Review by New York Times Review
ONCE THERE WERE just nomads, their wanderings no more than necessary for survival. But then came the stockades their successors built and the fire-warmed settlements in which they huddled - and suddenly travel changed, becoming what for most would henceforth be a pursuit more elective than essential. There were many motives for it. Sheer curiosity-what's beyond the fence? - came first. Then a need to trade, to inhabit, to conquer, to preach, to take part in a pilgrimage, to migrate and settle anew, to wage a war or to seek refuge. These and any of a thousand other proddings of the sharp stick would send travelers out on the road. Before long, humankind had been whipped into a frenzy of wandering, one that has never let up. And nowadays, with technology and low cost combining to create a perfect storm of wanderlust, we see the results: the vast Lunar New Year crowds at a Chinese railway station, the lethal scrums at the hajj in Mecca, the endless security lines at Heathrow and Kennedy and Sheremetyevo, all vivid testimony to the unanticipated backwash of our pathological desire for ceaseless mobility. And yet just why, fretted Blaise Pascal back in the 17th century, when all of this seemed to get going, why the urge to engage in so much movement? Why all this transnational Brownian motion? Surely all of man's ills must stem, the philosopher wrote, from his simple inability to remain quiet and alone, serenely in the comfort of his own home. When confronted with this season's tottering tower of new travel literature, I found it easy to sympathize with poor Pascal. Well over 40 books arrived on my desk, ranging widely in their geographical reach, but most nonetheless possessed of a certain predictability - an urgent need to escape here, a frantic need to impress there, a pressing need to inquire and explore and explain what goes on in the faraway. Only a handful could possibly be chosen for a closer look. A small sampling of those that, with profound regret, had to be left by the wayside, may indicate the scale and manic scope of this tarantella of travel writing: A former cult member tries to bicycle around the world. A man with an appetite for fish walks the coast of India, sampling as he goes. A Canadian waitress who swears like a fishwife goes on holiday to Boracay. A man walks, illegally, along the Keystone XL pipeline. Sixteen school-boys canoe their way from Montreal to the mouth of the Mississippi. An Englishman visits all of the Central Asian "stans" - except the most interesting one, Turkmenistan, with its revolving statue of the former president and an ice rink built in the desert. An expatriate Briton writes admiringly about Holland. A Hungarian writes similarly about China. Someone writes a sentence that includes the words "the atopic character of literary space" and supposes it will appeal to a reviewer of travel books. An oenophile goes in search of the finest wines grown in Georgia, not here but in the Caucasus. A Floridian who has visited more than 60 countries tells us about himself. A radio reporter immerses herself in the dubious delights of the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. In the end, I sifted what I thought might be some pearls from the sand. And there's an irony in my first choice, one Pascal would like, since Philip Marsden's RISING GROUND: A Search for the Spirit of Place (University of Chicago, $27.50) doesn't require the author to venture very far from his home in Cornwall, yielding a travel book that involves little real, physical travel. And yet Marsden's essays about landscape and history and the habitations and habitants of that mysterious, familiar but deeply unknown finger-like peninsula at England's lower left-hand, seagirt end are deft and exquisite, filled with the learning of a supremely well-traveled man and composed in a lilting, finely chased prose. I immersed myself for hours in the comforting blanket of this book, lulled into fond memories of my own. My very first job as a reporter, based in the gritty coal-mining northeast of England, once required me to visit Cornwall, but there was no budget and I had to hitchhike and camp out on Bodmin Moor. In a cafe near Liskeard, I met a wandering American student of quite astonishing beauty, and she spent an evening with me under one of the granite tors, a place called the Cheesewring. She cooked for me and played Joni Mitchell songs on her guitar. And then, for fun, she tried to balance a pile of small stones on the grass, intending to echo those that had been piled by nature on the tor. Almost half a century later, Marsden observes a woman at the very same place. She "picked a flattish stone and added it to one of the waist-high cairns, the mini-Cheesewrings that had been put up by recent visitors. The stone kept falling off and she bent down close to position it. Very gently she released her finger and thumb. She held them there for a moment. This time the stone was still." If deep and well-weathered erudition defines Marsden's book, learning and assimilated high culture similarly mark out Andrew Dickson's wonderfully imaginative WORLDS ELSEWHERE: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe (Holt, $35), which appropriately appears around the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death. For this, unlike most of the library-bound literary reassessments produced to mark the moment, demands of Dickson many thousands of miles of hard slogging as he seeks to inquire into the playwright's appeal around the world and to discover the plays being performed with often wild and eccentric enthusiasm in the most improbable places. China is perhaps one of the more predictably bardolatrous countries Dickson visits, where young Chinese (they and their elders raised on the Lambs' "Tales," still hugely popular more than a century after they appeared in translation) have become in recent years among the most numerous and raucous