Review by New York Times Review
what do you need to know about the places you're going? A dozen new books answer this question in strikingly idiosyncratic ways, wreathing their authors' wanderings in vivid back story - sometimes emotional, sometimes empirical, sometimes imperial - enveloping the reader in a kind of legible Sensurround. These books ought to come with 3-D glasses and a soundtrack. Five years ago, the Manhattanites Erik and Emily Orton, beleaguered but buoyant parents of five children between the ages of 6 and 16, hadn't even plotted an itinerary when they bought a 38-foot catamaran (sight unseen), flew to a Caribbean harbor and set sail on a Swiss-FamilyRobinson-style adventure. "Based on our best budgeting," Erik calculated, "we'd saved enough money to sail for a year. After that we'd be broke." Like her husband, Emily wanted to "pursue a dream so big there was room for my whole family" before their eldest left for college. Their time on the boat would be that dream. Where would they go? They didn't know, but their shipboard byword became, "It Will emerge." In SEVEN AT SEA: Why a New York City Family Cast Off Convention for a Life-Changing Year on a Sailboat (Shadow Mountain, $27.99), husband and wife take turns narrating the story of their voyage, chronicling the crests and troughs of their seaborne experience. Five months in, anchored in Virgin Gorda Sound, they woke to "the blue and green water rolling past, the sun coming up in the east, the trade-wind breeze cooling the morning, the flag flapping." Where would they go next? Anegada? Tortola? Puerto Rico? It would emerge. In THE SALT PATH (Penguin, paper, $17), Raynor Winn and her husband embark on another kind of sea-hugging journey. Theirs will not be on water but alongside it, walking England's rugged South West Coast Path, 630 miles from Somerset to Dorset, battered by rains, blasted by the sun, and shielded from the elements only by a thin tent. Their guide? A 30-year-old book called "Five Hundred Mile Walkies," written by a man named Mark Wallington, who'd undertaken the saunter with his dog. Unlike Wallington, they made this trip not because they wanted to but because they saw no other option. In middle age, they had become homeless as if by thunderclap: In the space of two days, they lost the farmhouse that had provided both their home and their livelihood and learned that Winn's husband had a terminal illness. Not wanting to be a burden on their children or to move into a "soul-destroying" council house, they headed for the path and closed the door behind them. Along the way, passers-by in coastal villages mistook them for drunken tramps and even the birds seemed to jeer at them: "Herring gulls calling daylight calls, tossed up by the air currents, mocked our slow progress." Winn possessed only one assurance: "If I put one foot in front of the other the path would move me forward." Her language makes their arduous trek luminous with the mingled menace and providence of a Hirner painting. "I'm a farmer and a farmer's daughter; the land's in my bones," Winn writes. "I'm cut free from that connection, from the meter of my existence, floating lost and unrooted. But I can still feel it_All material things were slipping away, but in their wake a core of strength was beginning to re-form." During the Raynors' long ramble, British dogs frequently burst through the gorse at awkward moments. But for the doughty park ranger Kristin Knight Pace, dogs are no mere detail; they stand, howling zestfully, in the foreground of her explorations of the Yukon wilderness. In 2016, at the age of 32, she mushed a dog team through the Iditarod, from Anchorage to Nome. This was a remarkable feat for a woman who had arrived in Alaska in tears only seven years earlier, fleeing the breakup of her marriage in Montana by taking a sled-dog-sitting gig in a small mining village near Denali National Park. Her memoir, this much country (Grand Central, $27), retraces her experiences in Alaska, where she remains today, working for the National Park Service and running a kennel with her new husband, whom she met when he helped dig her S.U.V. out of a snowbank the day after her divorce papers landed. By then, her heartbreak had just begun to heal, helped along by a forceful nudge from the dogs. The week before, on a day that reached minus 15 degrees ("a perfect temperature for mushing"), she had hitched the team to a sled unassisted for the first time. The animals "went berserk" with joy when she brought out their harnesses. No sooner had she pulled the quick-release knot than the sled hurtled forward, the dogs yanking her "violently forward into the unknown"; memories of her ex-husband fell off the sled as the team surged ahead, "the sun sinking low in the early afternoon, casting a brilliant orange glow on a frozen lake, silhouetting my dog team as Denali's slopes rise indomitable and massive in the great blue distance." Awe at the wonders of nature revives her confidence: "I have no past, no history. I am this very moment, I am excitement, I am intuition, I am love between