Review by New York Times Review
This season's travel books abound with journeys inspired by literary lions - a trip to a Greek island in pursuit of the teachings of Epicurus, a hike along the river where Virginia Woolf died, an excursion to the birthplace of the Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa. And not every excursion is highbrow: one of the best books of the bunch is partly a homage to Bobby Troup, the lyricist who wrote the 1946 hit "(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66." Noo Saro-Wiwa's LOOKING FOR TRANSWONDERLAND: Travels in Nigeria (Soft Skull/Counterpoint, paper, $15.95) is the remarkable chronicle of a journey home from exile. Many years after her father, the playwright, poet and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, was hanged by the military regime of General Sani Abacha, Saro-Wiwa returns to her native land from her home in England to see what, if anything, has changed. "There had to be more besides the media reports of kidnappings and the scam e-mails from 'Sani Abacha's wife' wanting to split her millions with me," she writes before setting off on an Odyssey from Lagos to the Muslim north to her birthplace in the oil-rich Niger Delta. "I found myself . . . voyaging to this final frontier that has perhaps received fewer voluntary visitors than outer space." For the first time since Nigeria's independence in 1960, one democratic government has succeeded another. Yet the country remains "a nation of ruffians," awash in corruption and plagued by epic mismanagement and decrepitude. "If Lagos were a person," Saro-Wiwa observes of Nigeria's brash economic capital, "she would wear a Gucci jacket and a cheap hair weave, with a mobile phone in one hand, a second set in her back pocket and the mother of all scowls on her face." Saro-Wiwa finds beauty in a northern bird sanctuary and is entranced by Nigeria's exuberant dancing and music, but her tour through ruined amusement parks, depleted game reserves and festering cities ravaged by gang warfare and Christian-Muslim violence reveals a dystopia well worth avoiding. Too many Nigerians, she concludes, take their moral cue from the country's politicians, who have "clubbed, kicked and clawed their way to power" and then "plunge elbow deep into our government tills with breathtaking abandon." In ROUTE 66 STILL KICKS: Driving America's Main Street (Skyhorse, paper, $16.95), Rick Antonson explores the highway that came to symbolize American mobility and rootlessness in the first half of the 20th century. In Chicago, Antonson and a companion rent a silver Mustang convertible - their version of the Corvette driven by Martin Milner and George Maharis in the TV series "Route 66" - then follow fragments of the mostly disused highway across eight states to Los Angeles. The journey brings them face to face with a lost America: ghostly motor courts, rusted gas stations, towns nearly abandoned after the Interstate Highway Act made Route 66 obsolete. They become mired in mud on unpaved stretches of road, bicker over missed turnoffs and bad hotel choices, and meet a host of people whose lives have "dead ended in the same way" as the roads. Antonson breaks from this adventure to recall Route 66's glory days. He tells the story of Cyrus Avery, an Oklahoma entrepreneur who persuaded the government to stitch together bike paths, auto club roads and pieces of existing highways into a cross-country route. He looks back engagingly on the lives of Woody Guthrie, Mickey Mantle and Will Rogers, all of whom grew up near Route 66 and traveled it on their way to becoming American icons. And he shines light on Route 66's dark side, including Al Capone's liquor runs. Antonson anoints John Steinbeck, whose "Grapes of Wrath" chronicled the exodus of Okies from the Dust Bowl, as the road's poet laureate. Route 66 was "the mother road," Steinbeck wrote, "the main migrant road . . . waving gently up and down on the map . . . over the red lands and the gray lands, twisting up into the mountains." Seeking to explain its continued allure, Antonson aptly calls this ribbon of asphalt "one long, rambling sentence that describes America." TO THE RIVER: A Journey Beneath the Surface (Canongate, paper, $13.95) pays tribute to another legendary artery with literary associations: the River Ouse in Sussex, where Virginia Woolf drowned herself in March 1941. Dejected and unmoored after the breakup of a relationship, the British journalist Olivia Laing sets out on a ramble from the river's source in "a copse of oak and hazel not far from Haywards Heath" to its mouth at Newhaven on the English Channel. "Unlike a lake or sea, a river has a destination and there is something about the certainty with which it travels," Laing observes with typical insight, "that makes it very soothing, particularly for those who've lost faith with where they're headed." Laing finds the pastoral setting and the river's flow restorative. But she