Well of course you are going to do that by donating $10 to Passports With Purpose, by picking a travel-related prize that you want, right?

NO? Oh, I see, you are going to donate $50 and put it all on that one prize you’re hankering for.

NO? Still don’t have it right?  Oh, I see, you are going to donate $100, but you are going to put it on 10 different prizes.

See, there are lots of ways that you can help build two libraries in Zambia with Room to Read, to help kids who like to read as much as you do.  Take a gander at that thermometer thingy over there on the right hand side of this page, and you will see how Passports With Purpose is doing.

Okay, but could be better.  After all, your LAST DAY to bid is coming up soon–Friday as a matter of fact.

So I am here to let you in on a little secret.  Those prizes like a $4000 trips to Maui, and a $3000 trip to La Puerta Spa and $3000 Mexico Resort stay are absolutely wonderful. You think so. I think so. Several hundred people think so. Do the math. How are your odds? I have the feeling that the fantastic collection of $300 worth of books that you can win from Interlink Books, or the $100 worth of CDs from Mac Millan Audio you can stock up on for your next road trip– although they are terrific for a traveler who reads, and a great addition to a traveler’s library–may not get as many bids as a $4000 trip.  What do you think? Maybe the odds are better for us library nerds?

Interlink Books

INTERLINK BOOKS

Have you looked at the catalog for Interlink Books? You will see:

                                  Interlink Books

Changing the Way That People Think About the World

I quoted their self description once before, but I’m going to repeat it, because it is so enticing for travelers who really want to KNOW the country they are traveling to.

Using travel as a way to build cultural bridges has been part of Interlink’s fabric since its birth 24 years ago…(Our books) give you the background information to enrich your journey; they encourage you to connect with people; they nudge you to leave your comfort zone, and help you to discover the unfamiliar. If you would like to get to the heart and soul of a city, go there with an open mind—independently; read about the city’s history and indulge in its genuine cuisine culture; and most importantly sample the literature of its leading novelists.

Sounds like it could be the mantra for A Traveler’s Library as well, doesn’t it?

I can’t begin to tell you what a joy it is to browse through their carefully selected titles. You can browse by region of the world or by category. Although they have a category called “travel”, every book they carry relates to enriching your travel experience, or tempting you to book a ticket.

And here’s a tip–sign up for their e-newsletter. I get the best ideas for new reading material from them and they are constantly introducing me to foreign authors I would otherwise have missed.  But then go to Passports With Purpose and bid on  $300 worth of  Interlink books. (It’s fourth under Gift Certificates).

MacMillan Audio

And audio books. Don’t you love ‘em? Here’s what Macmillan audio has to say about their business:

Macmillan Audio offers titles both abridged and unabridged both on physical media and by digital delivery. The division was honored with prestigious Audie Awards in three categories in 2007, and has Pulitzer Prize-winning authors and Academy Award-winning narrators on its list. Macmillan Audio publishes audio editions of the best fiction and non-fiction books for adults and children, from among the Macmillan trade publishers including Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Feiwel and Friends, Henry Holt and Company, Picador, Roaring Brook Press, Square Fish, St. Martin’s Press, and Tor Books, and it acquires titles from outside publishers as well.

The Macmillan Audio list is filled with such bestselling and acclaimed authors as Jackie Collins, Michael Cunningham, Jeffrey Eugenides, Janet Evanovich, Thomas L. Friedman, Robert Jordan, Robert Ludlum, Tom Perrotta, Marilyn Robinson, Scott Turow, and Tom Wolfe.

Books we have talked about here that come on MacMillan Audio, The Last Child (thriller and winner of Edgar award) by John Hart; Back of Beyond by C. J. Box; Summer Rental by Mary Kay Reynolds.  Or try something I haven’t read yet:  the Irish Country series by Patrick Taylor or the books about Province by Peter Mayle.

Bid at Passports With Purpose is $100 worth of audio books from MacMillan Audio. (It’s 5th under Gift Certificates.)

