Destination: Paris

Book: The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris (NEW June 2011) by John Baxter

Strolling in Paris, Eiffel Tower

In The Most Beautiful Walk in the World, John Baxter tells stories that add depth to a stroll through Paris.  The Australian writer lives in the city of literature and art with his French wife and their young daughter.

When a friend ropes him into leading a literary walk for participants in a literary seminar, he adds “tour guide” to his professional description. He takes us along from the first attempt to hold  tourists’ attention by talking about the lives of the famous, sex (the kinkier the better), and food (equally lusty). His self-deprecating description of his learning process includes letting us in on mistakes he has made as he gets used to living in France. But the details of literary and political history that he shares reveals an intelligent and  entertaining companion you would be glad to have along on a  Paris walk.

Because the casual visitors may get bored by details about the famous writers, artists, expats and revolutionaries that fascinate Baxter, he tells stories instead of piling on facts.  But thankfully, he has saved up a multitude of little-known information to share in The Most Beautiful Walk.

He muses on the popularity of cultural seminars where people pay to take writing classes in Paris (strictly limited hours so as not to interfere with sight-seeing) or bullfighting practice in Spain or “The Literature of Cuisine” in Rome with dinner every night being the most taxing part. “The only required reading was the menu.”  He says.

Next to environmental tourism, cultural tourism is the leisure industry’s major growth area.  For every person who hikes across Bhutan or counts butterflies in the Brazilian rain forest, another longs to plunge into the thickets of literature, unaware that it’s just as full of surprises, agreeable or otherwise, as any Amazonian jungle.

Because Baxter lives on rue d’Odeon, he most intimately knows the Latin Quarter and adjacent St. Germain. That made the book particularly appealing to me, because we stayed in St. Germain and walked to the Jardin Luxembourg…

Jardin Luxembourg

through the Alleé behind the restaurant Procope, down St. Michael and across many of the short curving streets he mentions in this book.

Procope Restaurant, Paris

The frustration, of course, is that John Baxter was not along on our walks. We slap our forehead and say, “How did we miss that plaque that says…!” or “I wish I had known that Marat printed revolutionary flyers in this very building.”

Allee behind Procope restaurant

Why did we not go all the way up to Montparnasse when we were so close?

Why did we not visit Hemingway haunts like La Couple (opened in 1927)?

Why did we not stop at Closeries des Liles, with its plaques naming each table for a famous person who once hung out there–like Hemingway, playwright Samuel Beckett (spelled Becket on the plaque, we learn from Baxter) or Man Ray, the avant garde painter and photographer?

Mais je ne regrette rien, as Edith Piaf sang. When you travel, everything you choose to see cancels out something else that you might have seen. So the answer to most of our couldashouldawoulda thoughts is simply time. Just as this book shortchanges the right bank and many outlying arrondissements, we would never see ALL of Paris–even if we lived there.

In case you are traveling to Paris for the first time, Baxter also includes at the end of the book a very helpful guide packed with insider tips, entitled “Paris, Mode d’Emploi” (a User’s Guide).

I already loaned my copy to my brother and sister-in-law, who have visited Paris and teach literature. But if I am fortunate enough to return to Paris, I’ll want it back, because of all the Paris books I’ve read, this one fit most neatly into my own method of travel. Verdict: Just as sure as walking is the way to see Paris, The Most Beautiful Walk in the World belongs in the travel library.

I want to thank the publisher, Harper Collins,  for providing the copy of this delightful new book for review. Photos are Ken’s and my own and if you want to copy, please ask first. The video of Edith Piaf comes from You Tube. The book title is linked to Amazon for your convenience. If you click through to Amazon and purchase anything at all, I get a few cents which helps support A Traveler’s Library. Thanks.

I have a few favorite cities for walkability, but Paris must be number one. Do you have other recommendations for walkable cities?

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Book Cover

Destination: The World

Book: Life is a Trip:The Magic of Transformative Travel (NEW August 2010) by Judith Fein

I first met Judith Fein when I was on a press trip in Richmond Virginia. She and her husband Paul took off from the main group tramping through Civil War Battlefields to look for something out of the ordinary–the oldest Jewish cemetery in Virginia. That’s what they do, poor things–live in Santa Fe, travel the world in search of interesting stories, and write and photograph award winning articles.