a woman and her dogs. I am pure and undiluted. I am the world that surrounds me." Intuition and dogs can also help you get a bead on present-day Russia; Bulgakov's short novel "Heart of a Dog," a satire of Bolshevik officialese, still resonates today. Far more useful, however, is to read in PUTIN'S footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia's Eleven Time Zones (St. Martin's, $28.99), Nina Khrushcheva and Jeffrey Tayler's fascinating account of their travels in 2017 between Kamchatka and Kaliningrad. In its pages, you'll learn that you can see China quite clearly from Russia in the harbor city of Blagoveshchensk, six time zones east of Moscow and 500 yards across the Amur River from the Chinese city of Heihe. Ferries transport Chinese and Russian traders back and forth daily. Khrushcheva made that shuttle trip and does not recommend it - the pushing and shoving and rude border control brought her to tears. Khrushcheva (a granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev), who teaches at the New School (as do I, though we've never met), collaborated with Tayler, an American journalist who lives in Moscow and is married to a Russian, to write this book. They were inspired by a suggestion Vladimir Putin floated during the first year of his presidency: that he should fly across the Russian Federation one New Year's Eve, making pit stops at midnight local time in all 11 time zones to "show our nation's greatness, our riches, the diversity of our Mother Russia, our unity, our worth." The authors sample that diversity and report back. Exploring dozens of points along the 6,000-mile-long Trans-Siberian Railway and beyond, they find contemporary evidence of a revival of national pride, not unmixed with habitual Slavic cynicism and resignation. As one contemporary joke they cite goes, "Before you make fun of children who believe in Santa Claus, please remember that there are people who believe that the president and the government take care of them." The double-headed eagle, a czarist symbol suppressed during Soviet times, now replaces the Communist red star in many city squares, along with cult-of-personality-style portraits of Putin. The triumphant cry "Crimea is ours!," referring to Putin's 2014 annexation of Crimea, met the authors in many places, reflecting, they thought, "feelings of insecurity and superiority all at once." Their book delivers a unified impression of a "coherently incoherent" Russia. They bring fresh eyes to cities that usually get too little attention and share fascinating revelations. Who knew that the city of Yakutsk held the world's only woolly mammoth museum, or that its icy river Lena inspired the young Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov to mint his nom de revolution, Lenin? They knew. But nobody knows more than the erudite and entertaining Simon Winder. If you could plug your brain into his, you wouldn't need Google. Then again, your head might explode. After entering the literary fray a dozen years ago with a stirring tribute to James Bond, he hopped the Channel and wrote two volumes of Hapsburg and Teutonic social and political history, "Germania" and "Danubia." Winder now crowns his Continental trilogy with LOTHARINGIA: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30), a book that enfolds a geographic sprawl even a framer of the Almanach de Gotha would be at pains to chart. The title, at least, can be explained. In 814, when the great emperor Charlemagne died, he was notionally the ruler of "everywhere between the Pyrenees and Denmark, the mountains of Bohemia and central Italy." As anyone who has watched (or read) "Game of Thrones" can understand: That's a lot of land to hold onto. In 843, Charlemagne's grandsons split the empire into chunks to give them a better chance at keeping it in the family. Charles 11 took the west, which today is basically France. Louis 1 took the eastern chunk, which today is basically Germany. The third brother, Lothair 1, took the middle, from the North Sea to northern Italy. Lothair f's chunk was still a lot to wrangle, so when he died, his sons divided it further; one took north Italy, one took Provence, and Lothair 11 took everything north of Provence, giving rise to the word "Lotharingia." Today Lotharingia, like a Delphic riddle, is nowhere and everywhere. To give a sense of what a notional map of Lotharingia might look like, Winder supplies the metaphor of a dog that has swallowed a jigsaw puzzle, then thrown it up. To those who say, like Forster, "Only connect," this brilliant and maddening book prompts the thought, "Must we?" Nonetheless, it will make you want to visit several hundred places upon which Winder's discerning, lionizing eye alights. The journalist Alev Scott knows all about the intricacies of Cypriot politics. Though she grew up in England, her mother and grandmother were born in the northern half of Cyprus, an island long divided between Türkey and Greece. In ottoman odyssey: Travels Through a Lost Empire (Pegasus, $27.95), Scott tracks the vine of Turkish influence, "architectural, political