Review by New York Times Review
FAILED relationships, broken marriages and dead-end careers are among the catalysts that lead this season's travel writers to hit the road. The escapees range from a middle-aged journalist seeking high-altitude transcendence in the Himalayas to a frustrated poetry scholar in search of beauty among the holy spots of Iran. And then there's the global nomad torn between a longing for domestic tranquility and a masochistic impulse to throw himself into the world's "messy heart." This summer's selection also includes authors driven by simple journalistic curiosity and academic inquiry, but it's the more tortured souls whose journeys resonate the most. Restless professionally and disappointed romantically, Lisa Napoli, a journalist in her mid-40s, takes a temporary leave from her job as a public radio reporter in Los Angeles and relocates to Bhutan, a secluded and peaceful Himalayan kingdom that is just opening its doors to the outside world. "I was tired of sleep-deprived, stressed-out, too-busy people who shirked downtime in the service of making money," she writes in RADIO SHANGRILA: What I Learned in the Happiest Kingdom on Earth (Crown, $25), her affectionate portrait of life in a slower-paced, high-altitude society. Napoli settles into an apartment in Thimphu, the sleepy capital, where she has signed on as an unpaid consultant to Kazoo FM, an English-language radio station established by the Bhutanese monarch as part of a drive to modernize his kingdom. There she encounters a tiny band of West-infatuated D.J.'s who organize Larry King-style call-in shows and Valentine's Day singing contests. She copes with the less-than-welcome attentions of a spoiled and materialistic Buddhist monk, has a near romance with a charismatic expat and tries, without success, to develop a liking for emadatse, the "yak-cheesy, fiery-hot chili stew" that locals consume three times a day. Napoli inevitably falls under the spell of a country "guided by intense spirituality" yet seduced by the accouterments of the modern world: A.T.M.'s, fast-food restaurants, nightclubs, the Internet. "The most exciting experiences I had were with start-up ventures, companies where we made it all up as we went along," she observes in this absorbing, often touching memoir that unfolds on the eve of Bhutan's first democratic elections. "In many ways, Bhutan was a start-up too - an ancient, once-secluded kingdom transitioning now at warp speed." In SAVED BY BEAUTY: Adventures of an American Romantic in Iran (Broadway, $24), Roger Housden, entering his 60s alone after a broken second marriage, decides to head for Tehran, eager to explore a country that has fascinated him since his days as a Persian poetry aficionado in 1970s London. A few months before pro-democracy protests erupt against the Islamic regime, Housden visits some of the glory spots of Persian history and has a series of risky encounters with Iranian artists, filmmakers and writers who are "living and working in an environment watered by the roots of a mythic past." Housden mostly skirts the country's repressive politics in favor of eloquent ruminations on its humanistic spirit and artistic excellence: the architectural splendor of the Royal Mosque in Isfahan; the rituals and gently tolerant outlook of the Sufis; the ruined Silk Road city of Nishapur, birthplace of the poet and scientist Omar Khayyam. In Tehran, Housden finds an artistic community energized both by opposition to the regime and by distance from materialistic distractions. "He'd never felt at home in a consumer-capitalist culture," Housden observes of Behzad, founder of a popular art-and-culture Web site. "What he had always felt the lack of in America, and what he so appreciated here, was the extended sense of community, the way individual identity was always wrapped into the broader culture." Ultimately, however, Housden can't avoid a collision with Iran's implacably anti-Western government: his book begins and ends with descriptions of his interrogation by thuggish security men who accuse him of working secretly for the Americans and threaten to toss him into the notorious Evin Prison. "The darkness was a fact in my life now," the British expat writes of the terror he experiences before being permitted to a board a plane to freedom and his home in California. "Now I knew for a certainty that I had no special pass - that everything could be taken away from me at any moment." In THE SINNER'S GRAND TOUR: A Journey Through the Historical Underbelly of Europe (Broadway, paper, $15), the veteran travel writer Tony Perrottet sets off on a romp across England, France and Italy, searching for remnants of their bawdy