(This is the 2nd of my offerings about women travel writers as the world goes ga-ga over the movie Eat, Pray, Love.)

Judith is half of the team that started the web site Your Life Is a Trip, where she and Ellen Barone enlist other travel writers to go beyond the usual go-there-do-this-do-that kind of travel writing.(And in full disclosure, I am one of the occasional contributors to that site.) Fein’s new book, Life is a Trip: The Transformational Magic of Travel, tells about her experiences in cultures from South America to Southeast Asia, and how those experiences touched her life. She talked to ATL after returning from a trip where she learned Viking chants in Scandinavia–just your everyday travel experience for Judith Fein.

Vietnam

A Traveler’s Library: You talk about the subject “forgiveness” in your trip
to North Vietnam. Did you also visit South Vietnam? And if so, how did their
reaction to the war differ?

Judith Fein: Almost all of our time was spent in North Vietnam. In South Vietnam, in Ho Chi Minh City, there is a startling museum about what they call The American War. When we visited, there was a group of school children taking notes from exhibits. To them, the war was a remote event in history. Something that could show up on a test and be summed up in a few sentences. It was shocking to me. I asked several people how they felt about the war. They were forgiving. They wanted to put it behind them. The lesson about forgiveness was huge.

Curandera in Mexico

ATL: I think my favorite story was the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, where you became an apprentice to a Mexican curandera. But I wondered as I read the ending if you ever
felt that you let her down by not becoming a full time healer? After all,
she selected you as an apprentice, implying that you were learning the
trade.
JF: What a wonderful question. Why wonderful? Because it makes me ponder the effect of my decision on Ana. And then it makes me think about trust. Ana and I, who didn’t share a culture or language or history, somehow made a great leap together over the chasm of doubt, demands and expectations. We believed in each other. We have never had a conversation about whether or not I became a full-time healer. She generously provided me with the tools, and she believed I would know how to use those precious skills. I suppose you could say, Vera, that my life is about healing, even though I do not do it formally or full-time. I try to bring that energy to every interaction I have. And when I sat down to write my book, it sat down right along side of me.

ATL: To your knowledge did Ana train other “apprentices”? Is that a regular
practice?

To the best of my knowledge, Ana does not train apprentices. I know she spends a day or two with a group of nurses every year, initiating them into the world of native healing so they can understand the needs and beliefs of some of their patients.

ATL:  Have all these experiences with self-discovery in diverse cultures made you look for similar opportunities within your own culture? Or is that another book?

JF: I always look for opportunities with diverse cultures. When I read the local paper, I wildly circle every event that involves another culture. I go to these events to observe, interact and learn. I go to be moved, changed, educated. But it doesn’t even have to be an event. When I stand in line at the movies, or meet a waitperson in a restaurant, I’m always excited when I meet someone from another culture. It’s an opportunity to expand into another reality; it’s a chance to grow.

Judith Fein

This is where I usually asks authors to tell us about their own favorite travel book(s), but Judith answered that question for us some months ago in a guest post. Judith’s book was supplied by the publisher, Spirituality and Heath Books, for this review. Photos are courtesy of Paul Ross, and you can see more of his work by clicking on one of the photos.

And, readers, would you care to share the most transformative experience you have had in your travels? If that word is too scary, how about the most moving? Influential? Revealing?

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And if a cookbook explores a region in depth like the Dordogne, then you have the best of all worlds, a travel cookbook.

Destination: Louisiana

Book: The River Road Plantation Country Cookbook by Anne Butler (NEW 2010)

In the introduction to River Road Plantation Country Cookbook, the reader gets a bit of history — the Mississippi’s impact on the development of Louisiana and the business, culture, and cuisine of the row of plantations built between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana along River Road. Butler says, in her introduction:

The refined culinary customs transported from France soon mingled with hot seasonings and cooking techniques from other countries and incorporated native game, seafood and fresh local produce unknown in European kitchens. The resultant dishes were and are superlative…

Although the sepia tone photographs used throughout the book give it a historic feel, the author swerves back and forth from historic recipes in plantations to much more modern developments and modern recipes. You soon figure out the book is not all about plantations.