fans of the man officially known as Shashibiya. Dickson reminds us that when Wen Jiabao, then China's premier, came to England in 2011, he flew first to a small airport outside Birmingham and hared off to Stratford to pay homage. He left behind as a gift an edition of "Love's Labour's Lost" rendered into putonghua and wrote an elegantly calligraphed paean, "He brings sunshine to your life,/Gives your dreams wings to fly" - which, though more Elton John than Li Bai, does suggest a certain fondness. And given that Marx revered Shakespeare, it was for much of China's recent history an officially approved fondness. So Dickson treks around to experience Shakespeare with Chinese characteristics - notably watching an up-to-date "Coriolanus" being performed in Beijing, with two local heavy-metal bands called Suffocated and Miserable Faith playing a noisy continuo. In Shanghai, he meets a once and now again famous Shakespearean actor, Jiao Huang, and watches him weep as he explains why he had not been on the stage for nine years during the 1960s. It was, of course, the time of the Cultural Revolution. "If you were passionate about Western plays, you would be so severely criticized that you could n't lift your head- I lived in a cowshed. I experienced everything. My house was destroyed." Such an encounter, which amply repays the price of admission, also transmutes a Shakespeare book (in which Dickson also ventures to Nevada City, Munich, Durban, Kolkata and Gdansk, among other cities) into a true travel book, of the best kind. Of a more traditional kind is WALKING THE NILE (Atlantic Monthly, $26) by Levison Wood. I mean no disrespect for the behatted, bandannaed and be-bearded Wood, who was bred by all appearances out of Bear Grylls by Sir Ranulph Fiennes, when I note that, like all too many of the newly empireless British, he has a perverse liking for far-flung epic stunts - his other travel book, WALKING THE HIMALAYAS (Little, Brown, $27), comes out almost simultaneously. What elevates this perfectly reasonable 4,000-mile northbound wander through Africa, from the trickle of the river's source in Rwanda to where it debouches by the grubby gravel of an Egyptian beach, is how Wood deals with the very lowest point of the trip, when one of his party falls desperately ill and dies. He was Matthew Power, a young man from Vermont who had made something of a name for himself as an adventuresome reporter. Men's Journal had commissioned him to meet up with Levison Wood ("Captain Wood, I presume?" clearly had to be his first words when they joined forces in the scorching uplands of Uganda) and to walk with him toward South Sudan. Tough-looking yet unused to the extreme heat, Power never made it: "I found Matt hunkered down in the elephant grass," a plainly frightened Wood writes. "He was sipping from the water pack attached to his rucksack, through a thin tube. There was something almost ghostly about his face: pale, white and flushed red in equal measure. 'Are you O.K., Matt?"' He was dying of hyperthermia. Wood knew the symptoms, had seen them before in Afghanistan. He got out his satellite phone and called - for medical advice, for a helicopter, for help. Gunshots were fired in the air. But no one came. One of his companions lit a fire to create a landing zone for a chopper, but lit it in the wrong place, and the wind-whipped flames swept toward the party and their fast-dying charge. They tried to carry him out, but he stopped breathing, his pulse vanished. They took his fast-cooling body to the top of a hill, wrapped him in a tarp and whispered a prayer. And then, the next day, after the rangers had come and the formalities had been completed in the closest town, Power's photographer picked up his cellphone and dialed the New York number of Power's wife. And told her the terrible news about her husband's death, about what happened to the man who had come out to Africa, as Wood puts it, "so that he could write about me on my indulgent, pointless, selfish trek." I was near tears when I read that passage. It cast a shadow over the adventure, from which neither the adventure nor the book's eventual account ever really recovered. I confess I had an instinctive initial dislike of what seemed to be a truly indulgent, pointless and selfish trek undertaken by a troubled young woman from Texas named Clara Bensen, whose NO BAGGAGE: A Minimalist Tale of Love and Wandering (Running Press, $25) recounts her three-week adventure traveling from Istanbul to London, quite deliberately baggageless. She had little more than an emerald-green cotton sundress, a slim leather purse holding three pairs of underwear, her iPhone and iPad Mini, a pen and notebook and a toothbrush - and a devil-may-care boyfriend named Jeff, whom she had met on the dating site OkCupid and about whom she knew very little, other than that he taught environmental science at a college in Brownsville and had a young daughter, who would stay home with her mother. (Baggage there, of course. Half the point of the book.) Near the start of what turned out to be an absorbing and well-told tale, Bensen refers to Baudelaire's admiration for the life of the flâneur, citing the "immense joy" of being able "to be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world." And with gusto, courage and a palpable sense of joy, so Bensen goes on to enjoy her brief wander through the southeastern corner of Europe, as far away from Texan certainty as her budget allowed her to go. We learn perhaps a little too much about her feminine plumbing crises en route and the history of her various low-level mental troubles back home among her evangelically minded family. But she arrives back in Texas with her relationship with Jeff intact and her eyes widened to the wondrous realities of the world. I was happy for her, and I hope she travels once more, returning with another well-furnished notebook. Finally, and by deliberate sartorial contrast, there is