From the category archives:

Travel Books

Book Review: Plane Insanity

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A lot of us dream about becoming a flight attendant when we’re younger, but for the few who turn their dream into reality, they might just find that the reality is not quite as romantic as we like to believe. And if the book Plane Insanity: A Flight Attendant’s Tale of Sex, Rage and Queasiness [...]

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Book Review: 500 Places to Take Your Kids

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Better than many of the current flock of “places to go before …” travel guide books, Frommer’s 500 Places to Take Your Kids Before They Grow Up by Holly Hughes and Julie Duchaine makes a sensible point: there are some places that you can visit that your kids might enjoy the most while they are [...]

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Book Review: Beijing Blur

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With so many books on travel in China coming out these days, it’s clear that we readers have a fascination with this important country; even though not that many of us have visited China yet, we all want to read about it. And for a modern look at some “real life” for a foreigner in [...]

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Book Review: Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons

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Italy’s a common destination for travel writers, but not so many of them head to Siciliy and decide to circumnavigate it on a Vespa scooter. But that’s what British travel and food writer Matthew Fort did and it led to his book Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons: Travels in Sicily on a Vespa.

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Book Review: The Ethical Travel Guide

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The new 2009 edition of The Ethical Travel Guide: Your Passport to Exciting Alternative Holidays by Polly Pattullo and Orely Minelli starts with forty pages of discussion on the topic of ethical travel, written by Polly Pattullo. There are facts and figures on the state of tourism in the world at the moment, and then [...]

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Book Review: A Country in the Moon

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Michael Moran’s A Country in the Moon: Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland is the kind of travel book that can inspire an armchair traveler to want to visit a place they’ve never had a special interest in before – and that’s because this is a literary travel narrative, written beautifully and with [...]

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Book Review: Frommer’s Ecuador & the Galapagos Islands

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With a close friend about to embark on a month in Ecuador including a trip to one of the destinations I’ve always wanted to get to, the Galapagos Islands, I thought it was a good time to look at the new second edition of the Frommer’s Ecuador & the Galapagos Islands guide. The front cover [...]

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Book Review: Seeing Central Park

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By far one of the most famous parks in the world, if not the most famous, is New York’s Central Park – and if you either aren’t able to get to New York to visit it just yet, or if you’re there and you want to understand every detail of it, then the beautiful new [...]

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Book Review: Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

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Susan Jane Gilmore, now a successful writer, was a mere college graduate when she and her college friend Claire decided to buy a backpack and travel around the world after finishing their degrees. That was in 1986, just a year after I also made my first overseas trip, and their first stop was the same [...]

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Book Review: The Best Travel Writing 2009

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One of my favorite gifts for armchair travelers is the annual compilation of travel stories put out by the people at Travelers’ Tales, and The Best Travel Writing 2009: True Stories From Around the World lives up to my expectations.

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Book Review: Burma, The Alternative Guide

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Burma, also known as Myanmar, is usually in the headlines to highlight its democratic problems and the struggle of Aung San Suu Kyi, and there are some groups which advocate travelers should avoid making visits to Burma. However, for those who decide it’s a good idea to get to know this country better, Elena Jotow [...]

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Book Review: The Hidden Magic of Walt Disney World

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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

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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: Night + Day Athens

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Pulse Guides recently started a Night + Day series of guide books and one of their first was Joyce-Ann Gatsoulis’s Night + Day Athens. The goal behind the Night + Day books, which are part of the Cool Cities Series, is to provide travelers with not only the typical daytime sights to see, but also [...]

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Book Review: In Search of King Solomon’s Mines

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Travels through Africa tend to make for fascinating travel narratives because the depths of Africa are usually places that fewer of us get to – and for that reason alone Tahir Shah’s In Search of King Solomon’s Mines: A Quest in Ethiopia is already a great armchair travel story. The premise, too, is a great [...]

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Book Review: Mousejunkies!

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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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