Gail Pool's Blog, page 2
November 28, 2020
Review: An Inland Voyage
An Inland Voyage
By Robert Louis Stevenson. Introduction by Ian Correa. Digireads.com. 2011. Originally published, 1878.
Although Robert Louis Stevenson is best known today for his fiction, he loved to travel, and his writings include a great deal of wonderful travel literature. "I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move," he wrote. And it is clear in An Inland Voyage—as it was in Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes and The Amateur Emigrant, both of which I previously ...
October 19, 2020
Book Recommendation
Recommended by a friend: Lost in Shangri-La, by Mitchell Zuckoff, the story of a WWII mission to rescue survivors of an American military plane crash in Dutch New Guinea.
August 8, 2020
Review: If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name: News from Small-Town Alaska
If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name: News from Small-Town Alaska
By Heather Lende. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2005, 282 pp.
Haines, Alaska is the focus of Heather Lende's book, and though the town may be small, it abounds in contradictions.
The area is so beautiful that John Muir, who visited in 1879, warned young people to stay away from the region because after seeing it, other places would forever disappoint them. But,says Lende, it is also "isolated, cloudy, and cold."
...
June 22, 2020
Review: Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills
Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills
By Neil Ansell. Kindle Edition, Penguin, 2011, 207 pp.
When he was thirty, Neil Ansell undertook an extreme adventure. He moved into an old Victorian gamekeeper's cottage, situated in one of the least populated regions in Britain. Without electricity, gas, running water, or plumbing, Penlan Cottage—uninhabited for decades—had only some basic furnishings, and Ansell brought nothing with him beyond some clothes. "I wanted to know how lightly I c...
May 29, 2020
Review: An Area of Darkness
An Area of Darkness
By V. S. Naipaul. Vintage, Random House, first published 1964, 291 pp. (Kindle Edition)
Although V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, his family originally came from India, and in the early '60s, the author made his first journey to the subcontinent. An Area of Darkness chronicles this year of travel, which took him to Bombay, Delhi, Kashmir, and eventually to the small village that his grandfather left as an indentured laborer more than 60 years before.
As Naipaul ...
March 29, 2020
Review: Tales of Remarkable Birds
Tales of Remarkable Birds
By Dominic Couzens. Bloomsbury, 2015, 224 pp.
In this beautifully illustrated book, the naturalist and bird guide Dominic Couzens takes readers on a world tour of some fascinating avian lives. It is, he says, a "small taster for a great feast." So many birds, so many extraordinary traits!
But selecting for geographic breadth, a wide range of behaviors, and his own preferences (he likes handsome birds), Couzens has chosen well. Some of the birds are familiar,...
February 1, 2020
Review: London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets
London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets
By Peter Ackroyd. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2011, 228 pp.
As Peter Ackroyd observes in London Under, most pedestrians give little thought to the underworld that lies beneath their feet. It is a world at once "sequestered and forbidden," and it seems to leave us indifferent.
Ackroyd proposes to penetrate that indifference in this Secret History Beneath the Streets. Having written previously about the city of London aboveground—in London: A...
January 4, 2020
Links of Interest
Article on Svalbard (Spitsbergen) in the New York Times Travel Section today, January 5th, 2020. My husband has collected many old maps of Spitsbergen--this1728 chart by Gerard van Keulen is one of the most beautiful.
January 1, 2020
Travel Quotation
"I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind."
--G.K. Chesterton,What I Saw in America
December 17, 2019
Review: The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod
The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod
By Henry Beston. Introduction by Robert Finch. First published 1928, Doubleday and Doran. Reprinted, Henry Holt, 2003, 256 pp. I read the Kindle Edition.
In 1925, Henry Beston bought around 50 acres on the dunes of Eastham on Cape Cod. He had a two-room cottage built, which he called the Fo'castle and intended to use only for brief visits.
But arriving there the following year for a two-week stay, he found that he couldn't...
