They drove cross-country and back on a ten-week trip, recording images of American life through humerous texts and the lens of a Leica camera. When they returned home, they published their work in Ogonek, the Soviet equivalent of Time magazine, and later in the book Odnoetazhnaia Amerika (Single-Storied America). This wonderful lost workfilled with wry observations, biting opinions, and telling photographsis now collected in Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip, the first English translation.From Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip:"The word 'America' has well-developed grandiose associations for a Soviet person, for whom it refers to a country of skyscrapers, where day and night one hears the unceasing thunder of surface and underground trains, the hellish roar of automobile horns, and the continuous despairing screams of stockbrokers rushing through the skyscrapers waving their ever-falling shares. We want to change that image."A Cabinet Book published by Princeton Architectural Press

    It was a 3500 mile journey across the roof of the world. He chose as his traveling companion Ella Maillart, a beautiful Swiss journalist. Fleming is one to underemphasize difficulties. He describes events and places in brilliant color and detail, also with great wit and humor. His story of the journey, a seven month odyssey through desert and upland, virtually uncharted, has become a classic of travel literature since its publication in 1936. "No writer has given a keener picture of unchanging Tartary than has Fleming, and his description of Sinkiang reveals the last home of international intrigue, politics, violence and melodrama, where all foreigners are suspects and none welcome."

    Aware that he might never again visit this land whose sites and scenes had once exercised a strange and terrifying power over his imagination, he immerses himself in a stream of discoveries, reappraisals and inevitable self-revelations. From Venice, he traces the route taken by the Germanic invaders of old down to Ravenna, to stand, fulfilling a lifelong dream, before the sacred mosaics of San Vitale.This journey into his private past brings Antal Szerb firmly, and at times painfully, up against an explosive present, producing some memorable observations on the social wonders and existential horrors of Mussolini's new Roman Imperium.

    From this backwater outpost, Stark set forth on what was to be her most unforgettable adventure: Following the ancient frankincense routes of the Hadhramaut Valley, the most fertile in Arabia, she sought to be the first Westerner to locate and document the lost city of Shabwa. Chronicling her journey through the towns and encampments of the Hadhramaut, The Southern Gates of Arabia is a tale alive with sheikhs and sultans, tragedy and triumph. Although the claim to discovering Shabwa would not ultimately be Stark's, The Southern Gates of Arabia, a bestseller upon its original publication, remains a classic in the literature of travel. This edition includes a new Introduction by Jane Fletcher Geniesse, Stark's biographer.

    Charles Doughty (1843 1926) spent two years among various nomad tribes and wrote in 1888 what would be the first comprehensive Western work on the geography of Arabia, in an attempt, as he says in the preface, to 'set forth faithfully some parcel of the soil of Arabia smelling of samn and camels'. His classic and justly famous account is a fantastic piece of travel writing that shows full understanding of the area, the people and all aspects of nomadic life in the desert."

    It was published in the United States from 1936 to 1966, during the Jim Crow era when discrimination against non-whites was widespread. African-American travelers faced a variety of dangers and inconveniences, ranging from white-owned businesses refusing to serve them (or repair their vehicles), to being refused accommodation or food, or even threats of physical violence and forcible expulsion from whites-only "sundown towns". New York mailman and travel agent Victor H. Green published The Negro Motorist Green Book to tackle such problems and "to give the Negro traveler information that will keep him from running into difficulties, embarrassments and to make his trip more enjoyable. From a New York-focused first edition published in 1936, it expanded to cover much of North America including most of the United States and part of Canada, Mexico and Bermuda. The Green Book became "the bible of black travel during Jim Crow", enabling black travelers to find lodgings, businesses and gas stations that would serve them along the road. Outside the African-American community, however, it was little known. It fell into obscurity after it ceased publication shortly after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed the types of racial discrimination that had made the book necessary. Interest in it has revived in recent years in connection with studies of black travel during the Jim Crow era.

    A Group of friends travel across the Sahara desert on a motorcycle and side car.