also encounters a region haunted by ghosts. At the site of the Battle of Lewes in 1264, which pitted Henry III against the doomed rebel and reformer Simon de Montfort, she walks across meadows that have grown over the marshes where many of Montfort's knights drowned in muck. Visiting the home of Woolf and her husband, Leonard, she contemplates Woolf's literary obsession with "immersion and submersion, about going under and being washed away" - and speculates on how it foretold her death. "She was wearing Wellington boots and her hat remained wedged on by a string of elastic tied beneath her chin," she writes of Woolf's body, which was fished from the Ouse three weeks after she descended into its cold, swift current. Yet much of Laing's writing feels overwrought, and her descriptions of the natural world can seem repetitive. Thinking back on her broken romance, she compares herself and her lover to Greek sailors lured by the sirens to their deaths on the rocks of the Aegean, destined to wind up "petrified, until the hide rotted from our bones." Even the simple act of eating a Mr. Whippy ice cream can inspire mythological references: "I wondered as I licked it if this was the corollary to the pomegranate seeds that Hades spooned into Persephone's mouth, the food that would entrap me in the mortal realm." In TRAVELS WITH EPICURUS: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life (Penguin, $20), Daniel Klein follows in the footsteps of another intellectual giant. The 73-year-old Klein plants himself on the island of Hydra on a quest "to figure out the most satisfying way to live this stage of my life." Klein comes armed with a copy of the Greek philosopher Epicurus' "Art of Happiness," which views old age as the "pinnacle of life" and urges those in their later years to slow down, surrender their competitive instincts and savor the joys of being alive. Sitting on the terrace of a taverna and meandering up steep mountain paths, Klein easily adjusts to the Epicurean rhythms of rural Greek life: "Moving slowly has a grace to it that I find I can easily settle into. I feel fluent in slow motion." He mocks the "forever young movement," the tendency of many people to cling to their youth through breast implants or testosterone patches, and advises them not to dwell on the prospect of what he calls "old old age," when the body and mind disintegrate. "Perhaps authentic old age," he writes in this often insightful meditation, "can consist of neither the breathless ambition of the forever youngster nor . . . unremitting despair . . . but something meaningful in itself." HOW WE FORGOT THE COLD WAR: A Historical Journey Across America (University of California, $34.95), by Jon Wiener, is a political argument masquerading as a travel yarn. A professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, Wiener visits cold war memorials and historic sites, seeking to debunk claims that the United States-Soviet conflict was a heroic struggle on a par with World War II. This effort, he writes, has been met with "public indifference, skepticism and apparent resistance to what historians have called 'cold war triumphalism.'" Wiener recounts the doomed attempt to build a $100 million Victims of Communism Museum in Washington and comically searches the Maryland countryside for the pumpkin patch exhibit commemorating Whittaker Chambers, the anti-Communist whose testimony exposed Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy in a case that boosted the career of then-Congressman Richard Nixon. "Like other cold war commemorative efforts," Wiener notes, after tracking down the bronze plaque to an unmarked barn that receives an average of two visitors a year, "the pumpkin patch National Historic Landmark is remarkable primarily as a failure." The problem, Wiener argues in this persuasive yet sometimes heavy-handed polemic, is that the cold war was no Manichaean struggle pitting the American white hats against a black-hatted Evil Empire. Rather, it was an ambiguous showdown between two superpowers driven by self-interest and geopolitical competition. Wiener's accounts of his trips to nuclear test sites, missile-launching control centers and fallout shelter exhibits contrast the guides' cheerful patter with the prospect of Armageddon, and his visit to a former plutonium processing plant serves as a reminder of the environmental costs of the arms race. His journey ends at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which stands as a stark rebuttal to those who have glorified the proxy wars fought in the name of defeating Communism. "It is the one monument of the cold war era that resolutely denies a triumphant interpretation of the conflict. With its sunken black granite walls carrying the names of all 58,000 Americans who died in the war, the memorial steadfastly refuses to celebrate heroism in a battle between good and evil." Condé Nast Traveler magazine has a knack for matching author to