Gail Pool's Blog, page 3
November 24, 2019
Review: My First Summer in the Sierra
My First Summer in the Sierra
By John Muir. Houghton Mifflin, 1911, 272 pp. Gutenberg Project: The Writings of John Muir, Sierra Edition, Volume II, 1917. With photographs by Herbert W. Gleason and Charles S. Olcott, and sketches by the author.
Was there ever anyone more exhilarated by nature than John Muir?
"Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days," he writes in My First Summer in the Sierra. "Days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show...
October 13, 2019
More on American Road Trips!
From Atlas Obscura:
The Obsessively Detailed Map of American Literature's Most Epic Road Trips
BY RICHARD KREITNER (WRITER), STEVEN MELENDEZ (MAP)
JULY 20, 2015
Atlas Obscura offers a list of road trip books along with an intricate map that charts the journeys described in the books-- "a painstaking and admittedly quixotic effort," says the author. This website is definitely worth a visit.
October 11, 2019
When the Drive Matters More Than the Destination
When the Drive Matters More Than the Destination:
Brief article in the New York Times about road trips, journeys much written about--by Kerouac, of course, and many others, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, pictured here with Zelda.
October 2, 2019
Review: After Hannibal
After Hannibal
By Barry Unsworth.
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 1997. 250 pp.
We tend to think of travel literature as nonfiction—travelogues, guides, histories of countries, memoirs of experiences abroad. But fiction, whether written by natives or foreigners, can offer equal insight into places and cultures, especially when the author is as intelligent and skillful as Barry Unsworth.
Unsworth's twelfth novel, After Hannibal, revolves around six households that share one of Italy's many str...
August 21, 2019
Review: The Gentle Art of Tramping
The Gentle Art of Tramping
By Stephen Graham. Originally published by Robert Holden & Co., Ltd., 1927, 264 pp. (with a dozen blank pages for "Notes by the Wayside"). Re-issued in 2019 by Bloomsbury Reader, foreword by Alastair Humphreys. Available on Kindle.
First published in 1927 and recently re-issued, The Gentle Art of Tramping, by the British travel writer Stephen Graham (1884-1975) is a terrific and timeless guide, at once practical and spiritual, to tramping.
And what, you...
July 15, 2019
Review: Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg
Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg
By James M. McPherson. Crown Journeys, 2009, 144 pp
"Perhaps no word in the American language has greater historical resonance than Gettysburg," writes the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Civil War historian, James M. McPherson. "For some people Lexington and Concord, or Bunker Hill, or Yorktown, or Omaha Beach would be close rivals. But more Americans visit Gettysburg each year than any of these other battlefields—perhaps than all of them combined."
Indeed...
July 2, 2019
Review: First Fieldwork: The Misadventures of an Anthropologist
First Fieldwork: The Misadventures of an Anthropologist
By Barbara Gallatin Anderson. Waveland Press, 1990, 150 pp.
What is it like to travel as an anthropologist, living in a foreign culture for a year, as both observer and participant?
As Barbara Gallatin Anderson says, the traditional anthropological monograph has done little to answer that question. With some exceptions, most anthropologists writing scholarly monographs about the societies they lived in have revealed little about t...
June 18, 2019
Review: The White Darkness
The White Darkness
By David Grann. Doubleday, 2018, 143 pp.
Antarctica, an obsession for past explorers, was also an obsession for a contemporary adventurer, Henry Worsley, a military man who served with the British Special Air Service and idolized Ernest Shackleton. A distantly-related descendant of Frank Worsley, who accompanied Shackleton on the Endurance expedition, Henry read everything he could about the great explorer, collected pertinent memorabilia, and strove to complete Shackle...
June 11, 2019
If Seeing the World Helps Ruin It, Should We Stay Home?
This New York Times essay offers a climate-change perspective on travel. I'm wondering how these concerns will affect not only the way we travel but also the way we write, and read, about travel.
May 2, 2019
Postscript to Review of Empire Antarctica
The Emperor Penguins have now all but abandoned the colony at Halley Bay described in Empire Antarctica, which I reviewed last month. Terrible news.