The recipes come from a variety of sources and many are skimmed from other cookbooks (with attribution). I think I might have been more charmed by one of the plantation cookbooks quoted that gives both the old “receipt” and the modernized version.

The travel part of the book held my interest more than the hodgepodge of recipes. The author introduced me to the LSU Rural Life Museum, which sounds particularly fascinating, and she  also clarified which plantations are open to the public, their hours, their restaurants and gardens. She tempted me to show up for the Jambalaya Festival some late May in Gonzales, when a cookoff is held. Possibly the best ever recipe for Jambalaya (a former champion contributed it) is included in the book. Another place I’d like to visit, the Cabin (restaurant, cottages, a whole Cajun Village of historic structures) will lure me to Burnside, Louisiana some day to try the Buttermilk Pie.

But overall, this book was disappointing. The layout and graphics did not inspire me. A prime factor in a good cookbook , the index, also left me searching. Despite the fact that the book is more travel book than recipe book, the index lists only recipes and not destinations.

Destination: Texas

Book: The Tex-Mex Grill and Backyard Barbacoa Cookbook by Robb Walsh (NEW 2010)

Texas and Louisiana, neighboring states, are about as alike as Hawaii and Alaska. As Robb Walsh talks about food as culture, it becomes clear why they are so different. In this book he is writing particularly about the Mexican influence on Texas cooking, and some of that sounds very familiar to an Arizonan like me.

I laughed out loud when I saw that he included a chapter on Taco Trucks. We have those portable restaurants in profusion in Tucson. The nickname here is Roach Coach, but in fact the cooking is good and inspected by the health czars just like restaurants.

It should not come as a surprise that Walsh includes those humble Taco Trucks–he does not leave anything out.  I’m still flipping through the pages and learning new things about cuts of meet, types of charcoal, varieties of chiles, and much more.

This is a lively, colorful cookbook with terrific black and white photos–many historical. How can black and white be colorful? You will have to see the great design work to understand.  Full page and double page spreads of closeups of food and/or people include a priceless picture of Fidel Castro in a ten-gallon hat tucking into some barbeque on a visit to Houston in 1959.

Walsh says,

“I hope this book encourages you to get out your grill.  I also hope it puts you in closer touch with the foodways of Texas and Northern Mexico and brings some exciting new flavors to your table.  Most of all, I hope it makes your next fiesta a lot of fun.”

You see, he assumes that you are going to have a fiesta–and the whole book assumes you are going to have fun cooking. Now there’s a book with personality.

I want to thank Pelican Publishing Company for sending me a review copy of River Road Plantation Country Cookbook and Broadway Books for a review copy of the Tex-Mex Grill.

How do you read cookbooks? Only when you need them? Or curl up with them like a sizzling novel?

And by the way, have you subscribed to A Traveler’s Library? Next week we’ll visit India, Carmel California, Arkansas and Arizona. Now surely you would not want to miss a line up like that.

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Book Cover

Destination: Italy

Book: 100 Places In Italy Every Woman Should Go, by Susan Van Allen (NEW 2010)

Traveler’s Tales, the publisher, offered me this book and I do love Italy, and Indie Travel Podcast said they would like a review, so I read it–I mean really read it, because it was so well written and packed with such good tips about Italy. And bonus points to the author for including suggestions for books in every section PLUS interviews with four women who have written about Italy. And get this! Susan Van Allen’s new travel adventure guide, 100 Places in Italy Every Woman Should Go, is now available as an iPhone app from the iTunes app store for $5.99.

After I read 100 Places in Italy Every Woman Should Go, I really wanted to talk to the author, so I checked and Susan Van Allen graciously agreed to a phone interview.

Susan Van Allen

Me: I recently wrote about Old Calabria by Norman Douglas. Have you been there?

Susan: I love Calabria. I took a cooking class there. It is very full of baroque architecture. It is famous for hot red peppers.

Me: What has changed since 1976 when you first visited Italy?

