Illustration by Zohar Lazar
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Booking the Journey
By Denis Boyles, September & October 2005
When it comes to rough-and-tumble traveling, we’ve found that sometimes we’d rather read about it than actually go
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The Station by Robert Byron. In 1928, the 22-year-old made a pilgrimage to Mount Athos, located on a peninsula near Thessaloníki and occupied by several male-only, self-governed monasteries. The result of his journey is one of the best travel books ever written, rivaled only by Byron’s own, much more famous The Road to Oxiana.
In Darkest Africa by Henry Morton Stanley. The ultimate exotic travelogue, this is the egregiously self-serving account of Stanley’s disastrous mission to save a nearsighted German doctor named Eduard Schnitzer, the stranded governor of Equatoria, who, as it happens, had no desire whatsoever to be rescued.
A Traveller’s Alphabet: Partial Memoirs by Sir Steven Runciman. A to Z and around the world with one of the most erudite guides imaginable. Runciman, who died at age 97 in 2000, was a linguist and historian with a special interest in Byzantine studies. His accounts of long-gone princesses, priests, and places are priceless.
South: A Memoir of the Endurance Voyage by Sir Ernest Shackleton. As the planet waged global war, Shackleton and his hardy band of explorers made an unsuccessful but heroic journey to cross Antarctica from 1914 to 1917.
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The Valleys of the Assassins and Other Persian Travels by Freya Stark. An Englishwoman in the 1930s moves to Baghdad, goes seminative, jumps on a donkey, and ends up—where else?—in Luristan, poking around in graves and such. Good stuff, what?
The Michelin Red Guide: France 2005 Reading through this definitive listing of all the decent hotels and terrific restaurants in France is better than going there, listening to Chirac prattle on about evil American culture, and spending the price of this book for a tiny cuppa “Jeau” and a cookie the size of your thumb.
The Past Is a Foreign Country by David Lowenthal. This masterpiece of armchair exploration uncovers the often poignant relationship between us and then.
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