Hotel Monteleone

Hotel Monteleone

On Thursday this week, I’m going to talk a little bit about my third sponsored gift, a 3-night stay at the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans. You can read more about Hotel Monteleone at this article from the archives. (Bid on it, 4th under Hotel-North America)

Good luck winning books or audio books, and please thank MacMillan Audio and Interlink Books for supporting Passports with Purpose.  And while I’m on the subject of thanks, here are the financial sponsors of Passports With Purpose. PLEASE support them in every way possible. Go to their website, check out their products. Tell them we love them.

• Round the World With Us
• TravellersPoint
• Home and Away 
• Good 2 Go (travel Insurance)

But go make your bid today while it is fresh in your mind.

THANKS!!

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Destination: England

Book: Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear (2003)

It’s a cozy, or is it?  A mystery novel that sidesteps blood and merciless beatings for a more measured and intellectual approach to solving crimes is called a cozy.  Maisie Dobbs, the first in a series of (so far) seven novels written by Jacqueline Winspear,  introduces us to the English woman whose business placard reads “psychologist and investigator.” Cozies generally feature women, but their content may not be quite as fraught with meaning as Maisie Dobbs.

Maisie tracks a criminal, but the leisurely pursuit occupies less than half of a fairly short book.  The rest provides us with most of Maisie’s unconventional life story. Winspear recreates the time preceding, during and after World War I and the effect that horrors of that war had on a whole generation.

End of World War I, 1918, London

The fledgling investigator sets up her office in 1929 London with the help of a wealthy woman she used to work for as a maid.   When a man asks Maisie to find out if his wife is cheating on him, she uncovers a scheme to take advantage of wounded veterans.  Working on discovering the truth draws her back through a lengthy flashback to her own growth from household servant to the grueling work as a battlefield nurse in France during the war. Winspear skillfully introduces the upstairs-downstairs world of Ladies and their servants and then the realities of World War I. In fact, all of her books are set in the period of the Great War, and in this first book, she acknowledges the stories of her Grandfather for setting her on that path.
With the exception of a bit of suspenseful action toward the end, the pace is slow and deliberate…fitting Maisie’s training by her mentor Maurice Blanc.  Some of his teachings–which always come to mind when she needs them, include meditation, although it is not called that. She also practices body mirroring to feel through another’s stance what they are feeling, and trusts her instincts along with logic.

The most unusual characteristic of Maisie in comparison to other sleuths you have known is her insistence that she has a duty to make people better–to help them heal.  Most fictional detectives have a deep understanding of human nature, but most are more focused on punishment and revenge than on healing.  And certainly the detectives we have talked about here at A Traveler’s Library view the world with a good deal more skepticism than Maisie. Take Phillip Marlowe and Spenser, for instance.

Sissinghurst in Kent, UK

So how does this mystery novel help the traveler?  Set in London and in the countryside of Sussex and Kent in the teens and twenties of the 20th century, it describes a bygone age.  And yet, please forgive me English friends, I tend to picture England and particularly London, in the early twentieth century anyhow.  This even though I’ve been there and know about the Millennium Bridge and the Eye and the bustles of the modern world. It is still the Mews and the Beefeaters and the venerable government buildings that come to mind. Furthermore, Winspear shows us a class system that is definitely altered by the advent of “The Great War,” but cannot be avoided even today in a country with a Queen and titled landowners.

Westminster Bridge over the Thames, London, early morning

Maisie likes to take walks, and as we follow her, we see London:

She entered Palace Road from Royal Street, and turned right to walk toward Westminster Bridge.  She loved to watch the Thames first thing in the morning.  Those Londoners who lived just South of the river always said they “were going over the water” when they crossed the Thames, never referring to the river by name unless they were speaking to a stranger.

And Winspear drops little tidbits that read like guidebook entries, like this about Mecklenburg Square which is very little changed since Maisie walked there in 1929, and Virginia Woolf lived there in 1939:

Named in honor of Charlotte of Mecklinburgh-Strelitz who became queen consort upon her marriage to George III of England, the gracious Georgian houses of the square were set around a garden protected by a wrought-iron fence secured with a locked gate.

As Maisie loves the countryside (out of the smoke, as her father says), we also are introduced to other areas of England.