past. "Today, the entire continent is still littered with secret boudoirs, perverse relics and ancient dungeons, many of which, I was convinced, could be found," Perrottet explains before embarking on his summer-long research trip, accompanied by bis wife and their two young sons. Perrottet drags his family to questionable holiday spots like West Wycombe, in Buckinghamshire, former site of what came to be known as the Hellfire Club, a converted medieval abbey that earned infamy in the 18th century as a "private rumpus room for theatrical and carnal misbehavior." This X-rated version of "National Lampoon's European Vacation" soon segues into an amusing - and surprisingly absorbing - series of quests. In Paris, Perrottet searches for the long-lost fauteuil d'amour (the sex chair) of King Edward VII, used by the morbidly obese British monarch to facilitate his trysts with the city's prostitutes. In the Provençal village of Lacoste, Perrottet spends a week trying to arrange a meeting with Pierre Cardin and is rewarded with a peek inside the octogenarian fashion designer's villa, a medieval fortress once owned by the Marquis de Sade. In Rome, reports of a papal bathroom covered in pornographic frescoes by Raphael inspire various schemes to get inside the Holy See's W.C. Perrottet can be a bit too lighthearted about the misogynistic behavior of some of his subjects - like an act of sexual extortion organized by the 18th-century Italian playboy Giacomo Casanova - but as he tears away Europe's decorous historical facade he pays spirited homage to the rakes and reprobates who subscribed to Casanova's motto: "I have devoted my life to the pursuit of pleasure." IN THE DEAD YARD; A Story of Modern Jamaica (Nation Books, paper, $16.99), Ian Thomson journeys from the shantytowns of Kingston to the resorts of Montego Bay as he tries to touch the soul of this lush Caribbean island. But almost five decades after Jamaica's independence from Great Britain, Thomson finds this troubled country still scarred by its leading role in the slave trade, mired in poverty and crime, and deeply divided between a tiny white elite and a large black underclass. Thomson hangs out with reggae musicians and meets the dying director of the classic Jimmy Cliff cinematic anthem "The Harder They Come." He smokes weed with ganja-addled "Reborn Christians" and has a tense encounter with the Bobo Ashanti, a Rastafarian group that rejects reconciliation with whites and whose heroes include the murderous Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Thomson finds himself recoiling from the Rastafarians' "nasty streak of misogyny" and "the absolutism of its blood-and-brimstone visions." Among his less testy encounters is one with an expatriate vestige of Jamaica's colonial past, Blanche Blackwell, who befriended Ian Fleming and was supposedly a model for the "Sapphic aeroplane pilot and martial arts expert, Pussy Galore" in "Goldfinger." Thomson's meandering narrative, with its seemingly unedited dialogue and sometimes awkward phrasing, can be difficult to wade through. Stili, he paints a nuanced portrait of a country brimming with both creative and murderous impulses. "A nation built on violence and morose vendettas today stands on shaky political and economic foundations," he writes. "The Jamaican people . . . are stuck in a postcolonial malaise." In THE LUNATIC EXPRESS: Discovering the World . . . Via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes (Broadway, $24.99), Carl Hoffman leaves his comfortable Beltway life and sets out on a round-the-world Odyssey "from the exits of the New Jersey Turnpike to the peaks of the Andes and the plateaus of Asia." It's a journey that countless travel writers have taken before him, but Hoffman adds a twist: he does the entire trip in steerage class. "I wanted to travel around the world as most of the people in the world did," he explains, "putting their lives at risk every time they took off on overcrowded and poorly maintained conveyances because that was all they could afford or there were no other options." The first leg of the journey sets the tone: a flight from Toronto to Havana aboard Cubana Airlines, a company with a "fatal event rate" almost 20 times higher than Southwest Airlines. Later, Hoffman embarks on marathon bus trips through the mountains of South America, the plains of India and the Taliban-infested back roads of Afghanistan. He books passage on squalid ferries through the Indonesian archipelago and rides packed trains in Mumbai. Always on the move, Hoffman manages only to skim the surfaces of these complex societies. Yet he gathers insights into the fortitude of third-world travelers, his own