subject. THE CONDE NAST TRAVELER BOOK OF UNFORGETTABLE JOURNEYS: Volume II, Great Writers on Great Places (Penguin, paper, $16), edited by Klara Glowczewska, features a preponderance of urban adventures, from Jay McInerney's exploration of Amsterdam to Pico Iyer's inquiry into religious zealotry in Jerusalem, "City of God, City of Men." One of the best entries is Robert Hughes's "Liberation of Sydney," in which the Australian art critic returns to his boyhood home and finds that the city's reputation for "un-self-conscious masculinity" has mellowed: "Sydney is no longer quite so keen on the Ocker (Pacific redneck) image of the Australian: beer gut, thongs, nasal foghorn voice and a truculent certainty that, short of Paradise itself, Australia is the only ticket." Instead, Hughes finds a city brimming with sophistication, from galleries celebrating indigenous art to the Sydney Opera House, whose "form suggested blown spinnakers, birds' wings, seashells, all that was appropriate to the great port." In another fine essay, Julia Reed serves up her own tasty take on New Orleans four years after Katrina, reclaiming its identity as a city devoted to pleasure. Tracing New Orleans's fondness for libations, she describes a visit during Prohibition by a federal agent named Isidore Einstein, sent to test how easily he could obtain alcohol. Notes Reed: "A scant 37 seconds elapsed between the time Einstein stepped off the train and the moment he held a drink in his hand." The indefatigable Pico Iyer is fond of setting off on pilgrimages, and he takes another to the Indian holy city of Varanasi in one of the many exuberant essays found in THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING 2012 (Mariner/ Houghton Mifflin, paper, $14.95), edited by William T. Vollmann. Wandering along the ghats, the steps by the Ganges where Hindus cremate their dead, Iyer discovers not a "Shangri-La of calm, but a place where purity and filth, anarchy and ritual, unquenchable vitality and the constant imminence of death all flow together." As he has demonstrated in books like "Video Night in Kathmandu," Iyer is drawn to such crossroads of the world, places where religious acolytes, backpackers and various footloose types make dizzying connections. "He looked back at me and casually nodded," Iyer writes, describing an encounter with a white-haired gnome at Asi Ghat, "and I realized that it was a German singer of Sufi ghazals whom I had last seen in the Tiergarten in Berlin, talking of Ethiopia and Mali." Luke Dittrich makes a more somber but no less vivid journey in an essay called "Walking the Border." Traveling on foot from the coast of California to Ajo, Ariz., he wheels a baby carriage filled with food and water across desert tracks and camps in gulches frequented by drug mules and illegal immigrants. "I go and gather up everything I think I might be able to use as a weapon, including the pepper spray, a knife and some hiking poles," he writes of one sleepless night in his tent. "Lying there in the dark, watching vague shadows on the polyester, it feels like a world of unknowns is outside pressing in." A different kind of creepiness infuses "The Reckoning," by Kenan Trebincevic, a Muslim refugee who returns to his former apartment in Bosnia for the first time since the Balkan War. There he confronts a neighbor who stole from his mother just before the family was driven out by Serb thugs: "As she approached our floor, her footsteps became halting, her breathing heavy. She fumbled for her key. Her eyes didn't meet mine. 'No one has forgotten,' I said. She put her head down." In the winter of 1922, Agatha Christie, then a promising young novelist, joined her husband, Archie, on a trip around the world as part of a marketing campaign for an international trade fair. THE GRAND TOUR (Harper/HarperCollins, $29.99), edited by Christie's grandson, Mathew Prichard, documents that 10-month boondoggle with newspaper clippings, Christie's photos and letters she sent home to her mother in England. This scrapbook provides an intermittently fascinating look at the British Empire in its twilight, and Christie's characterizations of her companions often sparkle with humor. The junket's leader, a retired army officer, was "rude, overbearing, bullying, inconsiderate and mean in curiously small matters," she writes, describing how he would dispatch her at every stop to buy him "white cotton socks or other necessities of underwear" and never reimburse her. When angry, "he began to swell up slowly and go red in the face like a turkey cock. . . . When he was in a good humor, he told lion stories, of which he had a large stock." But the traveling party's itinerary - luncheons with local officials and tours of coal mines, power stations, farms and factories - soon grows dreary. And Christie displays a stunning lack of curiosity about the world beyond her colonial bubble. (She spends two months in South Africa and Rhodesia without a single recorded comment about race relations.) But the tour winds to a lively close with the Christies breaking away for a private vacation in Hawaii, where they enjoy the surf and unwittingly roast in the tropical sun. "We have tried all remedies - anointing ourselves with coconut oil, whitening, peroxide cream etc.," she writes of their agonies. "Finally A. has taken to bathing in pajamas, to the intense amusement of the natives who roll about in ecstasies of mirth." 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 2, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