In France, she had dreamed of Kent, of apple orchards in full blossom, primroses and bluebells carpeting the woodland, and the soft countryside stretching out before her.

Because of her skillful presentation of life as it was in the period of the war, and because the detailed descriptions allow the reader to see London and see the countryside, this is a fine book to add to the traveler’s Library.

Links to book titles provide you with a convenient way to purchase the book, and when you buy anything at Amazon after clicking on links from A Traveler’s Library, I earn a few cents to help pay the rent on the site. Thanks.

I would like to thank the photographers who share their pictures via Creative Commons License at Flickr for these amazingly appropriate pictures. You can thank them by clicking on the image to learn more. And a special thank you to regular readers Colleen Alley and Lorrie McCallum who both recommended that I read Winspear, and start with the first book, Maisie Dobbs.

Are you a reader of “cozies?”  Would you classify Maisie Dobbs as a cozy?

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Place de la Concord: Obelisk and la Fontaine des Mers installed in 1836 and 1846

Destination: Paris

Book: The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (NEW May 2011) by David McCullough

1900 Cafe, Left Bank

The master biographer, David McCullough , in the travel biography  The Greater Journey , focuses on a variety of people who spent time in Paris during the period between 1830 and 1900.  A crowd of medical students, art students, scientists, politicians–some dilettantes and some accomplished and dedicated to self-improvement–come from the raw new country of the United States to soak up some style in the cultural capitol of Europe.

It seems appropriate to review this book the day after the tenth anniversary of September 11, a day that sharpens a feeling of patriotism in America. Despite the fact that it takes place in Paris, the reader also learns about the maturing of the young country. Time after time these travelers to Paris–whether short-term tourists or long-term ex pats–tell friends how their time in Paris has made them feel more American.  McCullough skillfully shows the growing confidence of the United States citizens in their own country.

In the early sections, McCullough pulls off a complex act, juggling a great many life stories and at the same time filling in the history, culture, and look of Paris itself. People we meet include Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., father of the better known Supreme Court Justice. The elder Holmes studied medicine in Paris when U.S. medical schools lagged far behind.

And did you know that Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph, intended to become an artist? That’s why he went to Paris.

Posters for sale in book stall

We follow Richard Rush, American Minister to France, through the overthrow of the last King of France and then the horrible uprising of 1848, brought on by desperate economic conditions. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first American female physician, makes interesting observations on the arts, comparing Rembrandt to Hawthorne. “ The House of Seven Gables is a succession of Rembrandt pictures done in words instead of oils.”

Writers flocked to Paris, too.  McCullough gives us an in-depth portrait of James Fenimore Cooper. Regardless of whether you like Cooper’s  overwrought adventures of the American frontier, (eg. Last of the Mohicans) you must admit that he truly was an American writers, despite the fact that many of his books were actually written while he was resident in Paris.  McCullough says in the Source Notes “Cooper was a far more interesting man and the popularity of his work abroad far greater than generally appreciated in our time.”

Of the outstanding New Englanders whose brilliance distinguished American letters in the 1850s, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and now Harriet Beecher Stowe had all made pilgrimages to Paris.  In 1858 followed yet another, Nathaniel Hawthorne…The only one of the New England “immortals” who did not come was Henry Thoreau , but then he seldom went anywhere.

McCullough also praises the ordinary people who kept diaries–a form of writing that generally escapes fame– and we can thank this book for bringing them to our attention.

“….so many of the protagonists were superb writers… Such descriptions to be found in the letters and journals of even those who did not regard themselves as professional writers–like Emma Willard, Charles Sumner, or Thomas Appleton–amply qualify as American literature of the sea.  Anyone wishing a sample of the professional virtuosity of a writer like Nathaniel Willis need only read his hilarious account of dining on board the brig Pacific in rough weather.” From the introduction to Source Notes, Section 1. The Way Over.

In the Source Notes, McCullough recommends the first of John Sanderson’s  two-volume The Americans in Paris, as  ”one of the best books about Paris by an American ever written.”