Susan: The first thing that comes to mind is cellphones. They are crazy about communicating  and it is so much easier to get a cell phone than to get one installed.  I remember friends of mine used to say I’ve moved and it will be about three months until I have a phone.

The flirting style has become more refined. Before guys would pinch and grab you. That doesn’t happen now.

Italy used to be on sale. [very cheap for travelers] Now they are adding 20 or 30% taxes.

There are now a lot of Bed and Breakfast places, especially in cities. Particularly in Rome. It’s great for those of us beyond the hostel years.  The rural version are the agriturismo places.

Me: And what has NOT changed?

Susan: Italy is generally very welcoming to all travelers.  Friends will tell me, “I felt like I came home.”

Me: Do you have another book in the works? Maybe places you had to leave out of this one?

Susan: I have a couple of follow ups in mind. I would like to write about food in each of the twenty regions of Italy. “Hungry for Italy.”  I would take a cooking class in each region to master a regional specialty.  Food is so important–like a backstage pass to the Italian soul.

The other one I would love to do would be “Madonna Mia” I would write about Madonna sites that did not fit in the book.  [100 Places starts with a long section dedicated to Madonna art and places tied to the Madonna, which Susan equates to the earlier Venus in importance to Romans/Italians]

Me: What books about Italy, besides yours, belong in a traveler’s library?

[HERE IT COMES: THE BOOKS]

Susan:  The writers I interviewed have written books about Italy.  I wanted to get other women in the conversation.

I talked to Francis Mayes [Under the Tuscan Sun].

Erica Jong won me over with a quote I used in the book. “Venice is ever the fragile labyrinth at the edge of the sea and it reminds us how brief and perilous the journeys of our lives are, perhaps that is why we love it so.”  I learned so much about the Jewish ghetto of Venice in her book, Shylock’s Daughter .

Mary Taylor Simetti’s On Persephone’s Island is a mix of mythology and her personal experiences in Italy.

Marcella Hazen, from Venice, writes about Italian regional cooking in her cookbooks [and a book about her called Amarcord: Marcella Remembers.]

I also read the revised edition of Italy for the Gourmet Traveler by Frederick Plotkin, published originally in 1996 and this past June and new revised edition came out. I take out pages that I need because I don’t want to pack the whole thing. [It is a big book] So I have about three copies around the house.

Italy: Instructions for Use A practical book for travelers.

The Italians by Luigi Barzini  written in 1965. It is a great history. He was born in Italy and lived in America. He defines the Italian character, “Men run the country, but women run the men.”

We thank you so much, Susan Van Allen for your delightful book and for giving us a list of books about Italy to add to a traveler’s library. To learn more about the book, 100 Places, read my review at Indie Travel Podcast.

What is the biggest attraction for you in Italy? And remember your comments are still eligible to win in the Bastille Day contest.

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Road Trip Book Cover

Destination: Alabama

Book: Gods in Alabama (2005) by Joshilyn Jackson

There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel’s high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus.

Sorry, guys, but this book is going to quack like Chick Lit to you.  The retelling of a road trip that more or less proves that you CAN go home again, centers on the relationship between two women, and mothers play the supporting roles.  If that does not cinch the deal, be further warned that a great deal of the book takes place in flashbacks to high school, which definitely does not make it teen chick lit.

While the women are interesting characters, the author has made the supporting role of boyfriend to Arlene, the main character, perfect waaay beyond belief. One other male character only appears in the high school scenes and the other shuffles on as a sweet contrast to his strong wife, Lena’s Aunt.

Gods in Alabama weaves a suspenseful tale that explains why Arlene (or Lena her up-north-in-Chicago name) has refused to return to her home town in Alabama for more than ten years before she makes this life-changing road trip.  The author explains the motivation with a plot structure that double dares you to figure out how it is going to end.  Jackson mixes humor with a deeper purpose of investigating the meaning of truth in the midst of Bible Belt mores.

