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Travel Books

Book Review: The Hidden Magic of Walt Disney World

August 18, 2009
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Susan Veness, author of The Hidden Magic of Walt Disney World, has something in common with the author of another recent review, Mousejunkies. She also first visited Walt Disney World as a child, and also wasn’t properly captured by the magic until she returned as an adult.

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Book Review: Fun on Foot in New York

August 11, 2009
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Fun on Foot in New York, by Warwick and Nola Ford, has a long but informative subtitle: “The runners’ and walkers’ guide to New York City and its surrounds in New York State and New Jersey”. This basically sums up exactly what this book is about.
The introductory section of Fun on Foot gives useful background [...]

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Book Review: Mousejunkies!

July 21, 2009
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There are plenty of Disney World guides out there – and some people would argue that a theme park visitor doesn’t really need to read a whole guide book before a visit – but at least Bill Burke’s Mousejunkies! Tips, Tales and Tricks for a Disney World Fix makes the tips and tricks entertaining – [...]

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Book Review: A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean

July 14, 2009
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A book with the Travelers’ Tales imprint is often a reliably good read, but just come across one that’s better than good – it’s one of the funniest books I’ve read in ages. Gary Buslik’s A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean, with its long but important subtitle, “A grump in paradise discovers that any place [...]

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Book Review: The Shark God, in the South Pacific

July 8, 2009
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Melanesia is a part of the world that not many people get the opportunity to travel to, tucked away in the south-western corner of the Pacific Ocean near Australia – it’s a region including Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. From his childhood, author Charles Montgomery had exotic visions of Melanesia gained [...]

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Highlights from 2009 Rough Guides Catalog

June 30, 2009
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If you buy one of these travel guide books from Rough Guides, you can be at least reasonably sure that the information inside is not too far out of date, because they’ve all been published in the first half of 2009:

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Book Review: Ray Mears Goes Walkabout

June 23, 2009
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British bushcraft and survival expert Ray Mears is probably one of the most appropriate people to write a book about wandering through the Australian outback, and his book Ray Mears Goes Walkabout was published recently to accompany a BBC TV series of the same name.

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Book Review: Sing, and Don’t Cry: A Mexican Journal

June 16, 2009
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Sing, and Don’t Cry: A Mexican Journal by Australian writer Cate Kennedy is the kind of travel narrative that will interest you deeply, but either make you want to run off to an exotic location as a volunteer, or stay firmly forever at home.

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Book Review: One Planet from Lonely Planet

June 9, 2009
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The old adage that says a picture is worth a thousand words seems to hold true especially well for travel. Browsing through Lonely Planet’s One Planet: Inspirational Travel Photographs, a collection of some of the best photos from the Lonely Planet Images Library, will give you plenty of inspiration for your future travels; alternatively, you [...]

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Book Review: Rick Steves’ Germany 2009

June 2, 2009
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Germany’s cities are not sexy destinations like Paris or Rome, but they certainly have a lot to offer – and that’s the message that comes through in the most recent Rick Steves’ Germany 2009 guide. With some cities given a real boost, others, however, are not spoken of so highly, and most of the country [...]

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Book Review: Drink Play F@#k

May 26, 2009
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Drink, Play, F@#k: One Man’s Search for Anything Across Ireland, Vegas and Thailand by Andrew Gottlieb keeps ending up in the travel narrative shelves – not least of all because it’s clearly cheekily reminiscent of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love – and it reads like a travel narrative too. Traveler Bob Sullivan, the “one man” [...]

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Book Review: 500 Places to See Before They Disappear

May 19, 2009
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Frommer’s 500 Places to See Before They Disappear by Holly Hughes is another in a long list of “must see” books doing the rounds of the the travel shelves in the last few years. This one says it is intended for eco-tourists who are keen to visit places that are affected by environmental change or [...]

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Book Review: Strange Telescopes in Moscow

May 12, 2009
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There are ever more travel narratives coming out of Russia, and Strange Telescopes: Following the Apocalypse from Moscow to Siberia, the new book by Daniel Kalder, is certainly one of the more unusual ones – in fact the “strange” of the title is definitely an apt adjective.

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Book Review: Three Men in A Float, Across England

May 5, 2009
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Hopping on the topical bandwagon of “slow travel” meant, for British writers Dan Kieran and Ian Vince, driving the full width of England in an electric milk float. This adventure led to the new book Three Men in a Float: Across England at 15mph, a somewhat mad and often hilarious discovery of England and its [...]

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Book Review: Murderers in Mausoleums

April 28, 2009
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As Jeffrey Tayler points out in his new book Murderers in Mausoleums: Riding the Back Roads of Empire Between Moscow and Beijing, we hear a whole lot about Moscow and Beijing in the news these days – and thousands more tourists visit each city every month – but we don’t hear much at all about [...]