In the later sections of the book, McCullough focuses on one or two people at a time, going into great depth about men and women we may or may not remember, but who deserve our attention. The story of Elihu Washburne, friend of Ulysses S. Grant and ambassador to France during the great upheaval of a German siege from outside and a vicious internal revolt, surely deserves to be known as one of the truly great men of American history. We get mini-biographies of artists John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt and Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

Pont Neuf, Paris

Why does this book deserve a place in the traveler’s library? For one thing, a traveler planning a trip to Paris could use The Greater Journey as a guide. Here an uprising took place, here a famous artist or author had an apartment, here a  famous American took medical classes, or attended an artists’ atelier.

Traveler’s activities today echo those described in The Greater Journey. Naturally, all artists flock to the Louvre, many sitting all day and copying paintings.

Copying a Masterpiece at the Louvre (21st century)

Many of the figures in the book live on the left bank–several in St. Germaine. The Jardins Luxembourg and the Tuilleries are important to the lives of the 19th century visitor as they are today. The landmark bridges and even the venerable Procope restaurant had been visited as far back as the 18th century when Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and John Adams came to Paris. They are all still there.

Rear view of Procope with portraits of famous guests

McCullough always has an eye for the telling detail. For instance when the city residents are scrambling for food–dining on rat and horse, American Minister to France Elihu Washburne holds a Christmas dinner in which he serves canned goods, and

“…in addition chocolates, of which there was still no shortage in Paris.  Indeed, supplies of French chocolate, mustard, and wine appeared to be inexhaustible.”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, or as Henry James called it, “the still-present past of Paris.”

[A copy of the book, The Greater Journey, was supplied by the publisher, Simon & Schuster for the purposes of review. All photos are the property of Ken Badertscher and Vera Marie Badertscher. Please inquire if you want to reuse. 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.]

For many of the figures in the book, their time in Paris was transformative. You can see more modern stories of the influence of Paris in the book, Paris Was Ours. Have you visited another country and felt the visit changed you in important ways?

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Destination: Africa

Book: One Day I Will Write About This Place (NEW August 2011) by Binyavanga Wainaina

(NOTE: After I wrote and titled this review, I carefully read Binyavanga Wainaina’s sardonic instructions on “How to Write About Africa” in the magazine Granta. You may want to check as you compile your Africa reading list.)

Binyavanga Wainaina reinvents memoir writing in One Day I Will Write About This Place.  I read two or three books a week and many of them are very, very fine writing, but this one knocked me back in my chair and made me reconsider the conventions of writing. Original. Poetic. Surprising. Experimental. He sees and hears and feels the world in ways you never thought of before.  Right from the first page, this book is a WOW experience. In this quote, he is describing a day playing soccer in Kenya when he was seven.

Warm breath pushes down my nostrils past my mouth and divides my chin.  I can see the pink shining flesh of my eyelids. Random sounds fall into my ears: cars, birds, black mamba bicycle bells, distant children, dogs, crows, and afternoon national radio music. Congo rumba.  People outside our compound are talking, in languages I know the sounds of, but do not understand or speak, Luhya, Gikuyu.

Maybe it is this early exposure to various languages that seem to be sounds without meaning that creates an approach to language that seems as much incantation as communication. These verbal meanderings come across as playful and spontaneous, but in fact are carefully crafted, because, as he says while contemplating the words “thirst and thirsty”, ”Words, I think, must be concrete things.  Surely they cannot be suggestions of things, vague pictures: scattered, shifting sensations.” Nothing escapes him.

One bee does not sound like a swarm of bees.  The world is divided into the sounds of onethings and the sounds of manythings.  Water from the showerhead streaming onto a shampooed head is manything splinters of falling glass, ting ting ting.  

All together they are: shhhhhhhhhh.

Shhhhh is made up of many many tinny tiny ting ting tings, so small that clanking glass sounds become soft whispers; like when everything at the school parade is talking all at once, it is different from when one person is talking.

This reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe’s love of words which bursts out in his poem, The Bells, when he finds words to mimic the sounds of the bells from tinkling to tolling, and extols the “tintinabulation of the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells.” Wainaina knows very early that he is meant to be a writer and spends all his money on novels and all his time reading. He says, (as many writers have discovered)  ”I…start to write and answers arrive, and after a while I realize I have followed a straight line and I am done.” But as a young man, the impressions of the world are overwhelming. “I do not have enough words for all of this,” he says. Eventually, he sends off a travel narrative to an Internet site and is paid for it. He is a professional writer.

