Book Lust to Go Page 2
Jeffrey Tayler’s River of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia’s Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny and Murderers in Mausoleums: Riding the Back Roads of Empire Between Moscow and Beijing both showcase the author’s talents as a travel writer: powers of keen observation and an ability to convey his own palpable enthusiasm for exotic places and interesting people, even as danger is always just around the corner.
Many people make the choice to set off on an adventure, but the men described in Dean King’s Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival merely ended up where they did by accident. In August of 1815, twelve crew members from the Connecticut merchant brig Commerce were shipwrecked off the western coast of Africa, enslaved by a Bedouin tribe, and forced to accompany their captors—by foot and by camelback—on a seemingly endless, desperately grueling, and bone-dry trek through the sands of the western Sahara desert (now part of Morocco). King based his book on two first-person accounts of the experience the men underwent; from these two works, King has constructed a gripping and page-turning narrative of survival and courage. The fact that as this story was unfolding alongside a parallel story of survival and courage in the face of dire circumstances—the abduction and enslavement in the “New World” of African native men, women, and children—makes King’s book especially ironic.
Deep-sea diving off the coast of French Polynesia: could anything be more, well, um, adventurous? Not according to Julia Whitty in The Fragile Edge: Diving and Other Adventures in the South Pacific.
James West Davidson and John Rugge’s Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure chronicles the story of a failed exploration that was dogged with bad luck, as well as its complicated aftermath.
Mumbai to Mecca: A Pilgrimage to the Holy Sites of Islam by Ilija Trojanow (his name is also spelled Ilya Troyanov—see the section called “Star Trekkers” for another of his books) is one of the bound-to-be-classic travelogues: an account of the Hajj as seen through the eyes of a Western journalist sympathetic to Islam.
I enjoyed so many of the selections Lamar Underwood collected in The Greatest Adventure Stories Ever Told. They include both fiction and nonfiction, from an Arthur Conan Doyle non-Sherlockian short story and Tom Wolfe’s account of Chuck Yeager’s breaking the sound barrier, to a short story by Arthur C. Clarke and Joel P. Kramer’s “A Harrowing Journey,” which describes a trip (by foot and kayak) through New Guinea that seemed so desperately foolhardy I found myself wincing in sympathetic pain while I was reading it.
AFGHANISTAN: GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES
As with many of the places I’ve included in this book, probably the only way we’re going to get to visit Afghanistan (unless we’re in the military) in the next few years is through the books we read. I somehow doubt that most of us will be making vacation plans to visit Kabul. But who knows? You may be far more adventurous than I.
The only positive outcome of the events of 9/11 that I can see is the proliferation of books—both fiction and nonfiction—set in a country that most of us never before paid much attention to. I wrote a whole section in More Book Lust that covers fiction and nonfiction about Afghanistan’s past and present, and you might want to begin there. But, to quote Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter” on the subject of oysters,“And thick and fast they came at last / And more and more and more.” It’s true, as all you observant readers have already gathered by now, that this is not a section that’s going to provide a lot of laughs. On the other hand, most of these books are perfect selections for your book group. But do me one favor—read these in the spring (or summer) of the year. They aren’t—for the most part—the best choice for gray and rainy days.
Nonfiction
One of the best books I read in 2009 (although perhaps“experienced” is a better choice of verb) was the graphic novel The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, and Frédéric Lemercier. It’s the powerful story of Lefèvre’s first assignment as a photojournalist in 1986, accompanying a team of Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) who were traveling through Pakistan to Afghanistan, during the long bloody conflict between the invading Soviet Union troops and the Taliban. The pictures include both Lefèvre’s original contact sheets (it’s interesting to note that contact sheets of photos are not unlike strips of comics) and Guibert’s drawings, while the text is reconstructed from discussions Guibert and Lefèvre had about the journey. Graphic designer Lemercier assembled the book. (Lefèvre’s journals—mentioned in the book—were lost years before.)
Other good reading choices:
Saira Shah’s The Storyteller’s Daughter: One Woman’s Return to Her Lost Homeland weaves tales that Shah heard growing up in Britain with her own impressions during a long sojourn in country. Shah is also a highly regarded filmmaker, whose documentary Beneath the Veil: Inside the Taliban’s Afghanistan is disturbing and necessary viewing for anyone interested in understanding the country. As is her book.
In his Opium Season: A Year on the Afghan Frontier, Joel Hafvenstein describes the year he spent working with an American aid organization to try to help Afghani farmers raise crops other than those that have been their livelihood for generations.
Seth G. Jones’s In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan provides an excellent history of U.S. involvement in the country.
One of the earliest books written about the battle between the Russian invaders and the mujahideen fighters is Under a Sickle Moon: A Journey Through Afghanistan. In 1984 Peregrine Hodson, a British freelance journalist, traveled with the resistance fighters throughout northeastern Afghanistan. His book is not, as Hodson makes clear in his introduction, an analysis of the war or the politics of the region. But reading it now, more than twenty years after it was originally published, one finds familiar names throughout, and the beginnings of stories that are not yet ended.