I read this first novel because of a suggestion from Twitter. (In the 5 years since it was published, Joshilyn Jackson has published three more novels, one of them a mirror image of this one.)While I am not as enthusiastic as the person who recommended it, I breezed through and frequently laughed out loud at either the self deceptive contortions of Lena or the revealing attitudes of her small town family members.  The recreation of small town family doin’s made for a good stop on our Road Trip through the South.

The thing that I found most distracting about Gods in Alabama (which definitely has the best opening sentence I have read in a long time–see opening of this post), was the perfection of Lena’s boyfriend, Burr.  In Lena’s family’s eyes, Burr is a lawyer (good), a Baptist (good), an American Baptist rather than a Southern Baptist (bad) and black (unforgiveable). Whether to ameliorate Lena’s family or to toe the politically correct line, author Jackson creates a man without personal flaws. (Unless, of course, you are a Southern Baptist). Setting him down next to the neurotic and seriously misbehaving Lena or her whacked out family makes it even more obvious that he is not a real person, but a foil.

But then, you shouldn’t pick too hard at a boiled-frosting-topped chocolate cake or the whole thing will collapse. Just enjoy the visit to rural Alabama, say your prayers, sip your sweet tea, and eat your cake. But this being Joshilyn Jackson, watch out for what’s hidden in the cake.

Remember to check out the Musical road trip at Music Road, where Kerry Dexter always has something interesting for our ears while we’re on the road.

Thanks for sticking around the Library while I’m on a road trip of mine own.  Since I won’t be here to keep reminding people to read A Traveler’s Library, I would consider it a real big favor, if you would please remind people for me. Just use one of those buttons below, post it on Twitter or Stumble Upon, or e-mail a few friends. Thanks!

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Calabria

Place: Calabria, Italy

Book: Old Calabria by Norman Douglas (NEW Reissued–2010)

I love to time travel with writers from the 19th or early 20th centuries and even earlier.  I enjoy seeing a place and its people brought to life in an era before antennas sprouted on top of every mud hut and CNN images reached everywhere.  What was their world view before they had automobiles to take them to the next region? What did they enjoy that might be missing in today’s zoom-zoom world?

Actually learning about the traveler can provide as much entertainment as learning about the place traveled to. What are their expectations? Through what lens do they observe?

Palgrave, an imprint of MacMillan, has a great idea. They bring back to life older travel literature in attractive trade paperback editions with lovely covers and readable type. I will be talking about several of their titles.

Norman Douglas’ [amazonify]1848851138::text:::: Old Calabria[/amazonify], first published in 1915, recounts a journey around the southernmost part of Italy, then as now the least visited part of the country.Old Calabria tells us a great deal about Norman Douglas and the aristocratic tradition of European travel in late 19th and early 20th century. Unfortunately, Douglas’ book did little to persuade me to head to this remote land.

Contrary to the worshipful preface and lush back cover notes, I found the book ponderous and unlovable. After attempting to join Douglas on his trip through Calabria,Italy, I have to agree that he is erudite. Almost more an encyclopedia than a travel book, Old Calabria makes me wonder at how large the original reading audience could have been.  How many people in Europe in the early 20th century had an education that prepared them to pick up on threads of history at the mere mention of a name (without explanation)? How many could skim through the untranslated phrases in Italian, French and Latin scattered through the book?

Calabria Procession 1974

Here is a passage near the end of the book.

Calabria is not a land to traverse alone.  It is too wistful and stricken; too deficient in those externals that conduce to comfort.  Its charms do not appeal to the eye of romance, and the man who would perambulate Magna Gracecia as he does the Alps would soon regret his choice.  One needs something of that ‘human element’ which delighted the genteel photographer of Morano–comrades, in short; if only those sages, like old Nola Molisi who have fallen under the spell of its ancient glories.

When Douglas travels, he carries books. As he goes, he reads what others from Greek or Renaissance travelers wrote and he folds their versions of Calabria into his own.

At last we have discovered something that we can agree upon. Reading about the place you are visiting can enhance the journey. Travel literature is good company for travelers.Unfortunately, Douglas’ erudite spills over into the pedantic, and in my opinion loses its value for the 21st century Internetized reader traveling to Italy.

