Gail Pool's Blog, page 9
February 9, 2017
Maps as Travel Writing
This rare map showing exploratory routes towards the North Pole as of 1909 includes the routes of Frederick Albert Cook and Robert Peary, each of whom claimed to be the first to reach the Pole. In the conflict that ensued, the courts ruled that Cook's records offered insufficient proof of his claim and awarded the honor to Peary. But a later explorer, Wally Herbert, concluded in 1989 that Peary was mistaken, and that though he came close--within 60 miles--he didn't in fact reach the Pole. Tha...
January 30, 2017
Reading Around the World: Great Photos
Steve McCurry: On Reading
offers unexpected, quirky, humorous, wonderful photos of reading around the world. The book has a foreword by Paul Theroux.
January 27, 2017
Review: Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart
Blood River: A Journey to Africa�s Broken Heart By Tim Butcher. Grove Press, 2007, 2008, 363 pp. After Tim Butcher, a war correspondent, was appointed Africa Correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, he became obsessed with Henry Morton Stanley, the great explorer�and not-so-great human being�who was also sent to Africa by The Telegraph more than a hundred years before. Although most famous for finding David Livingstone in 1871 (�Dr. Livingstone, I presume�), Stanley achieved something more sign...
January 22, 2017
Books, Travel, A Literary Hotel
""This Hotel With 50,000 Books Is A Literary Lovers Dream Come True. Oh, and theres a gin bar too. Thanks to the Huffington Post and Longitude Books for the link.
January 11, 2017
Review: Bones of the Master: A Journey to Secret Mongolia
Bones of the Master: A Journey to Secret Mongolia By George Crane. Bantam, 2000, 293 pp. Bones of the Master, an engrossing story of a pilgrimage, revolves around Tsung Tsai, an extraordinary Buddhist monk, who fled Mongolia in 1959, when Chinese communists were destroying monasteries and killing monks. In 1995, now living in upstate New York, he decides he must return to his homeland, find the bones of his teacher, and properly cremate and build a stupa for them in the cave where his teacher...
December 29, 2016
Counting the Cats in Zanzibar: Travel Quotation
Thinking about Thoreau, after reviewing Walking towards Walden (below), I decided this was a good time to quote his famous passage from Walden itself: It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhaps find some "Symmes' Hole" by which to get at the inside at last. England and France, Spain and Portugal, Gold Coast and Slave Coast, all front on this private sea; but no bark from them has ventured out of s...
December 28, 2016
Review: Walking towards Walden: A Pilgrimage in Search of Place
Walking towards Walden: A Pilgrimage in Search of Place By John Hanson Mitchell. Addison-Wesley, 1995, 301 pp. There never was a more passionate pilgrim, a deeper explorer of the wilderness of the nearby than Henry Thoreau, says John Hanson Mitchell in this delightful account of a saunter, as he calls his hike from Westford, Massachusetts to Concord. Mitchell, a naturalist, is himself an explorer of the wilderness of the nearbythree of his books explore one square mile in eastern Massachusett...
December 14, 2016
Review: The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters with Strangers
The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters with Strangers By Eric Hansen. Vintage Departures, 2004, 228 pp. Some travel writers recount trips that are accessible, doable: they describe places we might visit and inspire us to take similar trips ourselves. Other travel writerslike Eric Hansendescribe journeys most of us will never take. We read their work from a different perspective, glad that they have taken these journeys for us and shared the experience. Hansen is an adventurer, a li...
November 23, 2016
Review: Dispatches from the Ends of the Earth
Road Less Traveled: Dispatches from the Ends of the Earth By Catherine Watson. Syren Book Company, 2005, 282 pp. Catherine Watson sensed her vocation early. By high school, she writes in her authors note, I thought of myself as a tourist in life, someone whose actual earthly purpose was going away. Only later, when Id become a journalist, did I comprehend the rest of the assignment: coming back and telling about it. In Roads Less Traveled, she conveys her enthusiasm both for the traveling and...
