Customer Reviews

The Best American Travel Writing 2005 (The Best American Series)

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This year's editor Jamaica Kincaid has done an excellent job of choosing essays that, more than chronicle exotic journeys, speak about the perplexities of the human condition as her selections are often scabrous, sardonic, and emphasize the dangers and follies that roil beneath the surface of a travel itinerary. Here are some highlights:

1. "War Wounds" by Tom Bissell. A son and father, a Vietnam vet, travel through the father's war trajectory forty years later as Bissell explores what it means to be the son of a "war wounded" father.

2. "My Florida" by William E. Blundell. Famous for his book The Art of Feature Writing, Blundell has written my favorite essay in the collection. This is a gem of style, pungent, sarcastic, and wise. Blundell describes Florida as a place of grotesque indulgence for those geriatrics who decided to retire into a life of philistinism, tackiness, and decadence. A hilarious essay that would make Mark Twain proud.

3. "A Really Big Lunch" by Jim Harrison. Novelist Jim Harrison proves to also be a rather unapologetic gourmand who describes with hilarity his glutton quests with fellow sensualists. Almost as funny as "My Florida."

4. "My Kindergarten" by Peter Hessler. Set in rural China, this is a sad but inspiring essay about a peasant family struggling to overcome a mentally-handicapped family member and a child with a near deadly blood disease. Hessler shows how peasants, held in contempt, and urban citizens, given proper medical care, are treated differently by the government.

5. "My Thai Girlfriends" by Tom Ireland. An American living in Thailand, Ireland can't convince anyone that he is not a tomcat American embarking on a salacious quest in spite of his demure lifestyle.

6. "If It Doesn't Kill You First" by Murad Kalam. A recent convert to Islam and novelist, Kalam chronicles his pilgrimage to Mecca and shows his struggle to navigate through excruciating ritual, fanatics, and Muslims who, like him, are sincere but scared living in a post 9/11 world.

7. "Into the Land of Bin Laden" by Robert Young Pelton. The author shows how difficult it is to track Bin Laden in the no-man's land region of Taliban sympathizers and tribalists who afford great loyalty to the el Qaeda leader. He goes deep in the mountains of the Pakistan border and risks his life to tell his tale.

I'm sorry. I haven't even completed the book. And,in fact, I may not complete it. There's too much to read to subject myself to such negativity. So, the search for stories for this book was for "rare pieces that weren't 'aggressively positive'; or that 'underline my sense of my displacement.'
Give me a break!
This is travel writing! "A Walk in the Woods" still stands out as my all-time favorite piece of travel writing. Please don't misunderstand - I read copious amounts of non-fiction, and sadly, the majority of that writing isn't positive - it's more investigative, historical material or the author has an ax to grind - as in Al Franken's latest book.
But, what's wrong with picking up something to read that will provide a sense of joy or enlighenment? I don't care to read about how brutal Haiti's existence has been - I get quite enough of reality thru the Jim Lehrer Newshour.
Don't waste your money if you're hoping for something light - that's for sure.

Travel has become so much easier that it has made travel writing harder. Travel writers used to feed the imagination by tales of exotic places the reader could only dream of seeing, reached after long and arduous journeys. Simon Winchester's piece about Ascension Island and Ben Ryder Howe on the Darien Gap are the closest to being in that old-fashioned genre in this book. These days we can jet to Timbuctu or Samarkand and stay at the Holiday Inn.
To make up for the lack of difficulty getting there, some places are so dangerous that accounts of them provide vicarious excitement. Madison Smart Bell in Haiti and Robert Young Felton on the NorthWest Frontier are in this category. A lesser degree of this is to make the destination sound so unpleasant that we feel good not being there. Seth Stevenson does this brilliantly about India. He should negotiate with the Indian Tourist Board to get bribed to keep quiet. Others to make you happy you stayed home are Peter Hessler (helping a sick child in China) and Murad Kalam on the Haj.
Another gimmick is to stretch the definition of "travel writing". William Blundell, Ian Frazier, William Least Heat Moon, Pam Houston and John McPhee do not leave the United States. Bucky McMahon doesn't get anywhere. Frazier describes a trip from Montclair, New Jersey to Weehawken, New Jersey. No doubt this will intrigue Montclair residents who want to know what Weehawken is like. McPhee is wonderful at explaining complicated technology, and that's what he mostly does in his long piece about barges in the Mid-West. I always find reading McPhee rather hard work.

This was a very interesting collection that once again made me tip my hat to the "Best American" series that Houghton Mifflin puts out. The pieces were almost all worth reading, and they ranged all over the world. There were articles that take place in Haiti, Vietnam, Florida, the West African coast, New Jersey, the Great Lakes, China, the Grand Canyon, Thailand, Panama, Saudi Arabia, the middle of the ocean, Afghanistan, the Scottish Highlands, and Tijuana. There were big names like Simon Winchester, William Vollmann, John McPhee, Thomas Kenneally, Pam Houston, Jim Harrison, and Madison Smartt Bell.

Most of the pieces were were not intended for guidebooks, and deal with serious issues. One dealt with the world's dead and dying languages. Another discussed a few days spent with an American military intelligence man in the Middle East - I learned more from that one about what really goes on in those places than I have from hundreds of other news stories. Wacky and incredibly persistent William Vollmann goes on a quest to discover the hidden tunnels that Chinese immigrants supposedly used in Tijuana. William L. Heat-Moon goes on a quest to find some ciscos, once a popular fish for people's tables. Simon Winchester unintentionally spends some time in the tiny British territory of Asuncion Island, essentially a big dormant volcano sticking out of the sea. Murad Kalam describes a pilgrimmage to Mecca, and the chaos and suffering that he encounters there. J. Michael Fay describes efforts by environmentalists to protect the African coast and its creatures from exploitation. In a piece that I have read before, noted gourmand Jim Harrison describes a fantastic 37 course lunch, all based on ancient recipes, that he experienced at a French chateau. Ben Ryder Howe wanders around the wild, dangerous area between Panama and Colombia. Closer to home, Tom Bissell relates a trip he took to Vietnam with his macho, war veteran father; and William Blundell takes on Florida and his father's retirement years there.

Most of it was fascinating and wonderfully written - travel journalism at its best.