Citizen Reader

You'll never look at shampoo the same way.

If you buy stuff (and we all do), you should read Paul Midler's book Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the Tactics Behind China's Production Game.

Midler lived and worked in China for many years (in the manufacturing city of Guangzhou) as a sort of facilitator for global companies hoping to have their products manufactured, cheaply of course, in China. Speaking the language and understanding the culture a bit more than did many of the executives he helped, who often flew in for just a few days for brief factory tours and meetings, he was perfectly placed to someday write a tell-all from both sides of the story. And so he has.

The book's not perfect. The prose is a bit clunky, and it starts a bit slow. But all in all I'd put it right up there with John Bowe's Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the Global Economy as one of the biggest perspective-changers I've ever read (I also listed it as a best Business Book of 2009--The Economist liked it too so I felt I was in good company). What's surprising is not learning about all the way that Chinese manufacturers cut corners and save costs to help their bottom lines (Midler works extensively with an American soap and shampoo company manufacturing in China; hence, the title of this post) but how they view their business practices, and how, eventually, people who want cheap crap (yeah, that would be everybody) won't always be in the role of being able to dictate what we want and how we want it. I wouldn't say this narrative is frightening, but it's definitely unsettling.

Libraries won't own enough copies of this one to be able to hold a book group about it, but they should. But whether or not anyone would have the heart to discuss it after reading it, I don't know. Either way: take a closer look at all your stuff, think about what you paid for it, and ask yourself if it would still be such a bargain if you'd had to buy it in a three- or four-dollar store, rather than a one-dollar store. There should be interesting days ahead.

Book Menage Travel Edition: It's a go!

Okay! The votes are in, and the two books for our next Menage discussion are going to be:

1. Tony Horwitz's Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going where Captain Cook Has Gone Before;

and

2. Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country.

Thanks to everyone who voted, and I'll be contacting the winner of the two books (drawn from among the participants of the last Menage) a bit later. Why don't we be optimistic and plan to start the discussion on Monday, April 5? Please do invite your friends or consider posting a link to this page on your blogs--the more the merrier!

In other news this morning I'm very excited to have my article about the Best Business Books of 2009 posted at the Library Journal BookSmack! page. (The print article will appear in the March 15 edition of Library Journal.) We had a little more fun with the list this time around--the titles at the end of the article were particularly fun to write up. Please do check it out; it was a rather lively round of business books this year. Of course, most of them were about the continuing financial crisis, and so were depressing as hell, but they were interesting.

Loving Stephen Fry wherever he is.

Normally I don't have a lot of time for travel books written about the United States. But every so often I like to make an exception--particularly so when the author of such a book is British.

Stephen Fry (better known to American audiences for his role as Jeeves in the BBC series Jeeves and Wooster, or for his appearances on Blackadder) set out to set foot in every one of America's fifty states, and to learn a little something about what makes each of them unique. My next research task is to track down the television series he made (on which this book, Stephen Fry in America, is based), but even if I don't find it, I've already enjoyed the book immensely.

Be prepared: although Fry seems quite fond of America and Americans, there are times when he won't pull any punches. For instance, when he spent some time in Oregon camping out with a man who firmly believes in the Sasquatch legend, this is what he had to say: "I have to spend hours camping out with Matt, listening to completely unconvincing stories of Bigfoot sightings, accompanied by weird and inappropriately tearful mentions of his wife and children. His particular blend of aggressive family sentimentality*, macho gun-toting and childish superstition is not something I find it easy to respect or like." (p. 284.)

Now that's a bit churlish. But I love churlish. I think the churl is what lends more weight to Fry's many other kind words about the majority of the states and their residents. And, of course, as Fry said I would in his introduction ("human nature, after all, dictates that you turn straight to the entry in this book that covers your own state..."), I went right for the chapter on Wisconsin and was proud to learn that he thinks that we, in contrast to the rest of the U.S., really get cheese. I'll take that.

It's a fun read, with beautiful pictures. Do check it out.

*I totally love this phrase, as aggression and sentimentality are two of my least favorite personality traits.

What exactly are people loving about this book?

I was completely annoyed by Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea. A little background:

I kind of knew I was going to be annoyed by this book. I've avoided reading it for years, even though it was a big crowd-pleaser when I worked at the library, and I can't recall that I've ever read a bad review of it. As noted earlier this week, I am one of those nasty people who often dislikes the crowd pleasers, so I thought I'd save us all some time and skip it. But then my dad asked for it, as a neighbor had told him to read it, and he wanted to know what I thought of it, so I had to explain to him why I hadn't read it.* Then, because he was going to read it, I thought I might as well listen to it on CD and then we could at least chat it over when we were done.

