Articles of Section 'Travel Books'.

Travel Books
Time's Magpie: A Walk in Prague
By Joe Wiebe
Prague's transition In the early 1990s, young North Americans flocked to Prague for the authentic Bohemian lifestyle-the chance to live on the cheap in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Since then, however, rampant westernization has replaced most of the romance.
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Travel Books
Glory in a Camel's Eye: A Perilous Trek Through the Greatest African Desert
By George Fetherling
Jeffrey Tayler's Glory in a Camel's Eye: A Perilous Trek Through the Greatest African Desert (Houghton Mifflin) tells how he became intrigued by the romance of Islam's rich cultural past in general, and by the Bedouin and the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula in particular.
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Travel Books
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
By George Fetherling
Many are touting Suketu Mehta's Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (Knopf Canada, $39.95) as a potential classic. Mehta spent his early childhood in Bombay but left at 14 for the U.S., where he's now a much-decorated journalist and writer of short fiction. Returning 21 years later (to "Mumbai"--he sees the name change as a purely political ploy and so refuses to play along), he finds himself in the place he's no longer of. This at times slightly surreal situation calls to mind V. S.
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Travel Books
Winchester Seeks Calcutta's Core
By George Fetherling
Simon Winchester's book about Calcutta is actually titled Simon Winchester's Calcutta ($20.95), such is Winchester's reputation as a travel writer and historian of the bizarre. This is an anthology of excerpts, part of a new Lonely Planet series set up to compete with the popular Travelers' Tales one (to which Winchester also contributes). The pieces chosen are mostly by names you would expect to see: Rudyard Kipling, Paul Theroux, V. S.
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Travel Books
Canada By Thumb
By Joe Wiebe and Ivan Coyote
On first sight, the 400-page The Canada Chronicles (Summit Studios, $50) seemed like one of the last things I would want to lug around if I were ever to hitchhike across this country.
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Travel Books
Canada By Thumb
By Joe Wiebe and Ivan Coyote
On first sight, the 400-page The Canada Chronicles (Summit Studios, $50) seemed like one of the last things I would want to lug around if I were ever to hitchhike across this country.
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Travel Books
Heavy Books Can Enlighten Travellers
By Joe Wiebe and Ivan Coyote
Don't consider packing Lonely Planet's The Travel Book ($56.95) on your next trip--it's better suited for a coffee table than a backpack. Subtitled A Journey Through Every Country in the World, this is the perfect Christmas present for world-traveller wannabes.
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Travel Books
Heavy Books Can Enlighten Travellers
By Joe Wiebe and Ivan Coyote
Don't consider packing Lonely Planet's The Travel Book ($56.95) on your next trip--it's better suited for a coffee table than a backpack. Subtitled A Journey Through Every Country in the World, this is the perfect Christmas present for world-traveller wannabes.
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Travel Books
After the Gold Rush
By Joe Wiebe and George Fetherling
Since the centenary of the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-'99, books continue to appear, recounting the experiences of people trying to re-create the incredible journey made by 100,000 or so stampeders. In River Time: Racing the Ghosts of the Klondike Gold Rush (NeWest Press, $29.95), John Firth, a prominent figure in Whitehorse, made the trip with his nephews, following the path of his own grandfather.
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Travel Books
After the Gold Rush
By Joe Wiebe and George Fetherling
Since the centenary of the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-'99, books continue to appear, recounting the experiences of people trying to re-create the incredible journey made by 100,000 or so stampeders. In River Time: Racing the Ghosts of the Klondike Gold Rush (NeWest Press, $29.95), John Firth, a prominent figure in Whitehorse, made the trip with his nephews, following the path of his own grandfather.
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Travel Books
Russian Odyssey tests Mettle and Friendship
By Joe Wiebe and George Fetherling
Australians, generally speaking, are some of the world's most prolific travellers. One of the craziest travel adventures hatched from Down Under can be found in Off the Rails (Penguin Australia, $24), in which Tim Cope and Chris Hatherly describe their experiences cycling 10,000 kilometres across Russia, Mongolia, and China.
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Travel Books
Russian Odyssey tests Mettle and Friendship
By Joe Wiebe and George Fetherling
Australians, generally speaking, are some of the world's most prolific travellers. One of the craziest travel adventures hatched from Down Under can be found in Off the Rails (Penguin Australia, $24), in which Tim Cope and Chris Hatherly describe their experiences cycling 10,000 kilometres across Russia, Mongolia, and China.
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Travel Books
Running With Reindeer: Encounters in Russian Lapland
By Joe Wiebe and George Fetherling
Roger Took's Running With Reindeer: Encounters in Russian Lapland (McArthur & Co., $18.95) is of interest because few of us have ever read a book on this subject. The same might be said of The Fellowship of Ghosts: A Journey Through the Mountains of Norway, by Paul Watkins (Simon & Schuster Canada, $36).