But One Day I Will Write About This Place is much more than a travel memoir.  Instead, he uses the journeys he made through Africa to add to the picture  of the struggles that ripple over the continent.  Kenyans grow up saying, “We are not like those Ugandans,” but then the tribal conflicts emerge in Kenya as well. Because he is identified as Gikuyu, even though he does not feel that identity strongly (he just wants to be Kenyan) he and his family are in danger when the government turns anti-Gikuyu.  Even before the most dangerous period, his brilliance and high grades are not enough to get him into a top high school because he has the wrong identity. This awareness of dominant and minority groups sharpens Wainaina’s observations of other parts of Africa.

From childhood games, the influence of American culture, hairstyles and clothing choices, the book progress to corrupt politics and shockingly bloody oppression and reprisals. Wainaina depicts an Africa where real people live (see Granta article referenced at top)–an Africa that will stay in your mind.

He finds hope in the fact that Uganda has rebuilt itself. “This country gives me hope that this continent is not, finally incontinent.”

The light Wainaina sheds on “the dark continent” and his strikingly original expression make this book a must for the traveler’s library. And a real find for anyone who wants to expand their knowledge of Africa.

Having won several literary awards and started a literary journal Kwani? (why not?), he now teaches at the Chinua Achebe (See Things Fall Apart review) Center for African Writers and Artists at Bard College in upstate New York.

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 am visiting Africa through literature on a semi-regular basis, as I try to expand my woefully small pool of knowledge. I welcome guest posts on books about Africa that may have inspired you, or suggestions to add to my reading list. And you can enter the Book Giveaway when you leave a comment, subscribe to A Traveler’s Library, or add your name in other ways. (See the rules here, and the list of books here.)

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Destination: Wisconsin

Book: The Bird Sisters by Rebecca Rasmussen (NEW, April, 2011)

…Twiss knew she’d stay with her sister in Wisconsin despite wanting to see Machu Picchu and the Continental Divide. She’d grow up with Milly and grow old with her, and then one day, if time had any kindness, she’d die with her.  Leaving Milly alone would’ve been like leaving an injured bird in the middle of the road.

In The Bird Sisters, Rebecca Rasmussen paints Wisconsin farmland and small town U.S.A.–a backdrop that both feeds and limits these two sisters’ lives.  The story is as small and fragile as the birds that people used to bring to the sisters to fix.  We learn the story of their lives bit by bit as they ponder the secrets, the love, the deceits that shaped their lives.

The people in The Bird Sisters, for the most part, are not travelers, so what is this doing on the travel library shelf?  Is it really travel literature? Despite their seemingly hemmed in lives in Spring Green Wisconsin, characters yearn to be other places. The book seems haunted with possibilities.

Spring Green Wisconsin

Their mother has been to France and has flown in a small airplane, looking down at a familiar landscape that seems ideal at a distance. After talking about France, teaching the girls French, yearning for her once rich life, she finally says, “I’ll never see France again, will I?”

She listens to a radio show called “A Day in the Life” that portrays what it would be like to drive a train across Colorado, or sing on Broadway, or climb Kilimanjaro.

Their father’s dreams of being a golf pro are dashed by an accident and he moves into the barn.

The town priest runs off to Mexico “to drink margaritas and sleep with a Mexian woman,” but even he returns to Spring Green.

Why do these two old ladies wind up staying in the same house with only each other to depend on? We find out as they look back at their younger days. One sister, Milly, was once beautiful and kind, and full of promise; the other, Twiss (the one who thought she might some day go to Machu Picchu) daring and contrary and independent. When they were children, a cousin came to spend the summer and changed all their lives. In contrast to the leafy Spring Green, bursting with life, she comes from a place called Dead Water, and has stories of evil and decay. Even so, Dead Water is somewhere else, and Milly and Twiss think for a time that they might want to go there.

Even the landscape contributes to the yearning for somewhere else.