But it's not going to happen. I have listened to six CDs (of an 11-CD set) and I can't listen to any more. The subject matter is fine: Mortenson tried to climb K2 in Pakistan in tribute to his sister, who died at too young an age; failed in his attempt because he rescued someone else; was assisted in his descent by some of the Pakistani locals; and was so touched by their generosity and their stoic acceptance of their harsh environment that he pledged to return and build a school for their community. Which he did, and then did in other communities. I'm bailing out of this narrative right after he got a bridge built in Pakistan (he had to build that before he could build the school) and married his soulmate, so I'm going to have to live without knowing what happened with all the other schools.**

So what is the problem(s)? Well, for me, they are, in no particular order:

1. A large part of the first chunk of the book describes Mortenson's climbing exploits. I do not like mountain climbers. Just thinking about them (not all of them, but enough) leaving their spent tanks of oxygen all over the worlds' mountains annoys me.

2. Mortenson seems to have a bit more self esteem than I enjoy in a person. He introduces himself to some Pakistani children as "Greg" and "good." Who does that? I'd quibble less with the word "friendly," and sure, maybe I'm being overly picky, but the fact remains that I like people with a little more doubt in their soul. ("Citizen Reader. Hopefully good, but, you know, given the right circumstances, I'll bet I could do some pretty petty and/or scary shit.")

3. When he meets his soulmate and future wife, they go back to her apartment together, where she tells him "Welcome to my life," and he tells her "Welcome to my heart." At that point I snorted with laughter, said to the dishes I was doing, "Who are these people?", and then turned off the CD.

Please note: I am not against inspiring personal stories or philanthropists in general. It's just that there are many better books out there about people trying to make the world a better place: Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains, for one, and Melissa Faye Greene's There Is No Me Without You for another.

*Trying to explain to your father that you're a bitter and snobby person is always just a bit awkward.

**I'm pretty sure I can live without knowing.

Rick Steves, bad boy?

Normally I think Rick Steves is the most boring travel writer/presenter on the planet. I often watch his shows on PBS because I like travel shows, and because every time Mr. CR and I see his "Back Door" productions logo, we giggle, because we are immature. But if I want witty travel talk, I watch Burt Wolf.*

So I was pleasantly surprised by Steves's new travel narrative, titled Travel as a Political Act. Although Steves makes his living writing straightforward tour guides and running tours, this is more of a thoughtful book on travel, explaining how the cultures of other parts of the world differ from our culture in America. He strikes a nice balance; he's unabashed about saying he loves being American,** and he's actually thankful to be operating his small business in America, but he's also generous about pointing out how other cultures may have figured out different and very valid lifestyles; in Denmark, for example, residents pay much higher taxes but are also highly content with the health care, education, and other services their government provides. He also describes a number of Islamic countries, including Turkey, Iran, and Morocco, and is particularly interested that Morocco seems to be prospering while largely ignoring America and its cultural mandates (he found that Tangier had three languages on all of their street signs: Arabic, French, and Spanish). I also liked his idea, stated in his concluding chapter, that the "ultimate souvenir is a broader outlook."

But perhaps my favorite part of this book was reading about Europe's different approaches to drug use and their emphasis on "harm reduction," particularly where hard drugs (like heroin) are concerned. By pointing out that other first-world nations can and indeed do function, even in countries where you can go to "coffeeshops" to smoke marijuana, I think Steves is providing some valuable insight. I was also just tickled to find out that he is a former board member of NORML and sometimes speaks to groups in America about Europe's approach to drug laws and enforcement. Rick Steves, bad boy. Who knew?

*I have a huge crush on Burt, which disturbs Mr. CR.

**Steves's patriotism doesn't particularly bother me, as he seems to have developed it by learning about other cultures and giving it some independent thought, which is not a typical hallmark of patriotism (or so I've found).

Better reading about it than visiting.

I don't read a lot of travel books, unless they're by British humorist Tony Hawks, in which case I am required to. But other than that? They don't usually appeal. Travel is the one thing, weirdly, that I prefer to do rather than reading about it. (Although I am not a very good traveler; I'm the person next to you in the airport fidgeting, pacing, and generally making herself sick about possible missed connections and oversold planes.)

But have you seen the Crown Journey series? I love these books. They're slim little nonfiction titles written about various locations by authors who have a history with or knowledge of the location. Ray Blount Jr. wrote Feet on the Street, about New Orleans; Chuck Palahniuk wrote Fugitives and Refugees, about Portland, Oregon. The book in the series that I've been listening to this week is Alex Kotlowitz's Never a City so Real, about Chicago. And, although Chicago is my least favorite big city (that I've seen, anyway--no offense, Chicagoans), I'm finding the book very interesting.*

Kotlowitz is an investigative (some might call it journalistic; I call it investigative) author whose earlier books are There Are No Children Here** and The Other Side of the River, which are both fantastic reads about sad topics (poverty and children in the projects in the former; an ugly crime and racial disparity in the latter). And he brings a clear-sighted but still sympathetic feeling to this book, describing Chicago as a city of contrasts and home to many distinct personalities, including the author Nelson Algren, labor leader Ed Sadlowski, and mural painter Milton Reed. It's a thoughtful, vividly descriptive, and short book on a big city, and it made me feel much more warmly about Chicago than any of my trips there have. I'd highly recommend it.

