Gail Pool's Blog, page 21
April 25, 2015
Travel Quotation
Sometimes journeys begin long before their first step is taken.
―Colin Thubron
Goodreads Giveaway
April 10, 2015
Book Review
The Last Grain Race
By Eric Newby. First published 1956. William Collins, 2014, 235 pp. The Last Grain Race was Eric Newbys first book, but it already has the essence of the travel works that would follow: the challenging journey, the wonderfully precise writing, the self-deprecating modesty, and, perhaps above all, the humor. In 1938, at the age of 18, fed up with his London job at an advertising agency and inspired by a friends eccentric fatherwho he is convinced was a member of the British...
April 2, 2015
Birds-of-Paradise
Please take a look at the amazing Birds-of-Paradise video on my Lost Among the Baining Facebook page
April 1, 2015
Book Review
Whatever You Do, Dont Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide.
By Peter Allison. Lyons Press, 2007, 2014. 272 pp. The contemporary African safari is a fascinating mix of the natural and the artificial, the wild and the touristic. Peter Allison captures these contradictions in Whatever You Do, Dont Run, the first of several books he has written about his adventures as a safari guide. Allison would not have seemed a likely candidate for a guide when he arrived in Africa from Sydney, Australi...
March 24, 2015
Book Review
Arctic Adventure: My Life in the Frozen North
By Peter Freuchen. Introduction by Gretel Ehrlich. Echo Point Books and Media. 400 pp. Arctic Adventure isnt strictly a travel book. But then travel itself isnt a strictly defined categoryit so often bleeds into memoir, autobiography, history. Freuchens book is all of these and ethnography as well. In 1910 he left his native Denmark to set up a trading post in north Greenland with the explorer Knud Rasmussen, and over the next 14 years he settled...
March 9, 2015
Book Review
The Way of the World
By Nicolas Bouvier. Translated from the French by Robyn Marsack. Introduction by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Drawings by Thierry Vernet. Originally self-published in Geneva, Switzerland in 1963 as L'Usage du Monde. New York Review Classics, 1992, 318 pp.
It's tempting to gush over The Way of the World by Nicolas Bouvier. The two blurbs on my paperback edition, both from respectable reviews, call the work a masterpiece, as does the great travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor in his...
By Nicolas Bouvier. Translated from the French by Robyn Marsack. Introduction by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Drawings by Thierry Vernet. Originally self-published in Geneva, Switzerland in 1963 as L'Usage du Monde. New York Review Classics, 1992, 318 pp.
It's tempting to gush over The Way of the World by Nicolas Bouvier. The two blurbs on my paperback edition, both from respectable reviews, call the work a masterpiece, as does the great travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor in his...
February 22, 2015
Travel Quotation
"Travelling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you�or unmaking you."
―Nicolas Bouvier, The Way of the World
―Nicolas Bouvier, The Way of the World
February 20, 2015
Book Review
Covered Wagon Women: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1840-1849. Volume 1.
Edited and compiled by Kenneth L. Holmes. Introduction by Anne M. Butler. University of Nebraska Press, 1983, 1996, 280 pp.
Like other American youngsters, I learned about the 19th-century pioneers heading west seeking a new and better life. But my knowledge about their travels was limited, an abstract concept. I certainly had no sense of the remarkable journeys fleshed out by the pioneers themselves in the...
Edited and compiled by Kenneth L. Holmes. Introduction by Anne M. Butler. University of Nebraska Press, 1983, 1996, 280 pp.
Like other American youngsters, I learned about the 19th-century pioneers heading west seeking a new and better life. But my knowledge about their travels was limited, an abstract concept. I certainly had no sense of the remarkable journeys fleshed out by the pioneers themselves in the...
February 18, 2015
Facebook page
My new book, Lost Among the Baining: Adventure, Marriage, and Other Fieldwork, is now on Facebook