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Travel Books
Running With Reindeer: Encounters in Russian Lapland
By Joe Wiebe and George Fetherling
Roger Took's Running With Reindeer: Encounters in Russian Lapland (McArthur & Co., $18.95) is of interest because few of us have ever read a book on this subject. The same might be said of The Fellowship of Ghosts: A Journey Through the Mountains of Norway, by Paul Watkins (Simon & Schuster Canada, $36).
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Travel Books
Pilgrimages Provide Fodder For Travel Tales
By George Fetherling
The past few years a number of writers, including theologians as important as Shirley MacLaine, have published books about pilgrimages to such places as Santiago de Compostela in Spain or Canterbury in England. A serious example, not at all MacLaine-like, is Kerry Egan's Fumbling: A Pilgrimage Tale of Love, Grief, and Spiritual Renewal on the Camino de Santiago (Doubleday Canada, $32.95), but it's the exception.
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Travel Books
Savvy Guides Showcase City That Never Sleeps
By Julie Ovenell-Carter
A guide to New York City is only ever useful in the way that a guide to pregnancy is useful: it allows the comforting illusion that you might actually be able to control the experience.
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Travel Books
Prof Reads Into Writers' Homes and Offices
By John Mitchell and George Fetherling
Most people who write travel books about famous authors' homes believe, mistakenly, that authors are celebrities. Or, at the very least, they value writers' life stories more than their works. Art Seamans is different, and that's what's special about The Dead One Touched Me From the Past: A Walk With Writers Through the Centuries (Breakwater Books, $18.95).
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Travel Books
Prof Reads Into Writers' Homes and Offices
By John Mitchell and George Fetherling
Most people who write travel books about famous authors' homes believe, mistakenly, that authors are celebrities. Or, at the very least, they value writers' life stories more than their works. Art Seamans is different, and that's what's special about The Dead One Touched Me From the Past: A Walk With Writers Through the Centuries (Breakwater Books, $18.95).
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Travel Books
Writers Flee B.C. Winter, Embrace A World Of Grief
By Heather Neale
Retirement in Fort St. James doesn't really have a ring to it. There is nothing relaxing, after all, about being housebound due to weather day after day as you endure television reruns and the odd power outage, "when once again a loaded logging truck slides into the power pole at the corner of Loop Road in Vanderhoof...and plunges [you] into hours of chilly darkness." No, Northern B.C. winters aren't exactly Club Med.
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Travel Books
"Centaur Station" Disappoints With Aimless Ride
By Peter Neville-Hadley
Grand Centaur Station by Larry Frolick (McClelland & Stewart Ltd., $26.99) is a combination mystery and travel book Its subtitle is Unruly Living With the New Nomads of Central Asia, but as common sense should have told Frolick, and as he discovers, there are no such people. The mystery is "What is this book actually about?"
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Travel Books
Luxe Lets Travellers Put Asia in Their Pockets
By Peter Neville-Hadley
Finally, someone has produced a series of pocket guides that actually fit in the pocket. Luxe City Guides, concertinas of stiff card currently covering Hong Kong, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore, Bangkok, and Bali, collapse to a mere 7.5 by 15 centimetres. They're designed to be worn in the shirt pocket, logo outward, to show you're not one of the herd.
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Travel Books
Search for gold beats getting lost in Mongolia
By George Fetherling
Northern Brazil in the early 1980s experienced a gold rush that looked like something from the 19th century. Anyone following the news in those days will remember photographs of Serra Pelada, a high mountain that 40,000 prospectors turned into a deep hole, using hand tools and carrying the gold-bearing muck to the top in wet canvas sacks on their backs. In the 1990s, Marc Herman, a San Francisco journalist, found similar scenes still going on across the border in Guyana.
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Travel Books
Books Take Traveller to Lost Places, Times
By Daniel Wood
There is something about going somewhere that no longer exists that appeals to Roger Gale. That's why, for much of his adult life, he cruised the world's antiquarian bookstores, buying, say, accounts of 19th-century Ceylon, old maps of London, a 17th-century mariners' guide to Africa, and archaic travel books describing Timbuktu or Tibet or Tierra del Fuego. Once at home, he'd read his new acquisitions and study their illustrations, and instantly be transported into the past.
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Travel Books
Caribbean Cruise
By Alexander Varty
Ann Vanderhoof seems an unlikely adventurer. She has no stomach for choppy seas and is so phobic of dirt that she strides into each new town brandishing a pack of antibacterial Handi Wipes. She loves comfort, hates mess, craves routine, and fears cockroaches.
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Travel Books
Boat-building story turns out to be a corker
By Alexander Varty
John Pollack knows how to tell a tale, as might be expected of a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton and the 1995 winner of the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships. Cork Boat (Pantheon, $32) is a story that involves overcoming obstacles, hanging on to one's childhood, and finding a place for whimsy in our stressed-out world. It's about building a boat out of 165,321 recycled wine corks, and about dreams, and about friendship.
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Articles of Section 'Travel Books'.

Best of Vancouver 2007