*Sorry, no quotes today. When I listen to this book, I'm usually up to my elbows in dirty dishes, and don't want to take the time to write anything down.

**No kidding: this is one of the best books I've ever read.

Helene does it again.

After struggling through Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs this weekend, I decided I deserved a little treat, so off I went to the library to get the one Helene Hanff book I hadn't yet read: Q's Legacy.

For those of you not familiar with her, Hanff is the author of the fantastic letter collection 84, Charing Cross Road (containing her decades-long correspondence with the British used bookstore Marks & Co, and in particular one of its employees, Frank Doel) and the follow-up title The Duchess of Bloomsbury, in which she recounted her trip to London after the publication of 84. Q's Legacy is kind of a follow-up to the follow-up, in which she explains how she gave herself her own classics and English literature education by reading the lectures of a man named Arthur Quiller-Couch, a professor of English Lit at Cambridge. She also describes her early life in the theatre (you have to say it to yourself, "thea-tah," like I'm doing), her travails trying to find and keep affordable apartments in New York City, and how she came to be writing letters to Marks & Co in the first place. The latter part of the book is taken up with the details of several trips she took to London (after the one described in The Duchess of Bloomsbury), including the one to see the opening of a play based on her book.

Oh, and it's wonderful. It's vintage Helene. She's still full of snappy opinions and surprisingly gentle insights, and if you're interested in London, you get to hear even more about the city here. You also get to learn a bit more about Helene's life (although never enough, frankly), including her stint in secretarial school, where she corrected a teacher's grammar and was taken under the wing of the most popular girl there because of it. It also describes the fan mail and phone calls she got after the publication of 84 (one woman called and said simply, "We can talk as long as you're willing. The phone call is my husband's fortieth birthday present to me. He knew it was the one thing I wanted."). But mainly, it is all Helene, such as when she describes her cataract surgery:

"Fact One: Cataract surgery is simple, painless and (except with implants) risk-free; sight is easily restored by cataract spectacles, contact lenses or implants; the whole procedures is common, routine and nothing to worry about.

Fact Two: Fact One applies only to cataracts on the eyes in somebody else's head." (p. 139.)

It was just what I needed. When you need a treat, or a pick-me-up, or just another dose of Helene, go get this book.

Ah, relics, they always make for good reading.

You know you have slightly strange tastes in nonfiction when you see a book about saints' relics and you think, "Ooh, goody!" And you further know you've probably read too much nonfiction when you think, "I wonder if it will be as good as the other relic book I read?"*

I was very, very excited to find Peter Manseau's book Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead in my library catalog. Not only because I find the idea of saints' relics (purported remnants of saints' bodies and other holy items--like pieces of the cross Jesus was crucified on--that are honored and venerated within various religions, including Catholicism and Buddhism) fascinating, but also because I love, love, LOVE Peter Manseau. (His memoir Vows, about his parents, a former nun and priest, and his childhood spent trying to understand their and his relationship with the Catholic Church, was hands-down one of the best memoirs I've ever read.)

This book finds Manseau traveling around to various holy sites, including Jerusalem and Goa, a city in India where the remains of Saint Francis Xavier are kept, and investigating such relics as the foreskin of Jesus (you heard me) and the burnt bones of Saint Joan. He strikes just exactly the right tone throughout; he is respectful without being obsequious, skeptical without being rude. He is, above all, fascinated by and thoughtful about his topic. This is what he has to say about Francis Xavier, who was an unenthusiastic missionary (at best) to India, although that is where his remains are today: "In death Francis Xavier had joined the lives of a people and a place where he had never wanted to remain. These children, born in the country he scorned, educated in a school that bears his name, have lived their lives in his shadow, but now they run in front of his church, casting their own." (p. 52.)

When I really love nonfiction I fall into very distinct feelings when reading it. Some nonfiction is exciting; some is inspiring, some makes me very angry; but my very favorite titles make me feel settled and thoughtful and peaceful. You know what I mean, about different feelings that books give you? This book makes me feel settled and peaceful, and it's wonderful. Right on, Peter Manseau.

*The other relic book was Anneli Rufus's Magnificent Corpses: Searching through Europe for St. Peter's Head, St. Claire's Heart, St. Stephen's Hand, and Other Relics from the Saints, which was also excellent. More personal in some ways, sharper in some ways, less historical and even-toned in others, but still brilliant.

