Travel Literature

[Ben Jackson]

Beautiful book you posted Pat, thanks for sharing your views on that.

 

[Stevie B]

Robert S. Kane’s forthright and penetrating travel guides, of which Africa A to Z in 1961 was the first, were my entrée to the nations of the world, and like John Gunther’s Inside… series, still make excellent reading today.

Notice the year, 1961. About 25 African counties became independent between 1960 and 1962, so this volume could scarcely help being a fascinating snapshot of the continent at a key moment in its history. Kane is a very sympathetic, uncondescending observer.

Even the preliminary “get ready for travel” chapters are compelling. I was fascinated to learn that there were at least a dozen major organizations devoted to promoting friendship / cooperation / understanding between the US and Africa. I hope we’re doing as well today, but I wonder.

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Your travel book can now be read as a history book.

 

[Liam]

More ruminative than straightforward, but The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen is a classic!

A personal favorite: Tim Robinson's Stones of Aran in two volumes: Pilgrimage and Labyrinth (if you published them together in one volume it would be nearly 1000 pages long!).

But like I said, these are more ruminative and self-reflexive rather than straightforward travel writing.

 

[Liam]

One of my favorite "travel" books of all time is Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's (1737-1814) Journey to Mauritius: beautifully written and filled with interesting, sometimes profound, observations.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

Beautiful book you posted Pat, thanks for sharing your views on that.

I thought this might interest you, Ben!

This was Kane’s first book, and it was regarded as a trend-setting travel guide because of its forthrightness. He was not afraid to speak his mind. And he was 100% pro-Africa and pro-independence, which was in itself a political stance at that time.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

Paul Fussell’s Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars is a classic study of UK travel literature, but Mark Cocker’s much less known Loneliness and Time: The Story of British Travel Writing is also very good, and overlaps with the Fussell surprisingly little.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

The travel writer Peter Biddlecombe is one of the few writers who can genuinely make me laugh out loud and do spit-takes. His travel books are very valuably from the perspective of a businessman and NOT a tourist or travel professional. His narration is dry and the incidents he relates frequently beggar the imagination.

Biddlecombe writes about Africa a lot; is he ever culturally insensitive? I’m not African so in that sense it is not for me to say, but it does not seem to me that he is insensitive very often, in fact he has plenty of sympathy wherever he goes, and is very attuned to the “human comedy”. Bureaucracy drives him crazy, but of whom is that not true?

Of course all writers of European heritage are going to demonstrate insensitivities or misapprehensions OCCASIONALLY when they venture outside their native sphere, but unless they are vicious about it, I am not put off. None of us is perfect.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

When I read travel literature these days, I like to pull in some of our modern resources to augment the experience, specifically Google Images for photographs, both contemporary and historic, and for maps; and YouTube, for travel videos. The quality of these latter varies enormously, and I’m not just talking about the professionalism of the photography or editing. For instance, some vloggers really overdo the pointing-the-camera-at-their-own-face thing. (I don’t understand how people can do that walking down the street, I would feel completely weird!)

Drones, also way over-used these days.

So, many travel videos that I glance at get just a minute or two before I turn them off, but others can be quite engaging.

Adding the books / articles, images, maps, and videos together amounts to a form of “virtual travel” that I enjoy, especially seeing as I don’t get away much from my town anymore.