and social," that laces through the Levant and the Balkans, finding Turkish words "scattered like Ottoman souvenirs" in the speech of the people. She also encounters physical offshoots - "haunted wooden mosques" in Bulgaria; Turkish flags and a whirling dervish lodge in Bosnia-Herzegovina; TUrkish-speaking car mechanics in Kosovo; and in Serbia, a middle-aged Erdogan fanboy who serves her Turkish cay in a tulip glass. "The Ottomans made us," he tells her. In 2016, Scott made a pilgrimage to Thessaloniki (formerly Salonika) in Greek Macedonia to visit the childhood home of Turkey's founding father, Kemal Atatürk. Afterward, trying to book her flight home to Istanbul, she discovered that her Turkish visa had been suspended, a result of her reporting on Erdogan's crackdowns. Feeling the sting of exile, she moved "masochistically" to the Greek island of Lesbos, where she could see the Turkish coast from the distance. From there, she flew to Lamaca, in Greek Cyprus, and managed to cross the border into Turkish Cyprus. She met Greek holdouts who spoke Turkish; TUrks who spoke Greek. They shared a culture and a landscape, but were powerless to change their borders. "What is 'homeland' - a place or an idea?" Scott asks. "The more 1 traveled, the more powerful and yet obscure 1 found the emotional connection between geography and identity." The power of the connection a person feels with a place can have nothing at all to do with bloodline or citizenship, fn VOLCANOES, PALM TREES, AND PRIVILEGE: Essays on Hawai'i (Overcup, paper, $15.95), Liz Prato, an Oregonian, racks her conscience over the strong attachment she feels to balmy Hawaii. Most visiting American mainlanders throw aside worries about political correctness, seeking only to bask in the sun and surf the indigo sea, accompanied by the plinking of ukuleles. Not Prato. Such uncomplicated pleasureseeking makes her nervous. She first visited the archipelago at 12, soon before her parents' divorce. Scott's father took her and her brother back to Maui countless times; after her parents and her brother died, Hawaii became her refuge. She dreamed of living there, but was afraid of being seen as an interloper. Her book is a rebuke to cultural appropriation, combined with tribute to a place she loves too much to make her own. Italy's isle of Capri owes its cultural heritage to the famous and infamous outsiders who claimed it for their own: emperors and painters, writers and revolutionaries, prodigies and prodigals. Jamie James's splendid history, pagan LIGHT (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28), presents a pageant of these decadent invaders and illustrious exiles: from the Emperor Tiberius to Oscar Wilde and Pablo Neruda. If you read James's book, you will know that you should do more than sail through the narrow entrance of the Blue Grotto: You must hunt down the former Villa Behring, near Capri's main square, where Gorky and Lenin played chess, and seek out the homes of the lesser-known figures of Capri's past, whose rich stories are the true focus of this marvel of nuanced, connected biography. Frances Mayes learned long ago that Italy was her second true home. Indeed, she has lived longer in her villa in Cortona (the subject of her 1996 memoir "Under the Tuscan Sun") than anywhere else, fn see you in the piazza (Crown, $27), she invites ftalophile readers to accompany her and her husband on their visits to out-of-the-way spots. Reading this book is a vacation in itself; it proceeds geographically, not chronologically, pausing in nearly 80 towns and villages in 13 regions so readers can single out chapters that harmonize with their own travel plans. But why take a shortcut, with so many unexpected pleasures to discover? How else would you have known to add the Alto-Adige to your itinerary? There, in the alpine Dolomites, Mayes takes a cable car up a mountainside: "Like the birds, we skim through the larch forest." For Beppe Severgnini, a bona fide, passport-carrying Italian, trains are the preferred mode of travel, "rolling theater, where the scenery and actors change constantly." A train "isn't a vehicle: ft's a place," he explains, a place where talkativeness is "inversely proportional to velocity." fn OFF THE RAILS: A Train Trip Through Life (Berkley, $26), Severgnini reverses down the thousands of miles of tracks he has covered, from Baikal to the Bosphorus and across America and Australia, retrieving memories that emerged along the way. He begins in Washington, D.C., where he lived when he was a foreign correspondent for an Italian newspaper. Twenty years on, he returns with his 20-year-old son, intending to pass along his grand passion for Amtrak via a 5,000-mile ride from Washington, D.C., to Washington State. "Look at America out there," Severgnini enthuses. As Papa rhapsodizes, his son communes with his iPhone, listening in "rapt silence. A little too silent," he realizes. "1 lean over: He's asleep." The American writer John von Sothen crushed out on a more universally recognized source of allure, a beautiful Frenchwoman, whom he met in