Bourdain and Eggers rock my world.

Has anyone seen the fantastic new book State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey?

Don't let the rather drowsy cover fool you. It's meant to look retro; the editors wanted a modern equivalent of the state travel guides produced in the 1930s through the Federal Writers' Project (part of FDR's Works Progress Administration job creation). That's right, the U.S. government put $27 million into paying authors and artists to create books and art. Can you imagine how that sort of thing would go over today? Just imagine valuing authors and artists enough to want them to continue their work. Stunning.

But the history of this volume is not the great part. What is great is the list of contributors Weiland and Wilsey have managed to pull together: Dave Eggers on Illinois. Sarah Vowell on Montana. Anthony Bourdain on New Jersey. Louise Erdrich on North Dakota. Jonathan Franzen on New York. Jhumpa Lahiri on Rhode Island. David Rakoff on Utah. And many, many more.

You don't have to read the whole thing. Get it, and read about your state. (I did, and although it hurts me to report this, I didn't enjoy the essay about Wisconsin, by Daphne Beal. Ms. Beal talked mainly about the east side of the state and Racine, which is not my part of the state, and she maintains that all Wisconsinites say "soda," not "pop," which is not true.*)

When my duty to my home state was done, however, I went right for Anthony Bourdain's piece on New Jersey, which was awesome (of course), and then I proceeded merrily along to Dave Eggers's piece on Illinois, which blew me away and reminded me, instantly, how I felt upon first reading his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, lo those many years ago, and how I fell in love with him over that book. Who would have guessed that an essay about the state of Illinois (a state Wisconsin natives largely disdain from birth; it's in our water) would have knocked me over? As Eggers says:

"The slogan on all license plates in Illinois, for as long as anyone can remember, has been Land of Lincoln. Everyone in Illinois and all sensible people elsewhere believe it to be the best license-plate slogal of all the states in our union. The closest runner-up would be New Hampshire's fiery Live Free or Die, but that slogan scares children. A license-plate slogan shouldn't scare children and shouldn't include the words 'or die.' A license-plate slogan shouldn't encourage death in the face of curtailed personal liberties. A license-plate slogan should, without threats or hysterics, evoke the moral essence and scenic grandeur of a state, and if possible it should be alliterative and should mention everyone's favorite president." (p. 130.)

I'm still a little in love with Dave Eggers, if you must know the truth.

*It's not just me. Mr. CR deigned to read it, nonfiction though it was, and concurred with my sentiments.

Helene Hanff Appreciation Week: The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street

Although Helene wrote to the Marks & Co. bookstore for twenty years, starting in 1949, she didn't actually get to travel to London until 1971, when she did things up right and stayed there for a month, getting to know a wide variety of people and being (as far as I can tell) incandescently happy.

Although I loved The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, and loved all that I learned from it about London and Great Britain, my favorite part of it was actually reading Helene's memories of how she first started educating herself through books:

"But Oxford I have to see. There's one suite of freshman's rooms at Trinity College which John Donne, John Henry Newman and Arthur Quiller-Couch all lived in, in various long-gone eras. Whatever I know about writing English those three men taught me, and before I die I want to stand in their freshman's rooms and call their names blessed.

Q (Quiller-Couch) was all by himself my college education. I went down to the public library one day when I was seventeen looking for books on the art of writing, and found five books of lectures which Q had delivered to this students of writing at Cambridge.

'Just what I need!' I congratulated myself. I hurried home with the first volume and started reading and got to page 3 and hit a snag:

Q was lecturing to young men educated at Eton and Harrow. He therefore assumed that his students--including me--had read Paradise Lost as a matter of course and would understand his analysis of the 'Invocation to Light' in Book 9. So I said, 'Wait here,' and went down to the library and got Paradise Lost and took it home and started reading it and got to page 3, when I hit a snag:

Milton assumed I'd read the Christian version of Isaiah and the New Testament and had learned all about Lucifer and the War in Heaven, and since I'd been reared in Judaism I hadn't. So I said, 'Wait here,' and borrowed a Christian Bible..."

Charmed, I'm sure.

Here's a short list of things in which I am completely uninterested: hunting, Western Americana and American history, camping and outdoorsy stories of any kind, and buffalo (or bison; they're the same thing).

And yet? I managed to make it a good way through Steven Rinella's new book American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon. It's Rinella's travelogue/history/outdoor adventure memoir, in which he tracks both the history and lore of the American buffalo, as well as (more literally) an actual buffalo that he's hunting in the wilds of Alaska. Although he was interested in buffalo and the history of the West for a long time, the impetus for Rinella's narrative was his winning one of twenty-four annual permits issued to hunt a buffalo in Alaska.

