Travel books make wonderful gifts
Something for everyone who dreams of roaming
NEW YORK — From memoirs and maps to beautiful hardcovers, this year’s crop of travel books and publications offers a world of inspiration for travellers.
National Geographic’s World’s Best Travel Experiences looks at wild places, urban spaces, humanmade wonders and other extraordinary destinations. There’s even a list of best places for dance lessons, whether you want to hula in Hawaii or tango in Argentina. The book also includes writers like Bill Bryson and Anna Quindlen.
From Lonely Planet, Great Adventures offers inspiration for hikes, dives, biking, climbs and drives, plus animal adventures like tracking mountain gorillas in Uganda and washing elephants in Thailand; winter trips from ice-trekking an Argentine glacier to dogsledding the Yukon; and trips by water, in canoes, kayaks, sailboats, rafts and other conveyances.
Also from Lonely Planet, Food Lover’s Guide to the World offers food history, recipes and recommendations for where to eat, from a Bangkok vendor of noodle dishes, Yen Ta Fo JC, to tips for cooking mofongo, a combination of plantains and pork rinds popular in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.
Travel writers Don George, an editor at large for National Geographic Traveler magazine, and Pauline Frommer, creator of Pauline Frommer Guidebooks, both said travel books they’ve recently enjoyed include actor Andrew McCarthy’s memoir, The Longest Way Home (Free Press).
Frommer says she also enjoyed the “behind-the-scenes hijinx” of Heads in Beds, by Jacob Tomsky (Doubleday), a funny insider’s memoir of the world of high-end hotels, along with Wild, by Cheryl Strayed (Knopf), a memoir of a gruelling 1,770-kilometre hike on the Pacific Crest Trail that helped the writer put her life together.
Other recommendations from George include Among the Islands by Tim Flannery, about his adventures researching animals of the Pacific islands (Penguin) and The Black Rhinos of Namibia (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) in which writer Rick Bass recounts his experiences tracking animals in Africa with conservationists. George himself is out with a new anthology of travel stories he edited called Better Than Fiction (Lonely Planet) featuring work by Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Matthiessen, Kurt Andersen and others.
Favourites from Jodie Vinson, manager of the Globe Corner Travel Annex at Brookline Booksmith, an independent store in Brookline, Mass., include The Travels of Marco Polo (Sterling Signature) which Vinson describes as a “stunning new illustrated version of the classic travel text, complete with over 200 paintings, maps, illuminated manuscripts, and photographs” and Pictures from Italy by Charles Dickens (Tara Books).
“It can be surprising how many of our favourite novelists were travel writers as well,” said Vinson.
Finally, for a traveller with the right sense of humour, Gross America: Your Coast-to-Coast Guide to All Things Gross, by Richard Faulk (Tarcher/Penguin) offers quirky destinations like a walk-through model of human intestines in Houston and the preserved brains at Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum.