Sara Wheeler’s memoir of her life on the road begins with Dervla Murphy flashing her tits. The legendary Irish writer meets a guy in Cameroon who asks, ‘Are you a man or a woman?’ “In response,” Wheeler writes, “Murphy lifts up her jumper to show her tits.” That sets the tone for a thoroughly enjoyable journey from Wheeler’s working class Bristol childhood to a year in Athens in her twenties...
Do you have a book addiction? I’m here to make it worse. It’s that time of year when I tempt you to obliterate what remains of your savings on an out-of -control book buying bender. What can I say? It could be worse. At least you’re not spending it on commemorative spoons. I’ve got some great reads to recommend this year. As usual, I read and re-read a lot of great travel literature to prepare...
Along the Amber Route by C.J. Schüler Along the Amber Route traces C.J. Schüler’s journey down one of Europe’s great long distance trading routes. Like other ancient trade routes, this one had several branches running for some 2,500km from St. Petersburg on the edge of the Baltic Sea to the great trading city-state of Venice on the Adriatic. The existence of the Amber Route predates...
One People by Guy Kennaway Cousins Cove is a real village, but the stories in Guy Kennaway’s comic novel are fiction, gathered during his first ten years as an idle British expat in Jamaica. “If you travel to the parishes of St James, Hanover and Westmoreland,” he writes, “you will not find the characters in these pages, but will find their joy, friendliness, strength and defiance in the people...
Geography limits us and defines our possibilities in fundamental ways. A nation’s physical location — at a vital choke point, like the outlet of the Red Sea; commanding the waves on Europe’s northwest fringe; at the vulnerable end of the wide open North European Plain — does much to dictate its strengths and fears. As does its store of resources, and its location in relation to...
I read a collection of long pieces written by Joan Didion in the 1990s called Political Fictions this week. It contained “the first of a number of pieces I eventually did about American politics,” she wrote in the Preface, “most of which had to do, I came to realize, with the ways in which the political process did not reflect but increasingly proceeded from a series of fables about American...
“If Greek civilization explored the universe with geometry, the Maya did so with arithmetic and time.” This insight comes early in Ronald Wright’s Time Among the Maya, and it sets the stage for his journey through Belize , Guatemala, Chiapas and the Yucatán. Like the Mayan calendar, the narrative ranges through vast spans of time, from distant prehistoric beginnings to the heyday of powerful city...
Do you have a book addiction? Well I’m here to make it worse. I love a good reading list like a hobo loves Aqua Velva. As the year comes to a close, and as dark Berlin huddles beneath a pandemic sky, I’d like to take a moment to share my top reads from the past twelve months. Each book made my list because it was memorable, important, or just thoroughly enjoyable. And each is worth your time. I...
This new book by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay is essential reading for anyone struggling to make sense of the self-contradictory ‘woke’ ideology that’s spread divisive cancel culture like a mind virus through our workplaces, public policy and social lives. The authors have done an admirable job of tracing the development of these ideas, from the early insights of postmodern...
Kapka Kassabova is taking us back to the Balkans. I’ve been looking forward to something new from this wonderful writer since Border, which was my top travel read of 2018. That earlier book touched on the author’s childhood in Bulgaria, and To The Lake takes us deeper as she journeys to her grandmother’s place of origin in the mountainous Macedonian lake district. The region was once an important...