So why on earth did I pick up such a book? Well, the short answer is that some authors completely charm me, and when they do, I'm dedicated to tracking down all the books they write. Rinella is also the author of The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine, which was one of my favorite books of 2005, and in which he sought to hunt, trap, capture, or otherwise procure all the ingredients to be used in Auguste Escoffier's 1903 Le Guide Culinaire cookbook. So, even though this is not a book I would have gravitated to because of its subject, I did enjoy a large part of it (I didn't get the whole thing read, although it was very good, largely because I decided what I'd rather do is go back and re-read The Scavenger's Guide). But if you have any interest in the subjects I listed above, I'd recommend this one. Although, if you are not into graphic descriptions of preparing an animal to be eaten (i.e., butchered) then I'd skip it.

But Rinella is charming, no doubt about it. Consider: "The bulk of buffalo history is set in the geologic epoch known as the Pleistocene, which spanned from about two milion years ago to ten thousand years ago. Of the geologic epochs, the Pleistocene is by far my favorite. Its relationship to the modern world reminds me of my own relationship to my grandparents: their lives were distant and obscure enough that it's difficult for me to really know and understand them, but what I do know about them helps explain a lot about how I turned into the kind of person I am."

You just have to kind of like a guy who has a favorite geologic era, don't you? I do. Have a good weekend, all.

A trip I'm jealous of.

What I enjoyed most about Mike Walsh's Bowling Across America: 50 States in Rented Shoes was his opening chapter about he and his five siblings' arranging of their father's funeral (their father died suddenly in his mid-sixties):

"We continued to cry aplenty, but the fine emotional line between that release and laughter enabled us to find humor in the grimmest of situations...At the cemetery, the woman helping us select a resting place for Dad (and de facto for Mom, since she would one day be buried alongside him) bore the real brunt of a sarcastic family's grief.

'Now, this plot is nice because it faces south, so it gets a little more sunlight," she said of one site...

'It's nice,' someone replied, 'but could you move the Calvano grave away from it? I don't want my parents to be buried next to any Italians.'

'Yeah, where are all the Irish graves?'

'Where might we find some existing graves where the wife's dead, but the husband's still alive? We're looking for a rich widower for our mother.'

At some point our saleswoman began showing us sites of five graves together, suggesting that some of us might want to make a down payment on our own graves so that we might be buried with our parents. That or she was wishing more of us dead." (p. xvii.)

That's a lot of quoting, but I found the whole exchange hilarious and perfectly representative of the weird humor that pops out in families (especially big families) in the face of death.

The rest of the book is a travelogue of Walsh's quest to bowl in all fifty states (undertaken after he learned his father had had a similar goal of playing handball in all fifty states, but had died before he could achieve it). The chapters aren't too long and the stories are very enjoyable; it's sort of a Charles Kuralt "on the road" quest for younger readers. And he makes his trip sound like a lot of fun, even though he does, in pursuit of his goal, put more than 25,000 miles (on his mom's car) and inhale a lot of secondhand smoke.

Gutsy babe.

Sometimes the bravery of other women astounds me. Perhaps because I am a huge scaredy cat.

A while back I reviewed Deborah Copaken Kogan's novel Between Here and April, and while I basically liked it, there were a few elements that rubbed me the wrong way. In the comments for that review, however, a friend of mine we'll call Minnesota Sarah (hi up there!) reminded me that Kogan has also written the memoir Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War, which I promptly went and got from the library. 

Now, how anyone decides they WANT to go to war zones and take photographs among largely hostile crowds has always baffled me. But when a woman does it? Then I'm really stymied. For one thing, I'd say I personally place a pretty high value on my own safety. I'm a big believer in hoping to minimize trouble by not going out to look for it. This must be a trait that Kogan has never had, because the book opens with her traveling with a bunch of Afghani fighters in Afghanistan--by herself. Holy crap. Other chapters detail her experiences covering wars in Zimbabwe and snapping pictures in Romanian orphanages (photos are included throughout the book), and unless you have a high capacity to read about human suffering, I wouldn't say this is the book for you. She also, of course, dishes on the personal details of being a globetrotting photography correspondent, including a (what seemed to me) somewhat unhappy affair with another photographer.

But I digress. This is one gutsy woman. Consider her photography thesis project for college:

"[My] thesis was called 'Shooting Back,' and it was a series of photos of men who had accosted me in various red-light districts up and down the Eastern seaboard. New York's Forty-second Street. Boston's Combat Zone. South Philly. The whole project evolved as a sort of radical form of self-therapy after I'd fallen victim to a number of armed robberies (two) and assaults (four). It was the equivalent of an acrophobe tackling Mount Everest, or an agoraphobe facing down the mall at Christmas: I was a bad-guy-o-phobe, hanging out in the belly of the beast.