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Book Review: On The Scent Trail Around the World

April 21, 2009
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Celia Lyttelton has a new travel narrative book out that follows what’s becoming a fairly familiar route – travel writer gets something, then travels to where it came from. But the twist on this is that what Lyttelton “gets” is a scent: a special perfume created exclusively for her, using scents that originate from many [...]

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Book Review: Walk Around the British Coasts

April 14, 2009
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You may not have had a chance to see the television series that inspired this book, but if you’re planning a trip to any part of Britain then taking a look at the Coast: The Walks book put out by the BBC will give you lots of ideas for walking outings along British coasts. You [...]

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Book Review – Make the Most of Your Time on Earth – Rough Guide

March 31, 2009
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One of the biggest trends in travel books in the last couple of years are those “see before you die” list books, and although I usually shy away from them, I’ve found some lately that are actually pretty inspiring. One of them is Make the Most of Your Time on Earth: A Rough Guide to [...]

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Book Review Beijing Confidential by Jan Wong

March 24, 2009
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With this decade’s Olympic interest in Beijing having already reached its peak, I still found a lot of reasons to read Jan Wong’s Beijing Confidential: Lost and Found in the Forbidden City. Jan Wong is not exactly a local, but she’s of Chinese origin and has spent many years both living in and reporting about [...]

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New 2009 Travel Guides from Lonely Planet

March 17, 2009
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Guidebook publisher Lonely Planet has a bunch of new kinds of books coming out during 2009 – and a lot the emphasis seems to be on getting you a lot of information in a short time. There must be a growing market of travelers who want short web-like hits of information without the anecdotes of [...]

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Lonely Planet Predicts 2009 Trends – Book Review

March 10, 2009
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List books really are dominating the travel book shelves these days, and here’s another one: Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel 2009: 850 Trends, Destinations, Journeys and Experiences for the Year Ahead. The nice thing is that this book is well worth a look – of course, not for planning your trip but for getting some [...]

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Travel Book Review: Good Advice for Traveling With Young Children

March 3, 2009
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Many new parents – even those who were travel addicts – might decide that the time in which their children are under five years old is a time to stay home and take small, simple vacations. They need to read the new Rough Guide to Travel With Babies and Young Children for a bit of [...]

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Beautiful Travel Reading with Arabesques

February 24, 2009
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The new Robert Dessaix book Arabesques: A Tale of Double Lives is a beautiful book in many ways. Not only is the layout expansive and generous, but the pictures that illustrate it are gorgeous too. The fact that it’s such an attractive book makes it immediately more readable, and the tales of Dessaix’s travels are [...]

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Theroux’s New Railway Journeys

February 17, 2009
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Whether you love or hate Paul Theroux, you can’t really argue with the fact that he’s one of the most influential travel writers over the past century. I simultaneously like and dislike him – I absolutely admire his travel writing, but am not sure I’d be friends with his personality if we ever met up. [...]

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Exploring Mongolia with Jasper Becker

February 3, 2009
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Jasper Becker is an enthusiast who was one of the first Western travelers to explore Mongolia after Westerners got easier access to the country in 1990, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mongolia: Travels in the Untamed Land is the result of Becker’s travels and the book starts out with a potted history of [...]

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Understanding Afghanistan Through “The Places in Between”

January 27, 2009
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Crazy people making crazy trips do the rest of us a good service – we can experience their adventures vicariously without the dangers and hassles. And Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between is a great example of this.
Stewart had decided to walk across northern Asia but a canceled visa had him take a circuitous route, [...]

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Chasing Doctor Who in Britain

December 16, 2008

You probably have to be a science fiction fan to enjoy the new travel narrative Who Goes There: Travels Through Strangest Britain in Search of the Doctor, the second book by Doctor Who fan Nick Griffiths. It’s a nice concept: he’s picked out the sites used by the long-running Doctor Who television series and traveled [...]

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Make Your Travel Life-Changing By Traveling Magically

December 9, 2008

Travelling Magically: How To Turn Your Journey Into a Life-Changing Experience is a new book that’s a bit different to most of the books you find on the travel shelves, but I think there might be quite a big niche for it. It’s basically about how you can travel using your intuition, and whether or [...]

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Angus Bell Bats on the Bosphorus – An Eastern Europe Tour

December 4, 2008
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Writing a book about playing the very British game of cricket in a series of Eastern European countries certainly sounds like a pretty specific niche: the funny thing is that Angus Bell makes it eminently readable for pretty much any travel (or sports) lover in his book Batting on the Bosphorus: A Skoda-Powered Cricket Tour [...]

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A Greasy and Green Ride Across the US

December 2, 2008
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Great travel books often arise out of journeys that are a little bit odd. Driving an old car right across the United States is not especially odd, but when it’s powered by the leftover fat and grease from fast food restaurants, then it’s certainly a bit unusual. And that’s the premise behind journalist Greg Melville’s [...]

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