Rush Loving Jr.'s THE WELL-DRESSED HOBO: The Many Wondrous Adventures of a Man Who Loves Trains (Indiana University, $35), which has all tOO many pictures of the boring-looking men in business suits who ran, for good or for ill, some of the various railroads with which this former Fortune editor is acquainted. Loving loves trains - indeed, some years ago he wrote a book with a title professing just that - and he has a stiffly mannered approach to the delights of permanent-way passage, the kind that made E. M. Frimbo so beloved a character of the old New Yorker. His is by no means a good book - neither a good bad book nor a bad good book. But for those few of us who are attracted to a sentence that begins, "Then the Golden Arrow took off over the flatlands of the Midwest, highballing for Chicago, passing Crestline at 12:44, Fort Wayne at 2:02 and Valparaiso at 3:54," it is an essential book. And how much nicer a sentence that is than all that life-ruining piffle about the atopic character of literary space, an indigestible confection that deserves to be tossed from one of Loving's trains, to languish by the wayside forever. SIMON WINCHESTER'S most recent book is "Pacific." ONLINE The travel books described at the beginning of this review are listed at nytitnes.com/books.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 5, 2016]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Wood, a British veteran who served in Afghanistan, recounts his ambitious attempt, beginning in November 2013, to walk the entire length of the Nile River: 4,250 miles of water running through five countries. The impetus for the journey was a desire to emulate Western explorers of Africa such as Richard Burton, Henry Stanley, David Livingstone, and John Hanning Speke, whose adventures Wood admired. Wood also sought to meet people and hear their stories. Beginning in Nyungwe Forest in Rwanda, Wood travels through Uganda, South Sudan, Sudan, and Egypt before reaching the Nile Delta and the Mediterranean, following the river through forests, villages, cities, deserts, and-in South Sudan-active war zones and refugee settlements. The narration is unadorned and mostly relays the viewpoints of local guides and porters, who accompany the author through the majority of his trip, and others he meets en route. Wood does provide some history and contextual asides, but he devotes most of his book to sharing the opinions of the people he encounters, which are dynamic and at times surprising. A man in Sudan, for example, laments the end of British rule because of the prosperity that ended with it. These voices, seen through the lens of Wood's words, make this memoir a success. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
From the dense jungles of Tanzania, Rwanda, and Uganda, to war-torn South Sudan and the arid deserts of Sudan and Egypt, English writer and explorer Wood treks alongside the Nile dodging crocodiles, hippos, and the secret police in an attempt to be the first person to traverse the length of the river. After an unceremonious start, Wood gets blessed by a witch doctor, saves a vervet monkey, nearly runs out of water, and faces a tragic setback that causes him to consider abandoning the journey. Through interactions with locals, Wood creates a portrayal of Africa and its peoples that isn't often presented in the West. Additionally, an overview of each region, which includes a brief history, along with visits to historical and cultural sites, allow this travelog to also provide a glimpse into the soul of the continent. VERDICT Armchair travelers and those looking for a side of Africa not generally seen will find adventure sprinkled with culture and history in this narrative that circumvents the colonial pomp while following in the shadow of the original British explorers of Africa.-Zebulin Evelhoch, Central Washington Univ. Lib. © Copyright 2015. 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
Walking the Nile has enticed many explorers, but Wood provides an up-to-the-minute portrait of the nations and people that claim the world's longest river. From the moment the author began his journey, at the alleged source of the Nile, he encountered constant conflict and hardship. His guides mistrusted each other. So-called pygmies were reluctant to accept him. He had to fight through every border crossing, and he faced the constant threats of theft, disease, and corruption. Wood is a war veteran, and he was able to improvise his way through dangerous situations, such as firefights in a Sudanese city and an interrogation by secret police. But the trek was not without tragedy: when the author agreed to walk with American journalist Matt Power for a week, Power eventually collapsed and died of heat stroke. "I wanted the cold comfort of English skies again," writes Wood. "I wanted to be anywhere but here, thinking of the man who had died so that he could write about me on my indulgent, pointless, selfish trek." Overall, Wood is a sharp observer and authoritative writer. He takes pains to describe the Rwandan conflict, the Egyptian revolution, the Sudanese civil war, and all the culture clashes in between. But chutzpah and empathy only get him so far. In the end, the author is unable to adequately explain his interest in the Nile, and the book does feel indulgent at times. The story is awkwardly similar to Rory Stewart's The Places in Between, while lacking the immediacy of the Afghan context. Unlike Stewart, Wood accumulated media coverage as he went. By the time he reached the Aswan Dam, he was carrying an article chronicling his passage. This kind of publicity recalls the newspaper frenzy of the Stanley-Livingstone expedition. For adventurers like Wood and Stanley, the Nile is a metaphor as much as a place. Wood delivers a bold travelogue, illuminating great swathes of modern Africa, but as literature, it leaves something to be desired. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