I'd troll the seedy streets outside the strip clubs and the porno shops and wait for the inevitable comment, which ran the gamut from 'Hey, baby, wanna get it on?' to 'Suck my dick, bitch.' To every proposition I would quickly and confidently reply, 'No, thank you, but I would like to shoot your photo.' This retort and the presence of my camera changed the entire dynamic of the encounter. My clunky old Nikkormat became my weapon, turning hunter into prey, and as I held my wide-angle 28-millimeter lens mere inches from these men's faces, distoring their images, I felt the universe tipping for a moment in my favor." (p. 44.)

I ask you: who does that? I stand in awe of the gutsiness of other women.

I went out walking...

Geoff Nicholson's The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism is a very strange little book.

I liked it a lot.

I'd never heard of Nicholson but I did pick the book up based simply on its title. I love to walk. It's the only exercise I've truly ever enjoyed, probably because it's not very strident exercise. Nicholson loves walking too; the entire book is nothing but a collection of ruminations onwalks that he's taken, walks that other people have taken, how walking has been portrayed in writing and music, and a variety of other topics. He opens his narrative with an account of how he fell when walking in Los Angeles and managed to break his arm in three places, which made further walking surprisingly difficult. He describes the sick sensation of falling perfectly:

"The older you get, the bigger a deal it is to fall down. When you're age five you can hit the deck, skin your knees, bleed profusely, and be up playing again in five minutes. The older falling man is so much more vulnerable...

Even as I was falling I thought, Oh crap, I'm not really going to go all the way to the ground, am I? I'll stop myself somehow. I'll kepp my footing. I'll regain my balance. And then I knew I was wrong about that. I was going all the way. I'd passed the tipping point. Oh crap, indeed."

The narrative drags a bit in some points, but that seems only appropriate in a book about walking. (Sometimes, midpoint on a walk, it feels like you've been slogging for a while.) But overall it's a great read, and describes such great cities as New York, London, and L.A. from the sidewalk. (I'm particularly grateful to Nicholson for finally helping me understand the British phrase "council estates": "An English council estate is similar to, but culturally very different from, an American housing project, and I think the name says a great deal. Both are places where the poor, underprivileged, and undereducated live, but Britain likes it to sound as though its poor people are on some grand country manor, while America prefers to think they're part of a science fair experiment," p. 218.) And he includes a wonderful bibliography of walking books.

Hm, in looking over the book I see that Nicholson is also the author of some interesting-sounding titles: Sex Collectors, Female Ruins, Bleeding London, Everything and More. Further bulletins on those books as events warrant.

Okay, add France to the list...

...of the roughly zillion places I'd like to travel and visit.

This is awkward, since I never really wanted to visit France. Sure, everybody tells you to go to Paris, but sadly, when you're dealing with time and money constraints, you have to pick and choose vacation spots very carefully. Mr. CR has never been to Great Britain and I always wanted to drag him there first.

But then along comes a great book like Mark Greenside's I'll Never Be French (No Matter What I Do): Living in a Small Village in Brittany.* This is one of the first travel books I've read that actually made me want to GO to the place the author is describing, rather than just glad that I could read the book and not have to go. It doesn't hurt that the France being described by Greenside is actually Brittany--the northwestern part of France that juts up nearly to meet Great Britain and which is more Celtic in character than French.

Greenside tells the story of how, in his late forties, he followed a girl to Brittany. The love affair with the girl soon ended; his love affair with Brittany was just beginning. Part of the joy of the book is that he doesn't fit in and he knows it--he knows no French and he accepts that he's largely helpless. (His first morning in France he can't figure out his house door, hops out the window, makes it to the local bakery, and gets bread and coffee, largely through hand signals and the goodwill of the shop owner.) Thanks to some very helpful neighbors who are just happy that he's American and not English, he eventually starts to learn how things work in France and, by the end of the summer, buys his own house there.

I'll admit it. I liked this book largely because I liked this guy. I am charmed by middle-aged men who have no money, but have no problems taking advice from French women about which houses to look at, and who also are secure enough in their manhood to borrow the money from their moms. I also liked that he admitted he was helpless, and he was never going to actually be French (or Breton), but that he could appreciate them all the same. I also liked his take on the differences between French and American children:

"French parents treat their kids like adults, knowing they're children and they'll lapse. American parents treat their kids like babies and get short with them when they don't act grown up. One of the saddest sights I've seen is American parents bringing their two-year-olds to the movies and getting upset when the babies begin to cry." (p. 67.)

There's plenty of food and landscape description, as well. Tell me if this doesn't make you hungry: "We buy a hunk of white bread cut from a loaf the size of a truck tire, local cheese, a tomme and chevre, dry sausage with pistachios, pate de campagne, strawberies from Plougastel, two pears, two green apples, a bottle of local cider, and a huge chocolate truffle for dessert--and drive to Pointe de Corsen on the Atlantic for a picnic." (p. 204.)