In The Places In Between, Rory Stewart describes a trip through Afghanistan shortly after the fall of the Taliban, early in 2002. Having spent much of 2000 and 2001 trekking across Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, Stewart decided to walk from Herat to Kabul. He followed the route of Babur, a fifteenth-century leader best known as the founder of the Mughal Empire, and took with him only his dog, who was named for this most famous emperor. Canine lovers take note: Babur is one of the best dogs in literature.
J. Malcolm Garcia’s The Khaarijee:A Chronicle of Friendship and War in Kabul is the story of a middle-aged newbie reporter who cuts his teeth in the heat of Afghanistan following 9/11.
Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman is the moving account of the great pro football player’s death in Afghanistan. As with all of Krakauer’s books, this is eminently readable.
Fiction
Most readers are already familiar with Khaled Hosseini’s two novels, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. (In fact, those are the two works of fiction that probably introduced many readers to Afghanistan.) But don’t stop there—here are others you shouldn’t miss:
Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil; Dan Fesperman’s The War-lord’s Son (especially good for John le Carré fans); James Michener’s Caravans, which animates the 1940s and 1950s in Afghanistan quite marvelously; and Atiq Rahimi’s The Patience Stone, which helps us understand the role and place of Afghani women. (The introduction to Rahimi’s novel was written by Khaled Hosseini.)
AFRICA: THE GREENEST CONTINENT
I think it was Graham Greene who called Africa “the greenest continent.” Given the size and complexity of the continent, I could probably do a whole Book Lust To Go volume on books about Africa, which would only befit a locale that is 11.7 million square miles and comprises, according to Wikipedia, sixty-one political territories and fifty-three different countries, many of which are probably unfamiliar to the western reader (or at least to this particular western reader). Books about Africa can be arranged into enough categories to make even the most discerning slicer and dicer conte
nt (or queasy). Many of the titles cross categories.
There are the BYH (“break your heart”) books that range from history to classic fiction (Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton, for one) to contemporary mysteries (like Malla Nunn’s A Beautiful Place to Die and Kwei Quartey’s Wife of the Gods).
There are the older but still good police procedural mysteries by James McClure, featuring the white Inspector Kramer and his Zulu assistant, Zondi, that take place in South Africa during the long years of apartheid; The Steam Pig is my favorite.
There are the RCG (“rose-colored glasses”) memoirs (like Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa) and the DFCiASSaCoO (“dysfunctional families come in all sizes, shapes, and countries of origin”) autobiographies like Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller. (There’s more by this author in the “Zambia” section.)
I could go on for pages about the terrifyingly sad political accounts of bravery, pain, atrocities, and, unaccountably, hope, as they appear in recent nonfiction about Africa: Dave Eggers’s What Is the What; They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan by Alephfonsion Deng, Benson Deng, and Banjamin Ajak; Emmanuel Jal’s War Child; Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (you can watch my interview with Gourevitch at www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=3030904); A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It by Stephen Kinzer; Tracy Kidder’s Strength in What Remains (see my interview with him at www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=3031003); and Michela Wrong’s It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower.
It’s true that many of these books don’t necessarily make you want to get up and vacation in any of the continent’s war-torn and depleted countries like Sudan, Somalia, or Rwanda (although reading the charming novel Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin might change your mind a bit about Rwanda). Reading these books, I found myself weeping at the horrors, admiring the bravery, hoping for the best, and always feeling entirely grateful I was living in peaceful Seattle. But—let me emphasize—they are all absolutely worth reading.
There are also seemingly innumerable stories of exploration and discovery, mostly to be found in dusty sections of libraries and used bookstores. There are books galore on colonial Africa (much of what is in them is now totally politically incorrect). And there are the novels, literary and otherwise, in which Africa plays an important role: Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, for one; and Green City in the Sun by Barbara Wood (historical fiction set in Kenya) for another.
To make it simpler for readers (and myself), I’ve tried to list books under their specific settings, while including the general Africa titles, or those that cover more than one country, in this section.
Basil Davidson was one of the first white writers to suggest that Africa had a history and culture (amazingly enough, this came as shocking news to many people). He wrote a ton of books and they’re somewhat dated, but The Lost Cities of Africa and The Search for Africa: History, Culture, Politics together will give you a good grounding in African history.
Although I would count Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar as one of my all-time favorite books, I found that the later accounts of his travels expressed such a dyspeptic view of the people he met and the places he was visiting that I was disinclined to go on reading them. I hadn’t picked up another book of his (fiction or nonfiction) after the somewhat ironically titled The Happy Isles of Oceania, published in 1992, until a trusted book-recommending friend suggested Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town. In it, I discovered a hodgepodge of history, anecdotes, opinions, and description. I was immediately hooked by how Theroux begins his tale:All news out of Africa is bad. It made me want to go there, though not for the horror, the hot spots, the massacre-and-earthquake stories you read in the newspaper; I wanted the pleasure of being in Africa again.