I thank Palgrave McMillan for providing me with a review copy of Old Calabria. Unfortunately I started with my least favorite of their series of reisussued travel classics–but I still believe publishing these old travel books is a great idea. If you would like to try Old Calabria, you can buy this attractive reprint from Amazon with the link above. Or you can download an e-book.

(Photos are from Flickr, with Creative Commons License. Guissepe Quattrone took the landscape and Fiore S. Barbato  the haunting black & white. As usual, I encourage you to click on the pictures to see more of their work.)

A year ago, I devoted a week to travel classics, writing about Eric Newby, Bill Bryson, V. S. Naipaul,  and Bruce Chatwin.  Have you ever delved into travel books from the past? What value do they have for you? Perhaps someone reading this post has read Norman Douglas and would like to provide a counter view to my opinion?

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If you are a caffeine addict, this made aid you in planning a trip.

And if you have not seen YourLifeIsATrip.com, I think you are in for a treat.

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Voices from the Grave

Destination: Chicago

Book: Voices from the Chicago Grave: They’re Calling. Will You Answer? 2nd Edition, by Scott Markus

A GUEST POST by Dr. Jessie Voigts

I’d like to share an incredibly scary book of ghost stories. Why so scary? – because they are TRUE. The book? [amazonify]1933272198::text::::Voices from the Chicago Grave: They’re Calling. Will You Answer? [/amazonify]2nd Edition, by Scott Markus, published by Thunder Bay Press.  Scott divides the ghost stories into 14 well-researched – and hard to put down – chapters (i.e., fine food and spirits, city haunts, Chicago’s darkest hours, our Mafia Town, etc.).  If you head to the accompanying website, you’ll see more information and thousands and thousands of additional photos.

Spooky Chicago

[Note from A Traveler's Library: The lovely thing is that you can actually visit most of these places when you travel to Chicago, and wait around for the ghosts, if you wish]

We were lucky enough to sit down and talk with Scott about his book, and work. Here’s what he had to say…

Wandering Educators: Please tell us about your book, Voices from the Chicago Grave.

Scott Markus: Well, it’s about eight years and three generations in the making.  In 1999 I combined two of my interests (ghost stories and filmmaking) to create a feature-length documentary called Voices from the Grave.  In researching for the video I found way too many great stories.  As great as video is, unless I planned to do a Ken Burns-length documentary series, Id have to make a lot of cuts.

I went to work exploring ideas for an extensive book on the topic with myresearch partner, Mary Czerwinski.  It was the first book I wrote and I wanted this one to be completely mine, so I decided to self-publish it without ever looking for a publisher.  That book was completed and available for sale in 2003.

The 2003 book came with a CD-ROM containing 1,000+ pictures.  The idea was to give the reader the complete picture of what the different areas are like without having to actually go there.  For the second edition of the book, the photographs and hundreds more are now on the web site.

WE: With the exhaustive research you put into this book, you must have been surprised by a few – can you share your favorites/most surprising tales?

SM: My first surprise was how ghost stories are accepted as fact.  When I firststarted researching, I thought the question was, Are ghosts real?  The answer came back, ‘Yes, and here’s where you can go to find them….’

Other than that, it was hard not to notice how many disasters have befallen the city.  Chicago boasts the worst single plane crash in American history (Flight 191 in 1979), the worst shipwreck (The Eastland Disaster), the worst theater fire (the Iroquois Theater Fire), and the list goes on.

Though events like that are obviously sad, Chicago’s history is really a popcorn movie: generations of notorious gangsters and criminals like John Dillinger, a rich Native American history, it was the backdrop of world events like the Worlds Fair and the ’68 riots, and the birthplace of invention with so many of America’s first industrialists calling Chicago home.

The biggest surprise to me about the project overall was how much a casual interest in ghost stories got me involved with American history in general, a topic that I never had that much of an interest in prior to writing the book.

Read More in Wandering Educators Book Review section…

Jessie Voigts

Dr. Jessie Voigts is the Publisher of  WanderingEducators.com and contributes each month to A Traveler’s Library. She has a doctorate in International Education, and is passionate about intercultural learning. She and her husband are Worldschooling their daughter, and enjoying every minute of it. She is also a nature photographer and lives on a lake.