It's an awesome book. I won't tell you you have to go to France, but you do have to read this book.

*Follow the link to Powells.com, where there's also a cute video of Greenside talking about the book.

Eternal light indeed.

I have always been fascinated by ancient Egypt.

Egypt tops my list of places that I'd go if time, money, and personal safety were no objects. I used to absolutely devour books about King Tut, Queen Nefertiti, and egyptology. I even read Robin Cook's Sphinx when I was about ten (and decidedly too young for some of the subject matter) because it had a picture of a pyramid on the cover. (I'm still not sure where that book came from; it wasn't my parents', and it wasn't a library book--a sibling's, maybe?) For years afterward I wanted to be an egyptologist, and remember feeling crushed when I put it together that job openings for egyptologists in the midwest (where I have always intended firmly to stay, negative temperatures notwithstanding) were few and far between.

To this day, whenever I see a book about ancient Egypt, I bring it home. The latest such treasure was The Eternal Light of Egypt: A Photographic Journey, by Sarite Sanders. It's published by Thames & Hudson, and even though the photography is all black and white, it's still beautiful. I particularly love the close-ups of statues and carvings of human torsos, particularly those on buildings where light and shadow comes into play. They had such a beautiful way of carving--these torsos, most of them featuring bare midriffs or chests, look like they could breathe any second. To make stone look like it is a living thing is a pretty fantastic thing to be able to do, particularly way back in BC times.

The photographs are beautiful, but still they're only half of the book. The other half of the book is quotes and texts from ancient Egyptian sources (as well as a few more modern ones), and those are beautiful too. Consider:

"I live on Truth, and I have my being in Truth, I am Horus, who dwells in the heart, who dwells in the centre of the body. I live by saying what is in my heart, and it shall not be taken away from me. My heart is mine, and it shall not be wounded. No terror shall subdue me..." --The Book of the Dead, Chapter 29b.

That feels eternal to me. Take that, Julian Barnes.

There are few things more disappointing.

Don't you hate it when you see that a new book is out by one of your favorite authors, and then you get it, and you hold it with quivering excitement, and then you open it and start reading...and you just aren't loving it?

This happened to me with A. A. Gill's latest, Previous Convictions: Assignments from Here and There. It's sitll Gill, so it's still good, but somehow, I just didn't love every minute of it, like I did with The Angry Island and A.A. Gill Is Away. For one thing, I think I prefer his travel writing, and this book opens with several pieces that are not travel: Father, Son, Golf, Hunting, Dog, etc. (these essays are the "Here" of the title). I much preferred the "There" essays: Haiti, Guatemala, India, Oman, Pakistan, etc.

I did love the piece about Las Vegas:

"There's one of those plastic laminated nonbiodegradable notes in my hotel bathroom. It's headed PRESERVE OUR FUTURE: 'Preserving the Earth's vital resources is something we can all take part in. In an effort to save water and energy and to minimize the release of harsh biodegradable [sic] detergents...please leave this card on your pillow and we will remake your bed with existing linens.'

I read it twice.

I'm in a hotel that has built a replica of Venice's Grand Canal--on the second floor, so that it won't wash away the crap tables downstairs. This is a city that blows up the hotels when they're slightly soiled, that sweats neon, that sprays ice water from the lampposts and puts dancing fountains in the desert. This is a place that when they started nuclear testing next door sold picnics for those who wanted to get a closer look--and held Miss Atomic Bomb contests with bikinis shaped like mushroom clouds. These are the people who are wagging a finger at me and asking me to be parsimonious with the laundry.

Well, welcome to Las Vegas--where irony just curls up and dies." (pp. 243-244.)

Okay, that's pretty good stuff. I guess this one gets a thumbs up after all.

Shallow alert.

I'll admit it. I only checked out the book Long Way Down: An Epic Journey by Motorcycle from Scotland to South Africa for the pictures. Why? Because it's co-written by actors Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman.

And Ewan McGregor is SO CUTE.

I was not disappointed. There are three sections of photos in the book, in which McGregor and Boorman take turns telling the story of their motorcycle journey from the northern tip of Scotland to the southern tip of South Africa, and many of them feature Ewan looking very, very adorable. I also enjoyed the captions: (Between two photos, one of Ewan by his tent, one of Charley by his tent) "In the cuds in Tunisia. Ewan would like to point out that he often got his tent up before Charley. Charley would like to point out that not only is his tent up, he is already starting supper."

Okay, so I'm shallow. I looked at all the pictures, twice, and read here and there in some of the chapters, which were also quite amusing, but I'm not going to read the whole thing. I'd recommend it, though, especially if you're looking for a good adventure story that also has some laughs. If you'd prefer to watch the story,it's available on DVD, just like Long Way Round (the tale of the pair's first journey around the globe) was.

