Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East


Pico Iyer - 1988
    Mohawk hair-cuts in Bali, yuppies in Hong Kong and Rambo rip-offs in the movie houses of Bombay are just a few of the jarring images that Iyer brings back from the Far East.

Bicycle Diaries


David Byrne - 2008
    Since the early 1980s, David Byrne has been riding a bike as his principal means of transportation in New York City. Two decades ago, he discovered folding bikes and started taking them on tour. Byrne's choice was made out of convenience rather than political motivation, but the more cities he saw from his bicycle, the more he became hooked on this mode of transport and the sense of liberation it provided. Convinced that urban biking opens one's eyes to the inner workings and rhythms of a city's geography and population, Byrne began keeping a journal of his observations and insights. An account of what he sees and whom he meets as he pedals through metropoles from Berlin to Buenos Aires, Istanbul to San Francisco, Manila to New York, Bicycle Diaries also records Byrne's thoughts on world music, urban planning, fashion, architecture, cultural dislocation, and much more, all conveyed with a highly personal mixture of humor, curiosity, and humility. Part travelogue, part journal, part photo album, Bicycle Diaries is an eye-opening celebration of seeing the world from the seat of a bike.

The Best American Travel Writing 2011


Sloane Crosley - 2011
    Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites . A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected—and most popular—of its kind. The Best American Travel Writing 2011 includes André Aciman, Christopher Buckley, Maureen Dowd, Verlyn Klinkenborg, Ariel Levy, Téa Obreht, Annie Proulx, Gary Shteyngart, William T. Vollmann, Emily Witt, and others

The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands


Patrick Leigh Fermor - 1950
    Rather than a comprehensive political or historical study of the region, The Traveller’s Tree, Leigh Fermor’s first book, gives us his own vivid, idiosyncratic impressions of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Dominica, Barbados, Trinidad, and Haiti, among other islands. Here we watch Leigh Fermor walk the dusty roads of the countryside and the broad avenues of former colonial capitals, equally at home among the peasant and the elite, the laborer and the artist. He listens to steel drum bands, delights in the Congo dancing that closes out Havana’s Carnival, and observes vodou and Rastafarian rites, all with the generous curiosity and easy erudition that readers will recognize from his subsequent classic accounts A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water.

Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas


Chuck Klosterman - 2006
    There's An Introduction, But No Footnotes. Well, There's A Footnote In The Introduction, But None In The Story.

The Places in Between


Rory Stewart - 2004
    By day he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers' floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient past. Along the way Stewart met heroes and rogues, tribal elders and teenage soldiers, Taliban commanders and foreign-aid workers. He was also adopted by an unexpected companion-a retired fighting mastiff he named Babur in honor of Afghanistan's first Mughal emperor, in whose footsteps the pair was following. Through these encounters--by turns touching, confounding, surprising, and funny--Stewart makes tangible the forces of tradition, ideology, and allegiance that shape life in the map's countless places in between.

Smile When You're Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer


Chuck Thompson - 2007
    Enough of the half-truths demanded by magazine editors, enough of the endlessly recycled clichés regarded as good travel writing, and enough of the ugly secrets fiercely guarded by the travel industry. But mostly, he's had enough of returning home from assignments and leaving the most interesting stories and the most provocative insights on the editing-room floor. From getting swindled in Thailand to running afoul of customs inspectors in Belarus, from defusing hostile Swedish rockers backstage in Germany to a closed-door meeting with travel execs telling him why he's about to be fired once again, Thompson's no-holds-barred style is refreshing, invigorating, and all those other adjectives travel writers use to describe spa vacations where the main attraction is a daily colonic.Smile When You're Lying takes readers on an irresistible series of adventures in Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and beyond; details the effects of globalization on the casual traveler and ponders the future of travel as we know it; and offers up a treasure trove of travel-industry secrets collected throughout a decidedly speckled career.