competing yearnings for domestic stability and adventure, and the brutal economics of mass transportation in impoverished parts of the globe. "The third world is all about tiny margins of profit," he writes after careering around in Kenya with the drivers of matatus - private minibuses with appalling accident rates. "Speed and maximum capacity are of the essence. Regulation, safety, comfort - they cost money, and there is no money here." In ODESSA: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (Norton, $27.95), Charles King charts the tumultuous history of the Black Sea port best known as the inspiration for Pushkin and the setting for Sergei Eisenstein's revolutionary masterpiece "Battleship Potemkin." King, a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University, describes how the city came into being as the main port of Catherine the Great's province of New Russia and a bulwark against the Ottoman Empire, then grew to glory under the administrative genius of a Spanish nobleman, José Pascual Domingo de Ribas y Boyons, and a Russian aristocrat, Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov. By the 1840s, King writes, Odessa appeared to travelers as "a dreamlike city rising out of nothing, a surprising blip on the blank horizon formed by steppe, sea and sky." But its commerciai bustle, intellectual ferment and atmosphere of tolerance (it harbored one of Russia's largest Jewish populations) were accompanied by darker impulses. "When things worked, Odessa nurtured intellectuals and artists whose talents lit up the world," King writes. "When they didn't, the city's name became a byword for fanaticism, anti-Semitism and deadly nationalism." King describes the 1905 pogroms in the Pale of Settlement that spilled over into Odessa, leaving nearly 300 of its Jewish citizens dead. The horror of that experience helped shape the ideology of the Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, an Odessa native who led the Haganah, a clandestine Jewish military organization in Palestine after World War I. Jabotinsky's "right-wing, antisocialist, militaristic and uncompromising commitment to a Jewish homeland on both banks of the Jordan River" prefigured the settler movement in modern-day Israel. King's sprawling narrative loses focus at times, but it regains momentum with the occupation of Odessa by Nazi-allied Romanian forces during World War II - and the destruction of the city's ancient Jewish community. (Forty-eight Jews were left in Odessa by the time the Red Army liberated the city in November 1944.) Today, King observes, much of that population has been reconstituted in Brooklyn's Little Odessa, while the original city has become "a twilight town, sitting uneasy inside a new country and more comfortable marketing its distant past than presenting itself as a city of the future." When the British journalist Rachel Polonsky moves into an elegant apartment building on Romanov Lane in central Moscow, she discovers the still-intact library of a notorious former tenant, the murderous Bolshevik leader and onetime Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov. "I was raised to value books, but these decaying volumes were residues of a malign force, not yet expired," she observes at the beginning of MOLOTOV'S MAGIC LANTERN: Travels in Russian History (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28). "For decades, their owner had been the secondmost-powerful man in Stalin's empire, ... a man who collaborated diligently in the tyrant's crimes, condemning millions to cruel deaths." The discovery inspires Polonsky to make a journey across the former Soviet empire, tracing the lives of the novelists, scientists and doomed Communist apparatchiks whose works line Molotov's shelves. In the dacha colony of Mozzhinka, Polonsky ponders the disparate careers of the brothers Sergei and Nikolai Vavilov, estimable scientists who followed diametrically opposite paths, one to glory under the Soviet dictatorship, the other to death from starvation in Stalin's gulag. In Rostov-on-Don, she recounts the bizarre life of the Cossack leader turned Bolshevik insider Semyon Budyonny, whose brutality was chronicled by Isaac Babel in his classic 1923 collection of stories, "Cavalry Army." Turning to her own apartment block - "the most prestigious residence for the Party elite outside the Kremlin" - she tells of Leon Trotsky's 1927 arrest in Apartment 62 by Stalin's secret police and a failed 1918 plot by Sidney Reilly, an Odessa-born Jew, and his mistress, the tenant in Apartment 85, to overthrow Lenin. (The plot was foiled, and Reilly, whose real name was Sigmund Rosenblum, was dispatched with a bullet to the head.) Polonsky's