Wisconsin River

Beyond the porch and their feet were the rolling hills, the county and the country, and the winding Wisconsin River, which gained and lost strength, narrowed and widened, rose and fell, all the way down to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, the confluence of river and ocean.

When you are in a thoughtful mood, about why you yearn to travel, or why you do not travel, and what difference it makes, you might want to take a look at The Bird Sisters.  Note: The author may be totally surprised to see her novel on the travel shelf, also. There is so much going on in this beautifully crafted book that everyone who reads it will take away something different. If you read it, let me know what you see.

I appreciate the publishers, Crown, an imprint of Random House, for providing me with a copy of this book for review. The book is also available for electronic readers.  Please click on the photos, from Flickr with Creative Commons license, to see who took them and to learn more about them. 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.

Note: If you follow the link in the first paragraph to Spring Green, Wisconsin, you will see that it would be a charming place to visit–Frank Lloyd Wright, a theater company, beautiful river scenery. As far as I could find out, Dead Water is a figment of the author’s imagination.

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

The Tower Bridge

Destination: London

Books: Loathsome London by Terry Deary from the Horrible Histories

Various Titles from the You Wouldn’t Want To Be… series for children

“Horrible” History Makes Traveling to Britain with Kids Fun

A GUEST POST by Mara Gorman

Grownups tend to think that castles, suits of armor, and ancient towers are automatically interesting to the younger set. The fact is, to most children one old building looks much like another, even if they both happen to be ancient castles. And without understanding what suits of armor and lances were used for, what fun are they to look at?

I knew that our trip to England in the summer of 2010 was going to be heavy on the history – we would be touring the Tower of London, the Globe Theatre, the Roman Baths in Bath, and Windsor Castle, not to mention any number of colleges in Oxford. My children are both in elementary school and have started studying American history, but their understanding of Britain was limited to knowing that they wore red coats when they came to fight us. How to make those buildings come alive for my children so that they seemed like more than a pile of stones?

If you guessed that reading some great books before we left was in order, you are correct. In particular I turned to two series for children, both of which use humor and comic-book style illustrations to great effect.

My older son, Tommy, who had just turned eight at the beginning of the summer, is an avid independent reader. I knew that if I could find an engaging history book to leave by his bed, he would soon be learning about Britain without any effort on my part. I chose from the Horrible Histories series, British books that use a humorous approach and a focus on the gross-out factors that history provides in spades. Loathsome London by Terry Deary offers chapters with titles such as “Terrible Tower” and “Terrible Tudor and Slimy Stuarts timeline”

Mara's boys at the Tower of London

The book opens with a cheerful disclaimer that it is exploring history in a one-sided and disgusting manner and then goes on to talk about things like your choice of execution types at the Tower of London – beheading, smothering, stabbing, drowning, or falling. Of course, woven into all of this are stories like that of such notables as Anne Boleyn, Edward V, and the Earl of Essex, so the reader gets a historical overview of the city and its rulers. We learn too about the Black Plague, the Great Fire, the Industrial Age, and the Blitz, not to mention any number of lesser known stories villainy, corruption, and “lousy jobs” such as tarring the heads that went on the spikes lining the bridges into London to, er, preserve them for posterity and public gawking.

Despite the gruesome topics, the tone of the book is light throughout. There are numerous illustrations, asides, lists, funny asides, and boxed facts designed to engage even reluctant readers.

(From the Stone Age through modern times, you can find Horrible Histories on any number of topics – explore the Horrible Histories website to find online games and even clips from TV shows based on the books).

Tommy at the Globe Theater

Since five-year-old Teddy wasn’t quite ready for the Horrible Histories, I also made sure we had some of the You Wouldn’t Want to Be… books lying around as well. You Wouldn’t Want to Be Mary Queen of Scots and You Wouldn’t Want to Be a Medieval Knight by Fiona MacDonald were our go-to texts, and on our visit to the Globe Theatre we also picked up You Wouldn’t Want to be a Tudor Actor in Shakespeare’s Theatre by Jacqueline Morley.