The Memory Chalet


Tony Judt - 2010
    Each essay charts some experience or remembrance of the past through the sieve of Tony Judt s prodigious mind. His youthful love of a particular London bus route evolves into a reflection on public civility and interwar urban planning. Memories of the 1968 student riots of Paris meander through the divergent sex politics of Europe, before concluding that his generation was a revolutionary generation, but missed the revolution. A series of road trips across America lead not just to an appreciation of American history, but to an eventual acquisition of citizenship. Foods and trains and long-lost smells all compete for Judt s attention; but for us, he has forged his reflections into an elegant arc of analysis. All as simply and beautifully arranged as a Swiss chalet—a reassuring refuge deep in the mountains of memory.

Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History


Katy Tur - 2017
    She visited forty states with the candidate, made more than 3,800 live television reports, listened to endless loops of Elton John’s "Tiny Dancer"—a Trump rally playlist staple.From day 1 to day 500, Tur documented Trump’s inconsistencies, fact-checked his falsities, and called him out on his lies. In return, Trump repeatedly singled out Tur. He tried to charm her, intimidate her, and shame her. At one point, he got a crowd so riled up against her, Secret Service agents had to walk her to her car.None of it worked. Facts are stubborn. So was Tur. She was part of the first women-led politics team in the history of network news. The Boys on the Bus became the Girls on the Plane--but the circus remained. Through all the long nights, wild scoops, naked chauvinism, dodgy staffers, and fevered debates, no one had a better view than Tur.Unbelievable is her darkly comic, fascinatingly bizarre, and often scary story of how America sent a former reality show host to the White House. It’s also the story of what it was like for Tur to be there as it happened, inside a no-rules world where reporters were spat on, demeaned, and discredited. Tur was a foreign correspondent who came home to her most foreign story of all.FROM THE RECIPIENT OF THE  2017 Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism

The Best American Travel Writing 2003


Ian Frazier - 2003
    For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundred of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind. More and more readers are discovering the pleasures of armchair travel through the hugely successful Best American Travel Writing, now in its fourth adventurous year. Journey through the 2003 volume from Route 66 to the Arctic; go deep into Poland's Tatra Mountains and through the wildest jungle in Congo. Selections this year are from equally far-flung sources, including Outside, Food & Wine, National Geographic Adventure, Potpourri, and The New Yorker.Rebecca Barry Peter Canby Christopher Hitchens Kira Salak Andrew Solomon William T. Vollmann

I See by My Outfit


Peter S. Beagle - 1965
    Martin Luther King Jr. articulated his dream, JFK was assassinated, and zip codes were first introduced to the US. The world was monumentally changing and changing fast. But in the eyes of future fantasy author Peter Beagle and his best friend Phil, it wasn't changing fast enough. For these two twenty-something beatnik Jews from the Bronx, change was something you chased after night and day across the country on the trembling seat of a motor scooter.

The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks


Terry Tempest Williams - 2016
    Now Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the environmental classic Refuge and the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary celebration of our national parks, an exploration of what they mean to us and what we mean to them.From the Grand Tetons in Wyoming to Acadia in Maine to Big Bend in Texas and more, Williams creates a series of lyrical portraits that illuminate the unique grandeur of each place while delving into what it means to shape a landscape with its own evolutionary history into something of our own making. Part memoir, part natural history, and part social critique, The Hour of Land is a meditation and a manifesto on why wild lands matter to the soul of America.

In Extremis: The Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin


Lindsey Hilsum - 2018
    With fierce compassion and honesty, she reported from the most dangerous places in the world, fractured by conflict and genocide, going in further and staying longer than anyone else. In Sri Lanka in 2001, Marie was hit by a grenade and lost the sight in her left eye - resulting in her trademark eye patch - and in 2012 she was killed in Syria. Like her hero, the legendary reporter Martha Gellhorn, she sought to bear witness to the horrifying truths of war, to write ‘the first draft of history’ and crucially to shine a light on the suffering of ordinary people.Written by fellow foreign correspondent Lindsey Hilsum, this is the story of the most daring war reporter of her age. Drawing on unpublished diaries and notebooks, and interviews with Marie’s friends, family and colleagues, In Extremis is the story of our turbulent age, and the life of a woman who defied convention.