writing can be overwrought, and her narrative sometimes loses its way in a thicket of detail, but the book comes to chilling life with her portrait of Molotov, once described by Winston Churchill as a man of "outstanding ability and cold-blooded ruthlessness." An emotionless apparatchik, bibliophile and fanatical loyalist to Stalin who kept detailed lists of his victims, he personally signed the execution orders for 43,569 people between the summer of 1937 and the winter of 1938, at the height of the Great Terror. Molotov - who, unlike many of Stalin's associates, lived to a ripe old age - typically professed ignorance about the fates of the people whose deaths he ordained. "Stalin's men," Polonsky explains, "cultivated this kind of rejection of memory, of the concrete reality of the past." 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 [June 5, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
A successful journalist working for public radio in Los Angeles, Napoli hit a wall. Burned out and overwhelmed by regret, she wondered how to recharge her life. Enter a friend of a friend with connections to the tiny Himalayan country of Bhutan. In 2006, this Buddhist kingdom, long cocooned against the outside world, launched a new youth radio station, Kuzoo FM (kuzoo zampo means hello). Would Napoli like to volunteer as a consultant? So begins a love affair with a land unlike any other, a bond that lifts Napoli out of her blues and enriches the lives of the young people with whom she works. The stories of the wildly popular station are charming and gracefully revealing as Napoli shares her experiences of Bhutan's magnificent landscape, fiery cuisine, and openhanded daily life in a society that measures its achievements not with a Gross National Product but, rather, with Gross National Happiness. Napoli's engaging, keenly observed, and informative chronicle captures Bhutan midmetamorphosis as it transforms itself into a democracy and as media and the Internet redefine the Bhutanese concept of contentment.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
When Napoli met the handsome Sebastian at a cookbook party in New York City, she was intrigued by this man who traveled to Bhutan regularly. And when the accomplished L.A.-based journalist (MSNBC, CNN, public radio's Marketplace) researched the country about which he spoke so enthusiastically, she became entranced with Bhutan, a tiny Himalayan kingdom that sits between India and China. This country-dubbed "the happiest on earth" because of its focus on environmental and social progress-is hard to get to, with its remote location and governmental deterrents to tourism, like a $200 per-person, per-day tourist tax. But a friend of Sebastian's needs help with startup radio station Kuzoo FM, so Napoli leaves L.A. and goes to Bhutan for six weeks. She writes, "After more than two decades of reducing even the most complex issues to 1,000 words or less, I was tired of observing life from a distance." While the author turns an eye on her own motivations (nothing further developed with Sebastian), she refrains from tortured navel-gazing and instead shares and reflects on Bhutan's people, history, and customs (from painting phalluses on houses to repel evil spirits to Buddhism's role in daily life). Napoli's adventures at home and abroad, in nature and career and spirit, will delight readers. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Nestled between India and China, Bhutan is known as the last Buddhist kingdom and Land of the Thunder Dragon. The story opens with fortysomething journalist Napoli's dogged pursuit of happiness by documenting "three good things" each day. By chance, the Los Angeles-based author is persuaded to take a midlife journey to Bhutan. Taking place in 2007, this six-week sojourn's purpose is to help improve Kuzoo FM, the nation's fledgling radio station. Bhutan's monarch promotes "Gross National Happiness," restricts tourism, and imagines the radio station as a way to prepare Bhutanese young people for impending parliamentary elections. Over the course of the next two years, Napoli returns to Bhutan a few more times. Predictably, the author learns a great deal about herself and her life's choices and revels in the growth experienced by the young radio jockeys. VERDICT Napoli's fluid, elegant, and vivid prose draws readers into this special geographical place and illustrates the value of soul searching. This compelling story will inspire readers interested in other cultures and the spiritual side of world travel.-Elizabeth Connor, The Citadel, Military Coll. of South Carolina Lib., Charleston (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.