Written in the second person and designed to help children imagine themselves living as a queen, knight, or apprenticed actor long ago, these books are also humorous and full of colorful illustrations. “Handy hints” like “To try and ward off plague fumes, hold a pomander (a spice-scented ball) to your nose when you go out” provide additional information about what life was like. And contrary to the titles, not all of the information provided here is negative, just realistic and highlighting the contrast between life then and life now.

The consequence of arriving in London well prepared was that both boys were fascinated with British history. They spent hours looking at all of the kings’ armor in the new and impressive Tower of London exhibit. Tommy was especially thrilled to see the beautiful suit worn by Henry VIII, whom he knew like an old pal. When we arrived at the Houses of Parliament, he remembered that Guy Fawkes had planned to blow it up and relished the gory story shared with gusto by our guide from Fat Tire Bike tours.

In particular, both boys developed affection for Lord Nelson after hearing the story of his death at Trafalgar while standing at the base of his column. We had to visit his grave in Saint Paul’s Cathedral and examine his coat (complete with a hole from the bullet that killed him) in the Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Although they hadn’t read about Nelson in any of the books I gave them, I’m pretty sure that priming the pump with lots of history before our trip helped make them receptive to learning about the places we visited. And their reward for cheerfully tromping through all those castles and towers? A visit to Legoland, Windsor on our last day. Where in spite of the rides, their favorite thing to do was look at replicas of London’s famous buildings. Mission accomplished.

Mara's boys at Legoland

Mara Gorman

Mara Gorman’s blog The Mother of All Trips offers stories, tips, and inspiration for traveling parents. When she’s not on the road with Tommy (8) and Teddy (5), she can be found at home in Delaware.

What great book recommendations for boys and for the family travel library! I wish I had found books like this when my boys were small, but I’ll be laying in wait as soon as my grandsons are old enough. And what a smart mom you are, Mara. Thanks so much for sharing these good ideas and your wonderful family travel experiences. The photos belong to Mara, also (except for the first one which comes from a post by Julie, the Lady from London). Please don’t copy without  permission.

Here are some other books for traveling children:

Mara’s guest post on Monet’s Garden

guest post by Brette Sember on Maine

guest post by Christine Gross-Loh on helping children adjust to Japan

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

The blog Freelancedom is running a series entitled Why I Write.  I talked about my reasons for writing in a post that went up this week. You may have guessed that it is not to get rich and famous. But my answer may surprise you.

Hint: Questions

Oh, you don’t want to hear about me?  You want to know if you won a prize? OKAY,  to end the suspense…. The winner of the 2-night stay at a Cambria Suites, plus $100 credit at the cafe goes to food blogger extraordinare, Stephanie Stiavetti.  You can see her writing at several places, but take a look at her main home on the Web, The Culinary Life. Steph says that depending on when she can travel to take advantage of her prize, she may book a hotel in Denver as her getaway. Congratulations, Steph!!

Books Books Books

Now for the books–which have not been shipped out yet, but soon, I promise…Ten readers of A Traveler’s Library are expanding their own travel library with these literary gems that we classify as travel literature.

• Casey Barber of Good.Food. Stories won the book Come Again No More. Being a New Yawker, she needs a book about the West, doncha think?
• Casey also won A Week at the Airport, which she says may stimulate her to actually GO somewhere instead of just “living vicariously from the rest of the group.”
• Rosemary Carstens, who freelances writing about art and puts out a great literary, art and food newsletter, Feast, won Cemetery of Dreams.
• Connie Ong, who also goes as Anjuli, was a very lucky lady.  She won the memoir Crossing the Heart of Africa, and also Mike Gerrard’s book of travel essays, Snakes Alive.
• Over the Top, about misadventures on a long trek around the Alps, goes to Leigh McAdam who says she is a trekker and mountain hiker herself. Check her out at Hike.Bike. Travel.
• Jackie Smith, who blogs about travel at Travel ‘n Write and seems ALWAYS to be on the move, won a copy of The Leisure Seekers, about an elderly couple on their last RV trip across America on Rt. 66.
• I gave two books away on the Grand Canyon guest post by Jessie Voigts (with pictures from my own Colorado River trip). Fittingly, another Arizona tourism icon, Tombstone Postcards is the subject of the book won by Laura Baran.
• Debbie Beardsley, known as the European Travelista, won Under the Huang Jiao Tree, about a New Zealander teaching in China. (Okay, maybe Debbie needs a change of scenery from Europe.)
• Richard Mussler-Wright, prolific commenter at A Traveler’s Library, loves to read–everything. I’m sure he’ll be delighted with the book he won, War on the Margins.
• Bethany Salvon, another travel blogger, Beers and Beans, was lucky enough to get the beautiful book set in Oregon and Illinois, called The Crying Tree.
• And the final winner, Deb Christensen won The Year of the Hare, that wonderful book from Finland. It is amazing how these things turn out to be so fitting. (Do you think that random.org  has ESP instead of just mathematical formulas?) Anyhow, Deb tells me that her grandmother’s family is from Finland, and she herself visited there when she was in college and wants to go back. After reading this book, she will definitely want to head for Finland.