A House Somewhere: Tales of Life Abroad


Don George - 2002
    In this collection some of the finest names in contemporary travel writing reveal the perils and pleasures of exchanging the familiar for the foreign.Isabel Allende discovers love and paradise in California, Pico Iyer finds home in Japan amidst the alien and indecipherable, and a dank barge on the Seine opens up a new side of Paris for Mort Rosenblum.Revealing the flip side to the dream, relocating to the juicy heart of New York proves fiery for Lily Brett, Chris Stewart is frightened for his life in Andalucia, and the plumbing in William Dalrymple’s rooftop Delhi flat is held to ransom by his water-conserving landlady.Original Stories by:Isabel Allende, Karl Taro Greenfeld, Jan Morris, Rolf Potts, Mort Rosenbaum, Jeffrey Taylor, Errol Trzebinski, Simon Winchester.Selected writings by:Vida Adamoli, Lily Brett, Tony Cohan, William Dalrymple, Amitav Ghos, Carla Grissmann, James Hamilton-Paterson, Annie Hawes, Peter Hesller, Pico Iyer, Alex Kerr, Frances Mayes, Peter Mayle, Tim Parks, Chris Stewart, Emma Tennant, Paul Theroux, Nial Williams and Christine Breen.Home thoughts from Abroad --A Home in Paradise --The Alien Home, From the Global Soul --Tiwarik and Kansulay, from Playiing with Water --February, from A Year in Provence --Festina Tarde (Make Haste Slowly), from Under the Tuscan Sun --from City of Djinns --from O come Ye Back to Ireland --Digging Mr Benny's Dead Uncle --Troppo Gentile, from Italian Neighbours --At Home on the Seine --Tenmangu, from Lost Japan --from Dinner of Herbs --A Co-op Building, from New york --A House in the Casbah --The Visit, from On Mexican Time --The Year Brunetto II Piccolo Fell in Love, from La Bella Vita --from Extra Virgin --Waiting for juan, from a Parrot in the Pepper Tree --Lataifa, From In an Antique Land --Aloft in Paris --Chinese Life, from River Town --A Love-Scene after Work: Writing in the Tropics, from Sunrise with Seamonsters --from A House in Corfu --Barefoot at Shanzu --Coming Home in Massachusetts

Detroit: An American Autopsy


Charlie LeDuff - 2013
    Detroit, once the richest city in the nation, is now its poorest. Once the vanguard of America’s machine age—mass production, automobiles, and blue-collar jobs—Detroit is now America’s capital for unemployment, illiteracy, foreclosure, and dropouts. A city the size of San Francisco and Manhattan could neatly fit into Detroit’s vacant lots. In another life, Charlie LeDuff won the Pulitzer Prize reporting for The New York Times. But all that is behind him now, after returning to find his hometown in total freefall. Detroit is where his mother’s flower shop was firebombed; where his sister lost herself to drugs; where his brother works in a factory cleaning Chinese-manufactured screws so they can be repackaged as “Made in America.” With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark—and the righteous indignation only a native son possesses—LeDuff sets out to uncover what destroyed his city. He embeds with a local fire brigade struggling to defend its neighborhood against systemic arson and bureaucratic corruption. He investigates state senators and career police officials, following the money to discover who benefits from Detroit’s decline. He befriends union organizers, homeless do-gooders, embattled businessmen, and struggling homeowners, all ordinary people holding the city together by sheer determination. Americans have hoped for decades that Detroit was an exception, an outlier. What LeDuff reveals is that Detroit is, once and for all, America’s city: It led us on the way up, and now it is leading us on the way down. Detroit can no longer be ignored because what happened there is happening out here. Redemption is thin on the ground in this ghost of a city, but Detroit: An American Autopsy is no hopeless parable. Instead, LeDuff shares a deeply human drama of colossal greed, ignorance, endurance, and courage. Detroit is an unbelievable story of a hard town in a rough time filled with some of the strangest and strongest people our country has to offer—and a black comic tale of the absurdity of American life in the twenty-first century.