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The Best American Travel Writing 2005 (The Best American Series (TM))
Books: Travel: Basque: Item 2
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The Best American Travel Writing 2005 (The Best American Series (TM))by Jamaica Kincaid and Jason Wilson
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful: Glad I'm not there, February 28, 2006 Reviewer:D. P. Birkett (Suffern, NY USA) - 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.
From Booklist
Great travel writing feeds our hunger for armchair journeys while somehow making the armchair less comfortable. Series editor Wilson searched for the rare pieces that weren't "aggressively positive"; Kincaid chose finalists that she says "underline my sense of my displacement." True enough, whether discussing suburban Florida or the bullet-riddled border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, these essays and articles show us the overlooked and never-seen with curiosity, insight, engagement, and humility; none of these writers brags about being at home in the world. Standouts are many: in "Into the Land of bin Laden," Robert Young Pelton finds a soldier who says, "I have no idea who we are fighting"; in "Tight-Assed River," John McPhee sails with the men who pilot aircraft carrier-length barges down Illinois' narrow waterways; and in "Trying Really Hard to Like India," Seth Stevenson serves a stern rebuke to travelers who return with praise for a country simply because they made it there and back. Readers may try to sample this, but they'll end up devouring it all. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Book Description
Edited by the renowned novelist and travel writer Jamaica Kincaid, this year's collection reflects the wandering spirit and ever-present quest for adventure of the seasonedand not so seasonedtraveler. Contributors include Tom Bissell, Ian Frazier, Simon Winchester, Murad Kalam, and others.
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