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
Their hopes for a trip to Asia dashed, the author (president of Tourism Vancouver and a frequent traveler) and his friend Peter quickly came up with plan B: Route 66, the legendary and now mostly bypassed highway that spans nearly 2,500 miles from Illinois to California. The result is this lighthearted travelogue Rick and Peter being a sort of road-comedy team but the book also has its bittersweet moments, since to remember Route 66 in its heyday is to remember an America that no longer exists. The book is full of interesting or amazing historical facts (for example, Illinois was the first state to completely pave its portion of Route 66, way back in the Roaring Twenties, because Al Capone needed a good road to transport bootleg liquor). It might be a bit too artsy-fartsy to call the book a road trip into the past, but along the way, Rick and Peter do discover bits of the original Route 66, untouched by the modern world, including a smattering of people who live along the original roadway and who seem to have stepped out of the past. A winning mixture of travelogue and history.--Pitt, David Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An uninspiring grab bag of a journey down the storied highway. Route 66 is crumbling in spots, even gone to grass and dirt across decommissioned stretches along its path. But it lives on, largely because of Bobby Troup's musical anthem, given in incomplete form to Nat King Cole and forged in his hands into a pop hit. The best part of Antonson's (To Timbuktu for a Haircut: A Journey Through West Africa, 2008, etc.) grinding biography is his look at Troup's song; given the importance of Albuquerque, N.M., as a waypoint along the route, he wonders why it isn't celebrated in the song. The author travels the length of the highway, stuffing his narrative with as many anecdotes and oddments as he can cram in, with the result that the book has a tight-as-a-tick bloat to it. Some of them do useful work; Antonson does a good job, for instance, of considering the contributions of documentary photographer Dorothea Lange to the making of the Route 66 image in the American mind. But others are there just to be there, it seems, from the painfully obvious (" Joliet' Jake Blues, a character portrayed in the 1980 Blues Brothers movie by actor John Belushi, drew his nickname from this town") to the painfully overstretched (of Mickey Mantle: "many people stopped caring--not unlike the highway he called home"). A moment of confused dialogue concerning whether the author of the line "Standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona" was Jackson Browne or Savoy Brown is emblematic--the answer is easy to look up, utterly unimportant and well-known to anyone who cares about such things. A snooze. There's no ill intent here, but so important a road deserves a better book.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
