From the category archives:

Travel Books

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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Book Review – Off the Beaten Subway Track

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You might think you know New York City well, but until you’ve checked out a few of the attractions unearthed in Off the Beaten (Subway) Track: New York City’s Best Unusual Attractions by Suzanne Reisman, then you’ve really only just skimmed the surface.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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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500 Journeys of a Lifetime Might Be Too Many

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The National Geographic coffee table book Journeys of a Lifetime: 500 of the World’s Greatest Trips is big, heavy, and pretty exciting to open up for any lovers of travel. It’s full of colorful pictures, intriguing maps and enticing paragraphs explaining why we should head to a particular destination; each journey also includes a bullet [...]

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Exploring Mongolia with Jasper Becker

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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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Backpacking Basics for First-Timers

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Budget backpacking may be all that’s left for many of us when the world financial crisis hits our travel plans, so although Shane Gladigau’s new book Backpacker Basics: For Your First International Trip might be targeted at 18 – 25 year olds, the market might have just got a lot broader.

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Understanding Afghanistan Through “The Places in Between”

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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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Travel Deals of the Week January 26 2008

Here’s a list of travel deals for the week of January 26 2008.

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Chasing Doctor Who in Britain

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

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

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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

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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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Walking in the Palestinian Hills

Most would consider the hills of Palestine and the nearby Gaza Strip and West Bank areas more suitable for armchair travels than real ones, and that means that Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape is set up just right. Shehadeh has lived in the region for most of his life and knows [...]

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Hints on Taking the First Big Trip

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With gap year travel becoming so popular and more and more young people finding time between school, college and working life to get out on the road for an extended period of time, the concept of the new Lonely Planet book The Big Trip should definitely interest a few readers. It’s the first edition of [...]

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Lonely Planet Tips for Best Travel in 2009 Review

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Lonely Planet is making a habit of publishing lists of must-visit travel spots and there’s another one just out: Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel 2009. This book of lists is said to contain some 850 different destinations arranged in various lists, including in a special section on water, with 75 ideas for “water-related travel”.

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Live and Eat in Italy with Michael Tucker

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What does an actor do when he’s got (nearly) enough money and enough time to do what he wants? Some might buy a second home in France but Michael Tucker (of LA Law fame) decided to buy a house in Italy. Not only that, but he also wrote a book about it, resulting in Living [...]

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Getting Inside London’s Natural History Museum – Travel Book Review

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You might have thought that the secret life of a natural history museum is what you see in the Ben Stiller movie Night at the Museum, but science writer Richard Fortey tells the real truth in his book Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum. Fortey worked at London’s [...]

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Understanding the Real Sydney

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30 Days in Sydney: A Distorted Account by well-known Australian writer Peter Carey is not, as the title might suggest, a traveler’s guide book for how to spend thirty days in Australia’s biggest city. It’s something much different, loosely framed on Carey’s thirty-day stay in Sydney while he lived abroad in New York.

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Travel Wise, Travel Safe Book Review

The new Travel Wise: How to be Safe, Savvy and Secure Abroad by Ray S. Leki is a sometimes entertaining and sometimes heavy going reference handbook. It is designed to help travelers in general, and especially frequent travelers or business travelers, to ensure their safety while abroad.

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New Rough Guides for 2008

If you’re a fan of Rough Guides travel guides, you might be interested in knowing what destinations are getting new books during 2008

Back in May, Rough Guides published their new guide to Buenos Aires. It’s their first edition for this city and includes outlying suburbs as well as downtown BA, and claims to have better [...]

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Serve the People: Jen Lin-Liu on Cooking in China

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Plenty of travelers are also big fans of eating, and especially of trying the local cuisine – which makes Jen Lin-Liu’s new book Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China sound very interesting. Since Lin-Liu has gone on to found the Black Sesame Cooking School in Beijing, she seems the right person to write [...]

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