy to define. It manifested itself as a vague anxiety rooted, perhaps, in the discrepancy between the idealized America of schoolbooks and the present reality." In French Lick, Ind., he visits a gaudy casino populated by "bikers in club leathers, skeletal chain smokers, guys with ZZ Top beards, plus-sized matrons, and a coterie of small-town players, ardently indulging in the vices they kept under wraps at home." Luckily, Barich's depressing encounters are leavened by glimpses of American ingenuity, the surprisingly heterogeneous populations of towns like Dodge City, Kan., and the spectacular vistas of the Rockies. "The West fosters an easy intimacy," he writes, breathing in the crisp air in Ouray, Colo. "People don't seem as defensive, nor as inhibited by their mistakes and defeats. The idea that you can always start over still motivates behavior. If you fail to strike gold, it's time to head on." Matt Dellinger's INTERSTATE 69: The Unfinished History of the Last Great American Highway (Scribner, $26), is a ramble along a road that exists mostly in the mind. Dellinger, a former editor at the New Yorker, sets off to unravel the story behind "the most significant new highway construction since the original Interstate system," a proposed 1,800-mile-long, $27 billion Interstate that would run from Port Huron, Mich., to Brownsville and Laredo, Tex., and connect "the busiest trade crossings on the Canadian border to the busiest trade crossings on the Mexican border." Traveling to Texas from his native Indiana, where a portion of the highway has already been laid down. Dellinger meets some of the grass-roots organizers, politicians and lobbyists who are trying to stitch together this staggeringly complicated project. He also encounters environmental activists equally determined to block it: ''Democrats and. Republicans, young and old, hippies and hicks alike have come together to insist that the area's lack of Interstate is more of a lucky break than a curse." Dellinger captures the essential nature of the conflict, which pits 1-69 advocates in economically depressed areas of the Midwest and South, who see the highway as "a last best chance for prosperity." against congressmen "whose constituents live on ihe coasts . . . or in the Great Plains or Rocky Mountains," for whom "rescuing fading towns in Middle America is not necessarily a high priority." In the end, though, he fails to locate the Robert Moses character who might have tied the strands of the story together. And his officebound encounters with an endless procession of small-town politicos eventually have the reader yearning for the exit ramp. ALL OVER THE MAP (Harmony, $24), by Laura Fraser, unfolds over the course of nearly a decade as the globe-trotting magazine writer advances through her 40s and tries to balance her wanderlust with her yearning for domesticity and love. The book picks up where her previous memoir, "An Italian Affair," left off: with the breakup of a relationship with the Paris-based Italian professor who'd helped her recover from her divorce. Unattached and lonely, Fraser jets off to Samoa on assignment for a women's magazine, but an alcohol-fueled flirtation with a surfer on a beach ends in rape. "I am nervous on my own," she writes in the aftermath, "even walking in the evening around the Haight-Ashbury, where I have lived, safely, without incident for 20 years." Trying to recover, Fraser embarks on a series of adventures that could be called "Eat, Pray, Love Lite": tango lessons in Argentina, meditation in Marin County, even a brief affair with a lusty Brazilian. Yet nothing seems to alleviate her crushing feeling of failure. "I'm 45. Game over, time's up," she writes after another relationship bites the dust. "My boyfriend - my last hope for some conventional semblance of adult life - has just broken up with me. I don't know if I'll ever have another relationship - or sex, for that matter - again." The book's achingly confessional tone can be embarrassing at times, but Fraser's honesty keeps you rooting for her. Lying in bed at night, she imagines her preadolescent self, gazing into the future. "She would've been thrilled to know that one day she would indeed travel to many countries and be awed by so many sights, tastes, and people," Fraser writes, though she might be saddened by the "reality of herself at middle age: no husband, kids or house, not even an international affair with some mysterious Basil St. John with his dark eye patch and orchid serum, like Brenda Starr." By the time Fraser comes to terms with her disappointments and finds companionship and stability - and a beautiful new home - in the expatriate community of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, we're more than ready to wish her buena suerte. Almost a century ago. Rosita Forbes, the bride of an adulterous Scottish army officer, pawned her wedding ring, bought a horse, a revolver and a camera and embarked on what would be a long, adventurous career as a travel writer. In FROM THE SAHARA TO SAMARKAND: Selected Travel Writings of Rosita Forbes, 1919-1937 (Axios, paper, $15), Margaret Bald provides a taste of some of Forbes's forays into the Libyan desert, Iraq, Afghanistan and a disintegrating, post-World War I China. Her attitude toward the locals can seem patronizing at times, and her piles of descriptive detail can bog the reader down. But the book is redeemed by a memorable account of her journey through the hermetic Kingdom of Abyssinia, a land offering "every contrast of mountain and valley, desert, river and forest, of walled medieval town and thatched mushroom village, of troglodytes and hillmen, priests, courtesans and savages, of courteous simple hospitality and the glamour of ancient violences." Best, though, is the story of her attempted pilgrimage to Mecca in August 1922. Swathed in a shapeless black abaya, she identifies herself as half Turk, half Egyptian and sets out with hundreds of Muslim pilgrims on a boat sailing across the Red Sea from Egypt to Saudi Arabia. "There were fat, pale merchants from the cities and graybearded blacks from the South," she writes. "Tattooed Bedouin women, brown and lean, rubbed shoulders with unwieldy, untidy dames who looked as if they had never walked an inch in their lives. . . . The young men, plump and pale, intoned quick passages from sacred books, each one attempting to read quicker and louder than his fellows." In Jidda, Forbes is unmasked by representatives of King Hussein after an acquaintance recognizes her as an Englishwoman - but not before she's rubbed shoulders with T. E. Lawrence, "demure and neat and very hot under his yellow kaffiyeh." A funeral gondola from "Venice" and, top, Rosita Forbes on the Khyber Pass, in "From the Sahara to Samarkand." Joshua Hammer, a former Newsweek bureau chief, is a freelance foreign correspondent. He is writing a book about German colonialism in southern Africa.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 5, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
