Gail Pool's Blog, page 6

Review: The Most Beautiful Walk in the World

The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris By John Baxter. Harper Perennial, 2011, 298 pp. �After eating and sex, walking is Paris�s preferred activity,� says John Baxter, an Australian writer married to a Frenchwoman who has lived in Paris for more than 20 years and gives �literary walking tours� of the city. In The Most Beautiful Walk in the World, he treats readers to a walking tour. Baxter became a guide almost by chance, replacing a boring guide in the Paris Literary Sem...

Rudyard Kipling's Bad Trip

American Notes. By Rudyard Kipling. First published in 1891. Kindle Edition. Having read Charles Dickens�s American Notes, I decided to try Rudyard Kipling�s identically titled book, an account of a trip he made in 1889, some 50 years after Dickens�s excursion. What a letdown! I can�t say that I wasn�t warned. The introduction to the edition I read observes that these �Notes�are considered so far beneath Mr. Kipling�s real work that they have been nearly suppressed and are rarely found in a l...

Review: American Notes

American Notes for General Circulation. By Charles Dickens. Project Gutenberg. Charles Dickens�s account of his 1842 tour of America is, as I expected, a lively travelog. It is also, as I hoped, an insightful commentary that offers enlightening, if dispiriting, links between the country�s early days and its present. Dickens spent six months in America, and American Notes covers a lot of ground, recording where he goes, how he gets there, what he sees, and what he thinks of it all. He admires...

"The Eye-Openers," by Hilaire Belloc

In "The Eye-Openers," an astute essay in his collection First and Last, Hilaire Belloc argues that too often travelers find "what they have read of at home instead of what they really see." He complains that "printer's ink ends by actually preventing one from seeing things that are there." We're so committed to the "wretched tags" we've acquired that we can't see past them. I agree--it's hard to shed preconceptions, and also hard to really look at what's in front of us. Belloc doesn't go as f...

Review: The Lady and the Panda

The Lady and the Panda: The True Adventures of the First American Explorer to Bring Back China�s Most Exotic Animal By Vicki Constantine Croke. Random House, 2009, 402 pp. In the 1930s, the adventurers who sought to capture wild animals�either dead, for natural history museums, or alive, for zoos�were mainly young men from wealthy, upper-class families. Ruth Harkness did not fit into this group: she was a party-loving New York dress designer with no trekking experience, she wasn�t rich, and,...

Review: Afoot in England

Afoot in England By William Henry Hudson. Originally published in 1909. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013. (The edition I read but do not recommend�see review.) The practice of walking in the countryside, or rambling, has been popular in England since the 18th century, and William Henry Hudson (1841-1922) was an influential figure in the field of walking tours. For Hudson, these excursions were more than a hobby. They were part of his vocation�as a naturalist, an ornithologist...

The Green Unknown: Travels in the Khasi Hills

The Green Unknown: Travels in the Khasi Hills By Patrick Rogers. Westland, Kindle Edition, Amazon Digital Services LLC, 2017. Patrick Rogers began trekking in the Khasi Hills in northeastern India in 2010, and he has returned many times since, drawn by the beauty of the region, with its canyons, its waterfalls, its raging rivers, and, above, all its living root bridges. These extraordinary bridges, trained from the roots of the ficus elastica, can reach a length of nearly 200 feet and rise al...

Travel Writing Upgraded

According to a review in the Times Literary Supplement, the new academic term for travel writing is "literary-mobility studies." Only in academia! I love it!

Review: Two Years Before the Mast

Two Years Before the Mast By Richard Henry Dana (This book is available in many editions. I read it online on The Project Gutenberg.) Richard Henry Dana is buried in an old Cambridge churchyard just down the street from my house, and I�ve passed his gravestone hundreds of times. Yet I never paid much attention to it, and until a friend recommended Two Years Before the Mast, I had never read his classic work. Indeed, not only had I never read it, I thought it was a novel! In fact, of course, t...

Abroad, by Thomas Crane and Ellen Houghton

Abroad By Thomas Crane and Ellen Houghton. 1882. Reprinted in various editions. Abroad is a beautifully illustrated children�s book in verse that tells the story of an English family�s trip to France. Their mother died three years earlier, and every spring their father tries to give them �some tour, or treat, or pleasant thing��and their journey is this year�s gift. Their trip takes them to Boulogne, Rouen, Caen, and Paris, where they visit the Tuileries and Luxembourg Gardens, the zoo, and t...