Klein (Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar, 2008, among others) returned to the Greek island of Hydra at age 73. His return had a new and specific purpose: I want to figure out the most satisfying way to live this stage of my life. Prior experience with the island led to conclude that the old folks of Hydra have always struck me as uncommonly content with their stage in life. But just observing and absorbing what the people had to show and tell him didn't seem like quite enough. To augment his on-site learning, he took with him a stack of philosophy books by ancient Greeks as well as some modern writers. It's an interesting formula, resulting in a lovely little book with both heart and punch, an argument against the forever young syndrome so prevalent in contemporary American society. His contemplative time spent observing the old men of Hydra while reading his small library of the great thinkers led him to an evolving philosophy of a good and authentic old age. --Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Following a trip to his dentist, 73-year-old Klein considers his options after being advised that he needs tooth implants or a denture. Klein (Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar) opts for a sojourn to the Greek island of Hydra. Accompanied by a suitcase crammed with philosophy books, Klein contemplates the Greek philosopher Epicurus' pivotal question. "He fundamentally wanted to know how to make the most of his one life," writes Klein. Eschewing the "forever young" treadmill many American's embrace, Klein explores a different path, examining the relaxed Greek lifestyle surrounding him. He laments what's lost in the frantic rush to stay youthful: "And we have no time left for a calm and reflective appreciation of our twilight years, no deliciously long afternoons sitting with friends or listening to music or musing about the story of our lives." The author ruminates on the benefits of freeing ourselves from the prison of everyday affairs; the pleasures of companionship in old age; battling boredom; the difference between sexual urges and sexual nostalgia; and the value of facing death blissfully. Along the way, Klein touches on the ideas of Bertrand Russell, Erik Erikson, Aristotle, and William James. Klein's narrative is a delightful and spirited conversation, offering up the ingredients inherent to the art of living well in old age. Agent: Julia Lord. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A late-in-life reflection and modern-day philosophical exploration of what it means to age authentically. Septuagenarian Klein (co-author: Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates, 2009) is on a personal quest to redeem the grizzled and gray-haired among us. Returning to the Greek island of Hydra, which he visited in his youth, he sought to watch and learn from a culture that, he writes, best embodies the grace of old age. Over leisurely glasses of retsina at the local tavern, he observed the "lived time" of his aged, Greek friends and lamented the contemporary Western desire to extend the prime of life beyond its course. What do we lose, he asks, when we deny our hard-earned senior citizenship and opt instead for implants, Viagra and a second career? With the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus as his guide, Klein navigates a veritable sea of great thinkers and their treatises on aging. From Aristotle to Frank Sinatra, each philosopher offers a different take on what it means to live a meaningful life in one's later years. For Epicureans, it's a life devoted to simple, enduring pleasures and free of pain, particularly the pain we incur on ourselves by pursuing certain pleasures. As it turns out, there are no specific rules to living life well or to making peace with old age, but Klein suggests that perhaps the act of asking can be "some kind of end in itself." Some readers, especially younger readers, will reply in the affirmative when Klein wonders aloud if he is simply "a befuddled old geezer barking at the moon." Others will appreciate the slow, lighthearted amble of his discourse and the wise cast of characters that inhabit his journey. Charming and accessible, this philosophical survey simply and accessibly makes academic philosophy relevant to ordinary human emotion.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
