Wynelle Evans, a broadcast media producer and a devoted reader of literature about the Antarctic, recommends Antarctic Navigation, a novel by Elizabeth Arthur about a woman who becomes obsesssed with Robert Scott's expedition to the South Pole.
TraveLit--A blog about travel literature.
Even with the best of maps and instruments, we can never fully chart our journeys.
Books you might like: Reader recommendations
November 22, 2013
Maureen Blevins, writer, traveler, and blogger (maureenblevins.blogspot.com), recommends Roads by Larry McMurtry and Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing. “Both,” she writes, “are exceptional.”
Book Review
November 20, 2013
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
―Marcel Proust
A Sacred Landscape: The Search for Ancient Peru
By Hugh Thomson. Overlook, 2007, 330 pp.
For decades people have lamented the death of real travel, complaining that there are no new discoveries to be made in our much-traveled, well-known world. Hugh Thomson offers a different perspective in A Sacred Landscape, warning against complacency about the extent of our knowledge. Indeed, in Peru, where excavation has been slow, monuments and artifacts of the most ancient civilizations have only recently begun to emerge, offering glimpses of the fascinating cultures that are the focus of this book. Read More
Book Review
November 9, 2013
Tibetan Venture: In the Country of the Ngolo-Setas
By Andre Guibaut. Translated by Lord Sudley. Introduction by Pamela Nightingale. John Murray, 1947. Oxford University Press, 1987, 206 pp.
When Andre Guibaut and Louis Victor Liotard reached Tibet in 1940, they were headed for a region of the country that was unmapped and largely unknown to the western world. This was their second expedition to Tibet, but the first to the high plateaux inhabited by nomadic herdsmen notorious for their brutal hostility to intruders.
The aims of the mission were geographical and anthropological, and Tibetan Venture covers both aspects of the journey. But the heart of this gripping book is the death of Liotard, who was shot by bandits, leaving Guibaut at once grieving for his close friend and fearfully alone in an alien and dangerous land. Read More