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Reviews

How to Make Sense of Your Life’s Turning Points

H

I was searching for insights into this 40’s decade that I’ve somehow slipped into… I wanted to know more about the challenges ahead. Where I should focus my efforts. And why I now have this sudden very clear sense that the clock is ticking and my time is running out. My search led me to a classic book about the major crisis points we all face in our lives: I wanted advice for the...

A Week of Expedition Skills in the Lake District

A

It’s been a little while since I posted a new blog. I’ve spent all of 1 week at home in the past 5 weeks, and I’ve got a lot of travels to fill you in on. Let’s start by talking about the Expedition Skills course I attended last week in England’s Lake District. If you’re planning a journey beyond the farthest fringes of the map, then you really should have this stuff in your toolkit. I first...

The Lantern

T

We haven’t talked books in a while, but I’ve got a great one for you this week. It’s the best novel I’ve read in recent months. The Lantern by Deborah Lawrenson is set in a mysterious old farmhouse in Provence, France. And that location permeates every page, the way the sun soaks through the olive leaves and lavender fields of the south. Rather than try to sum up the book, I’ve copied and pasted...

What’s On Your Travel Playlist?

W

Music is essential for any trip. It entrances us on long journeys by bus or rail, occupying the conscious mind and allowing insight to float up from the depths. You listen to those same songs over and over, and they soak up the landscape, the smells and the very feeling of the place. They colour the way you see it just like different shades of glass colour a sunny day. Here’s what’s on my travel...

The Riverbones

T

It’s been a while since I reviewed a recent travel book. This one stood out among the books I read last month. The Riverbones by Andrew Westoll Andrew Westoll spent a year as a primatologist chasing monkeys through the jungles of the Central Suriname Nature Reserve. He returned five years later as a writer obsessed with finding the secret soul of this poorly understood country. Few...

Headed West on the China Clipper…

H

I read a fascinating book last week called Pan American Clippers: The Golden Age of Flying Boats by James Trautman. It’s about a forgotten age of air travel, when men were men, adventure was waiting around every corner, and the world was a much larger place. It was the decade before World War 2, the early days of aviation. Air travel was still a luxury within reach of a select few. Crowds...

Mean and Lowly Things

M

A lone mud-spattered researcher in torn khaki pants and sweat-stained sleeveless t-shirt kneels in the dirt in front of a makeshift shelter, carefully injecting formalin into a toad to halt the onset of decay. Tiny sweat bees cloud around her head, crawling into her nose and ears and getting into the corners of her eyes. She’s so concentrated on her work that she barely notices them...

The Saddest Pleasure

T

Born in 1915 to great wealth in Seattle, Moritz Thomsen died miserably poor in the tropics, of cholera, in 1991. He served as a bombardier in WWII, farmed in California, and at age 44 gave it all up to join the recently-formed Peace Corps. His book about that experience, Living Poor, is ranked as one of the best Peace Corps memoirs ever written. When his service was over, he chose to remain. He...

Quiet for a Tuesday

Q

You’re alone in the middle of Algeria. Your entire library of irreplaceable and out of print topographical maps has been confiscated by the military, and they suspect you of being a spy. It’s all just a bizarre misunderstanding of course, but they’re talking about deporting you. If they do, you’ll probably never get another visa to the country. This may be your one and...

In Europe

I

In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century In 1999, as the 20th century came to a close, beloved Dutch journalist Geert Mak crisscrossed Europe to retrace the history of its last hundred years and to take the pulse of the great European experiment on the cusp of a new century. Along the way he spoke to the survivors of some of the most significant events of our times, allowing them to tell...

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