In this book, Theroux seems to have recovered his emotional equilibrium and shed most of his grumpiness and petulance; all of his talent for discovering the unusual in the ordinary people he meets and places he visits is evidenced on every page, which was originally published in 2003. Here’s another grand example of his writing, also from the first chapter:I . . . was heading south, in my usual traveling mood: hoping for the picturesque, expecting misery, braced for the appalling. Happiness was unthinkable, for although happiness is desirable, it is a banal subject for travel. Therefore, Africa seemed perfect for a long journey.
Theroux travels by nearly every sort of conveyance you can imagine: a variety of trucks, a ferry, train, bus, and dugout canoe (a particularly fascinating section). He talks to people—Africans and others—from all walks of life, such as missionaries, tourists, and aid workers from Western countries, which gives him (and us) a well-rounded portrait of a continent struggling to find itself. Incidentally, there’s a very funny joke on page 123 of the paperback edition.
A heartwarming (but not soppy) book set in Malawi is The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer. In addition to being an inspiring memoir of a young inventor, it’s also a testament to the importance of libraries and librarians.
David Ewing Duncan’s From Cape to Cairo: An African Odyssey describes the bicycle trip he took in 1986 and 1987 in order to gauge the state of the continent. This is great reading for fans of two-wheeled travel.
Chimpanzee Travels: On and Off the Road in Africa by Dale Peterson is a winner: it’s a fabulous story of one man’s adventures across Africa to locate and then photograph chimpanzees.
In Betty Levitov’s Africa on Six Wheels: A Semester on Safari, the author describes a three-month tour of Africa as the leader of a group of college students.
Tanya Shaffer takes readers to several African countries, most notably Ghana, in Somebody’s Heart Is Burning: A Woman Wanderer in Africa.
The title and subtitle of Marie Javins’s Stalking the Wild Dik-Dik: One Woman’s Solo Misadventures in Africa says it all, except how engrossing the tale is.
Malaria Dreams: An African Adventure by Stuart Stevens is a wildly entertaining travelogue centering on returning a Land Rover to Europe, a goal that is complicated by killer ants, political unrest, and frenetic Peace Corps parties.
I think that any old excuse to read the exquisitely waspish Evelyn Waugh is to be taken (no matter how grungy the library copy is—and the copy of A Tourist in Africa I read was awfully grungy). I was totally charmed by his diary of a 1959 journey from Genoa to South Africa, via Kenya, Tanganyika, the Rhodesias (North and South), Mozambique, and Bechuanaland, and then back to Southampton, England. Here’s one of my favorite quotes, where he rues his age and how difficult it makes traveling:Nor is fifty-five the best age for travel; too old for the jungle, too young for the beaches, . . . There are few more fatiguing experiences than to mingle with the holiday-makers of the Jamaican North Shore, all older, fatter, richer, idler and more ugly than oneself. India is full of splendours that must be seen now or perhaps never, but can a man of fifty-five long endure a regime where wine is prohibited?
One of my favorite discoveries at a used bookstore where I was poking around for armchair travel reading was Peter Biddlecombe’s French Lessons in Africa: Travels with My Briefcase Through French Africa. In often hilarious and sometimes merely very funny anecdotes, Biddlecombe brings Francophone Africa, from Benin to Zaire, alive for us. Although this was published in 1994, not much of what Biddlecombe observed then has changed—or at least not changed for the better. If you can forget that depressing aspect, reading this is a delight.
And for an excellent and useful selection of recent writing from Africa, take a look at Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing, edited by Rob Spillman. It’s filled with authors both familiar (like Chinua Achebe) and unfamiliar to most of us (like Alain Mabanckou—or at least he was to me, before I read his selection).
Should you find yourself planning an excursion to Albania, the perfect accompaniment to the trip is Dorothy Gilman’s The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax, the first of a series (each novel is set in a different country).Widowed and bored with her life as a suburban woman-of-a-certain-age, she goes to the CIA head-quarters and volunteers to become a spy.Through a series of comic mishaps and misunderstandings, she’s sent to Albania to locate the whereabouts of an agent who has disappeared. In the process, you learn (painlessly) about the history, politics, and geography of a country that is typically regarded as a cipher to many people.
The major (and very prolific) Albanian writer—a poet and novelist—is Ismail Kadare, who won the Man Booker International Award in 2005, and some day, I believe, he’ll win the Nobel Prize for literature. Try The Siege (a historical novel about the fifteenth-century war with the Turks) or Chronicle in Stone (World War II in the life of a small boy and his vividly described town). The latter is one of those books that make you wish you could go back in time to spend a few moments in the place Kadare is describing.