a bistro in Brooklyn at the turn of the millennium. Soon his love for that woman, Anais, launched him across the Atlantic to Paris, where he remains today, monsieur mediocre: One American Learns the High Art of Being Everyday French (Viking, $25) records his love affair with France and with Anais (whom he married), and his continuing, bumbling attempts to carry off la vie Parisienne with something approaching grace - or, at least, skirting calamity. With Anais in Paris, he bought a disused spice warehouse in a dodgy section of the 10 th Arrondissement and converted it into a cavernous New York-style loft. At the housewarming party, von Sothen committed a flight of faux pas, from cutting the Camembert the wrong way to tucking in to dinner before his wife, the hostess, had raised her fork. All these years later, he has made his peace with his Franco-American improvisations: "fn a land not my own, 1 really could choose my own adventure and aliases." Few places are better than France for trying on new identities. The Australian John Baxter moved to Paris almost 30 years ago in pursuit of a Frenchwoman (what is it about Frenchwomen?), whom he married. Since then, he has written a number of books about his new home. He begins his latest tribute, A YEAR IN PARIS: Season by Season in the City of Light (Harper Perennial, paper, $17.99), with a dreamlike, only-in-France civic action. On an August Sunday in 1990, he woke to find the Champs-Élysées covered with a field of wheat. Farmers had "planted" it to remind the government to value those who work the land. The message was implicit: "Defy them, as Louis XVI had done in 1789, and you risked being handed your head." As Baxter shows, France's republican instinct lives on. fn "A Year in Paris," he strings together the beautiful beads of the French everyday, all held together by the invisible act of imagination that makes a country cohere and endure. LlESL schillinger, a critic and translator, is the author of "Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 2, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Winn and her husband, Moth, worked hard to build a rural life in Wales. In a matter of weeks, it all unraveled due to a friend's bad investment advice. Homeless and penniless in midlife, and with their children away at university and unable to offer any support, the couple exercised the only option available: keep moving. With nothing to lose, they set off on a 630-mile hike tracing the coast of southwest England. Complicating matters further, Moth is slowly dying from a Parkinson's-like disease. Funny thing, though: the fresh air and exertion prove beneficial, and only when they take a winter hiatus does Moth fall really ill. As they trek, the author's disillusionment falls away. As though scrubbed clean by the salt air, she and Moth begin to cobble together plans for a new life. Though the two never seem to bicker, Winn quickly dispels romantic notions about the trip, describing pelting rains; cold, sleepless nights; and stomach-grinding hunger when they run out of food (or money). A beautifully written and deeply satisfying read.--Joan Curbow Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Debut author Winn narrates a moving memoir of identities lost and found along England's wind-swept South West Coast Path.Having lost their farm and livelihood through a judicial misstep, and with her husband, Moth, diagnosed with a terminal illness only days before, a comfortable existence was cruelly whisked away. With few options and even less money, the couple determined to walk and camp the entire 630-mile stretch of the path, from Minehead in the north through Poole on the English Channel, not knowing how far a pair of 50-somethings not in the best of shape might reach. Many people's uncharitable reactions to their homeless stateone would think they were lepersdid not help matters, though those attitudes were often balanced by unexpected gestures of generosity. Along the way, their strength faltered and was regained. The unbearable became bearable, and despair gave way to resolve. The path became home and, more, a godsend. "Life is now," writes the author, "this minute. It's all we have. It's all we need." The saga opens with a tinge of melodrama (understandably), and Winn displays a mercurial prose style that takes a while to settle down and achieve simplicity and clarity of observation. The author's descriptive passages show a keen appreciation for coastal ecologies and the enchantment of moments in the wild. If some vignettes strain credulity, readers will quickly forget as they come to genuinely admire the couple's fortitude and resiliency. The book is not without humor or healthy portions of irony and self-doubt. Throughout, readers are immersed in a grueling and transformative adventure.Like the Winns, one feels "salted" by the experience, however vicariously, drawn to the edge in defiance of fate and in search of a new life. They found it as well as a measure of acceptance, and their story is indelibly told. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
