From the category archives:

Travel Books

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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Travel Deals of the Week January 26 2008

January 26, 2009

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

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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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Walking in the Palestinian Hills

November 28, 2008

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

November 20, 2008
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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

November 13, 2008
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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

October 31, 2008
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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

October 30, 2008
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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

October 30, 2008
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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

October 23, 2008

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

October 16, 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

October 9, 2008
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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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Newest Guide Book Offerings from Bradt

October 2, 2008
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Bradt Travel Guides, coming out of Britain, have developed a good repuation for covering the more unusual destinations across the world or more traveled places with a unique viewpoint, and for covering all of these with detailed information and balanced coverage. They’ve been expanding in recent years and in the last few months, a number [...]

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Lonely Planet’s Year of Festivals Book Review

September 25, 2008
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Deciding where to go on your next big trip is sometimes difficult – it’s a big, wide world out there. But now that I’ve got a copy of Lonely Planet’s new A Year of Festivals: A Guide To Having the Time of Your Life, choosing a destination gets easy, and it all depends on the [...]

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Italy Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time to Simon Capp

September 18, 2008
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With an internet-based translating job and a young family, Simon Capp thought it was a great time to take over and live abroad for a year or so, and that’s how the book Italy? It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time was born.

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747 Things to Keep You Busy In Flight

September 11, 2008
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It’s pretty hard to find anyone who really enjoys flying these days: whether it’s checking in, waiting at the boarding gate for a delayed flight, being up in the air or waiting for your luggage at the other end, there’s a lot of moments where boredom can set in.

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The Weird Guide Book to Australia: Cassowary Crossing

September 2, 2008
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There are hundreds of travel guides to the great continent Down Under, but not many that focus on the more unusual sightseeing spots like where you can watch the annual wheelbarrow pushing race, famous spots where miracles have taken place or where the oldest fish farm in the country is. If that’s the kind of [...]

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Finding Nino in Italy – Book Review

August 14, 2008

Marc Llewellyn’s new book Finding Nino tells the story of Llewellyn, his wife, new-born baby and dog moving to the Italian island of Lipari. Spending a year or two in a Mediterranean country is not really the makings of a new and original travel story, although many of the most famous predecessors seem to focus [...]

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On a Boat With Mr Ding’s Chicken Feet – Book Review

August 7, 2008

ravelers who teach English as a second language to get around are a dime a dozen, and more of them are producing books about their experiences: but Gillian Kendall’s Mr Ding’s Chicken Feet is a bit more than “just another English teacher’s trip”.

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The Man in Seat 61 is Now A Book

July 31, 2008

Mark Smith, also known as The Man in Seat 61, is iconic in European travelers’ circles for developing his incredibly comprehensive website, www.seat61.com. This site started as a kind of personal database explaining in a straightforward way how to travel by train anywhere in Europe, and now beyond as well. Smith’s personal preference for seat [...]

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Enjoy France Through a Summer in Gascony

July 24, 2008

There’s beginning to be a long tradition of travel narratives depicting glorious summers in the French countryside, and before you pick up Martin Calder’s A Summer in Gascony: Discovering the Other South of France you might be rather suspicious that this is just another one of them. In some ways it is, but that’s not [...]

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Miller Finds the Way to Amarillo

July 17, 2008

People the world over have heard of places like Tucson, Arizona or Nutbush, thanks to immortalized lyrics from the Beatles and Tina Turner. With hundreds of place names belonging to towns and cities he knew nothing about, George Miller set off around the United States to find out more about the places behind the lyrics. [...]

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Travel Osaka With a Kiwi Teacher

July 10, 2008

You’ll get a great taste of the wonders of Japan by reading Under the Osakan Sun by Hamish Beaton, a young New Zealander who spent three years working as a high school English teacher in Kanan town, an outlying suburb of Osaka.

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“Soaring With Fidel” Follows Birds Past Cuba

July 3, 2008

David Gessner’s new book is not just a bird book, like his previous one: Soaring with Fidel: An Osprey Odyssey from Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond is quite definitely a travel book too, and not something that only bird lovers will appreciate. His journey follows the migration of the osprey he knows from Cape [...]

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China Travels: Where Underpants Come From

June 26, 2008

In the tradition of WhereAmIWearing.com, New Zealand writer Joe Bennett bought a pack of five pieces of underwear from his local mega-market and then wondered where they really came from. Thus began a journey into China and beyond to find out Where Underpants Come From, subtitled From Checkout to Cotton Field – Travels Through the [...]

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Try Taking a Narrow Dog to Carcasonne

June 19, 2008

Terry Darlington might be the new Bill Bryson. His first travel narrative, Narrow Dog to Carcasonne, is a hilarious read and a real page-turner. Darlington and his wife Monica are a retired English couple who’ve bought a narrow boat to take on vacations, and they get quite addicted to the lifestyle of traveling along England’s [...]

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Get Etiquette Tips from Going Dutch in Beijing

June 12, 2008

It’s always good to know something about the etiquette and customs of the country you’re going to travel to – and Mark McCrum’s newest book Going Dutch in Beijing: How to Behave Properly When Far Away From Home is an entertaining way to get informed.

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