I hope this one does.

The above is my not-so-witty reply to the title of today's book: Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?

But of course, that is not true. If I'm going to waste time wishing that people go to hell, which just seems mean anyway, I'm going to start with bigger fish than this author Thomas Kohnstamm. Plus, there's any number of reasons why I should go to hell, so I guess I'm going to retreat into my own glass house now and hope no one out there's got any stones.

But anyway. The book is Do Travel Writers Go to Hell: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics & Professional Hedonism. It's by a Lonely Planet writer who's out to debunk the idea that travel writers visit all the destinations, hotels, and restaurants out there before they write about them, primarily because it would be very nearly impossible to do so, from a deadline and financial standpoint (he also points out that travel writers really aren't supposed to accept free meals or other perks from people they're evaluating, which is also nearly impossible). Is this so shocking? I rather assumed travel writers who wrote guidebooks were mainly popping in to a few places, doing internet searches on others, and making the rest up, but maybe that's just me. So I didn't find this book all that shocking from an ethical viewpoint. Who uses a guidebook except for the maps and a few general ideas of what to see anyway? Especially the Lonely Planet guides. They're nice to get a basic idea, but I can't imagine that the travelers who use LP don't know how to use the Internet to do their own hotel booking, etc. You know what I'm saying? I just don't think it's an older people crowd, like the Frommer's and Fodor's sets.

Actually, I wouldn't have minded a few more stories about the travel writing itself, or about Brazil, which is where Kohnstamm traveled for his first assignment. Instead, the book opens with Kohnstamm quitting his job in New York and then going on a bender with his friend "the Doctor." It's a little narrative that goes on for about twenty pages, but it feels a lot longer than that:

"I wish I could relate the exploits of the evening during and after the party, but the details are foggy. I know that we were at the party for many hours and I managed to avoid the Doctor and his girlfriend for most of it. I don't think that the cocaine lasted through the soiree loaded with stimulant-hungry Ivy League nostrils...I rarely black out, but I lost a few hours there. Eventually, somebody introduced Red Bull, which pulled me back out of the miasma. Now we have wound up in line at some pseudochic lounge/club in western SoHo, cleverly named after its numerical address.

Everybody has abandoned us. Were other people with us before? I am staring at the tips of my shoes trying to steady myself while finishing off the Red Bull. The Doctor, still with a vomit stain on his Hawaiian shirt, is talking to a guy he kind of know from LA who is working the door..." (pp. 42-43.)

And that's what the entire book is like, except in different countries. Every now and then there's a page about the writing life and/or Brazil, but certainly not enough to make this one interesting. If you want to read about frat boy sex and alcohol exploits, do yourself a favor and just get Tucker Max's I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, which is much more honestly a book in which nothing happens except Max's zany (said ironically) sexual exploits in every chapter. If you want to read a real travel book, don't start with this one.

Lost on Planet Maarten.

I'm not a huge travel reader. But there are a few authors who I make sure to pick up whenever I see they've got a new title, and J. Maarten Troost is one of those authors. His latest, Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation*, was no exception. Although I don't often read books about China, I couldn't resist the lure of Troost (whose The Sex Lives of Cannibals is one of my favorite travel books ever).

It's good, but not as good as Sex Lives. J. Maarten has a very funny style, but as he does not speak the language it's hard for him to have a whole lot of run-ins with the natives (those types of run-ins were my favorite parts of his other books). He himself becomes aware, early on, of just how difficult the language barrier is going to be to overcome: 

"I want to be very clear about this. I am not blaming anyone. No one is at fault. I am even willing to consider the possibility that it wasn't done on purpose. But, as I delved into Chinese for Dummies, I couldn't help but conclude that the Chinese language is the Great Wall of languages, a clever linguistic barrier erected to keep outsiders out. What, frankly, is wrong with Esperanto? Or alphabets?...I am even, dare I say it, fairly good at languages. Typically, it takes me no more than few weeks of study until I can more or less function: I can get myself from point A to point B, I can discern the general drift of a conversation, I can sit in a restaurant and feel reasonbly confident that the dish I just ordered wasn't the Monkey Penis Special. But, as soon became coldly apparent to me, there was not a chance that I was going to even manage that in Chinese. And that worried me." (p. 16-17.)

So, a qualified thumbs up on this one. If you're looking to learn more about China (particularly in light of the Olympics having just been held there) or need a good basic travel read, this is a good choice. If you're looking to laugh a lot, go back to The Sex Lives of Cannibals.

*The subtitle to the subtitle, "Or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid" should indicate that those readers who can't abide any kind of animal cruelty might want to give this one a miss.