Even during the dominance of the Roman Empire, Venice and Venetians were regarded as distinct by their neighbors. They spoke Latin, and later Italian, in an unusual dialect. Their geographic position as an island in a lagoon contributed to their fierce spirit of independence, but it also positioned them to control trade routes to and from the East. Ackroyd, the novelist, biographer, and writer of tributes to great urban centers (London), has captured the rich tradition, beauty, and vibrancy of this magnificent city in a survey that combines political and artistic history with aspects of a travelogue. Ackroyd moves back and forth in time as he examines the growth of Venice, from prehistoric settlement to its place in both the Roman and Byzantine empires to the present time. As he describes the development of the art and architectural treasures, he includes informative and charming diversions on various traditions, events, and personalities. For those who have visited or hope to visit the Pearl of the Adriatic, this work will be a treasure.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Novelist and biographer Ackroyd (The Canterbury Tales) provides a history of and meditation on the actual and imaginary Venice in a volume as opulent and paradoxical as the city itself. Structured and organized with a fluidity that reflects its many-faceted subject, he launches his tour de force with the basics of Venetian geography, hydrology, and climate before turning to history and architecture. The narrative continues to develop around themes both usual and unexpected such as trade and gossip or subjects such as the city's fabled churches, its love of sexuality, and theater. As it glides along, it gracefully incorporates tidbits about such traditions as the cabins on gondolas and the masks worn during Carnival. How Ackroyd deftly catalogues the overabundance of the city's real and literary tropes and touchstones is itself a kind of tribute to La Serenissima, as Venice is called, and his seductive voice is elegant and elegiac. The resulting book is, like Venice, something rich, labyrinthine and unique that makes itself and its subject both new and necessary. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Italo Calvino once wrote, "Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice." Maybe that's why Ackroyd's new book is more enjoyable than his recent Thames: The Biography. Nonetheless, it's more a string of essays than one coherent book. Ackroyd interweaves history with impressions (some quite apposite) on a host of topics about living in Venice: the light and color, Carnival, prisons, prostitutes, death, the Venetian republic's extraordinarily long existence, artists, and the claustrophobic life of the city. He writes exceptionally well at points: he's always been a master of the apercu, and his comments on Venetian art and architecture in particular are perceptive though by no means original. His sources are often vague or missing altogether. He errs twice, calling Philippe de Commynes "an ambassador from fifteenth-century Flanders" and "a traveler from the court of Burgundy," when, by 1495, the year Commynes visited Venice, Commynes had served France, not Burgundy, for 23 years. Perhaps it's a minor error, but it leads one to wonder what others lie hidden in this largely undocumented description and history of Venice. VERDICT This is a pleasant read but too formless for anything more serious. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/10.]-David Keymer, Modesto, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The indefatigable chronicler of his native England's culture looks overseas to the magical Italian city on a lagoon.In this impressionistic appreciation of Venice, Ackroyd (The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, 2009, etc.) opens with a haunting evocation of the site as it appeared to fifth-century mainlanders fleeing barbarian invasions: "a solitary place, its silence broken only by the calls of seabirds and the crash of the billows of the sea and the sound of the wind soughing in the rushes." But the city would not remain silent for long. It was a center of trade for more than 1,000 years, as its ships brought the spices of the East to Europe and carried manufactured items in the opposite direction. Its position at the economic forefront faltered after the 16th century, when city authorities refused to compromise the standards of the luxury goods for which Venice was famous and lost out to the merchants of England and Holland, able to offer cloths and metals for less. But Venice reinvented itself as a playground for foreigners, trading on its dazzling art and architecture and its seductive music and theater to attract the hordes of visitors that still clog the Piazza San Marco today. Yet Ackroyd reminds us that this city of brilliant surfaces has always also been a place of mystery, of secrets and crimes concealed behind opaque facades. Mosaics and glass are its characteristic products; its greatest painters (Titian, Tintoretto) excel in color and drama, not psychological complexity; ditto the music of native son Vivaldi and the beloved comedies of Goldoni. The author affectionately portrays Venetians as intensely social and deeply conservative, creators of an oligarchic democracy that endured for centuries. Public life was as theatrical as the opera; little was at stake because nothing ever changed. There's no need to lament the city's contemporary role as a tourist attraction, writes Ackroyd, because "the tourist Venice is the essential, quintessential, Venice."A loving yet clear-eyed celebration of the enigmatic icon on the Adriatic.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