The top photo is complements of Wandering Educators and Slim Pictures.com. The fog picture was taken by VMB . All rights reserved on both photos. Please contact owners before using.

Jessie: Thanks for an interview about a book that will be of definite interest to visitors to Chicago, one of my very favorite cities.

If you (reader) want more about Chicago, you might want to look at a post on an immigrant family from Ireland, and this movie about bad guys. Also this road trip thriller book visits Chicago. And keep an eye on the photos in the top right hand corner because the shiny “egg” that shows up once in a while is from Millennium Park in Chicago.

How about you? Do you like to visit ghostly places? Creepy cemeteries? Haunted Hotels? Possessed parklands? Weird restaurants?

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July 4th/Independence Day

Destination: New Jersey, (plus a little of Connecticut and Cooperstown, New York.)

Book: Independence Day (1995) by Richard Ford. This Book won PULITZER Prize for Literature AND Pen-Faulkner Fiction Prize.

Let’s hope that Richard Ford is not reading this.  According to an interview in the Guardian newspaper in 2008, he does not want to be called a Southern writer, despite being born in the South.  He would be even more horrified at being accused of writing travel literature, so let’s hope he does not see this. But this book is helpful in planning an east coast road trip.

In fact, while many of the settings in [amazonify]0679735186::text:::: Independence Day [/amazonify] are fictional and Ford is not interested in literal descriptions of place, he nevertheless sketches the American regional scene, accents, and cultural quirks, so that you would feel deja vu if you went there.

Ford’s first big hit novel was [amazonify]0679762108::text:: The Sportswriter [/amazonify], and the title character, Frank Bascombe returns in Independence Day with a new career as a real estate salesman. This career opens a closet full of metaphors for life. Frank, now in what he terms his “Existence Period,” ponders the risk and risk-avoidance dance of shopping for a home, the acceptance of larger uncontrollable forces (the economy) that affect life (and appreciation of property), the compromises an individual must make to find the good life.

(The Third of the series about Frank Bascombe, The Lay of the Land came out in 2007)
The first two books take place in Haddam, a fictional place, but you’ll see it if you drive through New Jersey far enough south of the industrial suburbs of NYC. Cooperstown, New York, on the other hand, is real and when Frank Bascombe and his son spend an Independence Day weekend there, we come to know the tourist town intimately. But the detailed descriptions of either the fictional or the real town really takes us beyond the specifics to a place we will know as Eastern Seaboard America.

Since Bascombe sells houses, we get a super close look at the lifestyle of New Jerseyites. His descriptions remind us that Jersey is not all smokey factories and freeways. It also contains leafy small villages, farmland and seashore. His descriptions are all the more interesting since he does not live in New Jersey. He once lived in New Orleans and we spotted his history there.

Here is Ford describing what Bascombe sees when he stops his car at a pull-off to stretch:

Beyond me hawks soar, martins, dip, a tiny airplane buzzes, a distant hang glider like a dragonfly wheels and sways in the rising molecules..And visible on the hillside opposite, where the sun paints a yellow square upon the western gradient, a tractor, tiny but detectably red, halts its progress in an emerald field; a tiny, hatted figure climbs down, pauses, then starts on foot back up the hill he’s tractored down.

Or just taste the lush first sentence of the novel:

In Haddam, summer floats over tree-softened streets like a sweet lotion balm from a careless, languorous god, and the world falls in tune with its own mysterious anthems.

Okay, it is not a travel guide, but Richard Ford writes about a character who spends a lot of time on the road,  road trip planning, and takes a road trip with his son. All the way he is while traveling around inside his own head, trying to understand himself in this coming-of-middle-age book.

I have inserted links to Amazon books, making it easier for you to purchase Richard Ford’s books. I make a few cents from ANY Amazon purchase you make when you follow these links. Thank you.

The photo above is used under Creative Commons license and comes from Flickr. Click on the photo for additional information.

Please also see Music Road Trip, a post on New Jersey musicians from my partner on the Great American Road Trip at Music Road.

Have you spent some time in New Jersey?  Been to the shore?  What have you seen?

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