Photographer, John Althouse Cohen, who took that lovely “Questions” picture has a nifty blog, too. Turns out I’ve used another of his photos, too. Troy Holden took the picture of the bookstore shelves. Both photos are used under Creative Commons license, and came from Flickr.com.

And HUGE thanks to Cambria Suites for making the Grand Prize available. We appreciate your interest in literary travelers, and are looking forward to our next stay at a Cambria Suites.

All but one of the books mentioned here have been reviewed at A Traveler’s Library. Too many to link them all, but if you are curious, and I hope you are, you can find them by using the search bar at the top right.

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Book Cover

Destination: Istanbul

Book: Strolling Through Istanbul, The Classic Guide to the City by Hilary Sumner-Boyd & John Freely (Originally published 1972;NEW edition, 2010)

I try to imagine strolling the streets of Istanbul, but I am hampered by the perennial action movie shots–camera zooming overhead as swarthy men race through narrow passage ways, overturning carts of chickens who run squawking in all directions and….CUT!

Actually, that was probably Marakesh, not Istanbul, but a bazaar is a bazaar, right? And since I doubt that I am going to get Ken anywhere even close to Istanbul, since the little incident in Jerusalem, I have just done the next best thing and read Strolling Through Istanbul, revised and updated this year, 38 years after it was originally published.

Oh–the incident in Jerusalem?  We were there in 1990 on a carefully chapereoned tour which had excluded the Arab quarter. On our last day, set free, we decided to wander a bit, climbed up to the Dome of the Rock and then entered one of the tightly packed streets of a bazaar.  Ken, as usual, was a bit nervous about me getting into trouble, and of course as soon as I got a few feet away from him,out of sight in the crowded narrow street, khaki- uniformed policemen, armed to the teeth, bustled in and rushed someone off.  Of course Ken was convinced I had been arrested and we would never get home again. I was just looking at jewelry. Not even the Holy Grail.  I swear, he reads too many Ludlum novels. But, he never did like cities, and now he particularly does not like ancient cities with bazaars. So much for strolling Istanbul.

After writing scholarly works, the two British authors they joined forces to share this more accessible version of information with travelers. Sumner-Boyd passed away after the original guide was published and Freely took on the task of revision and updating. He points out in the preface to the new edition that although Istanbul has expanded from two million to twelve million people, the heart of the old city remains largely unchanged, and did not change any of their original itineraries.

Topkapi Palace, Istanbul

I read through much of the book enjoying it like a history of the city that spanned such dramatic twists and turns of fortune.  The authors ingratiate themselves by telling stories as they stroll through the neighborhoods and over the seven hills (yes, just like Rome). I will admit to skipping over much of the architectural detail although if I were on the spot in Hagia Sopia or Topkapi Palace, I probably would pay more attention.

As it was, I skimmed for the fun details, like those marvelous names the Sultans had for everything. “The Halberdiers with Tresses,” were called that because they were guards (carrying halberds) with two long curls (tresses) hanging down in front of their eyes to obstruct their eyes to obstruct their view of the lovelies in the Harem.

Another mark of a good guide, I think,  is fearlessness in giving opinions, and these two felt justified in expressing themselves. My mind formed a sort of “tut-tut” British accent when the authors expressed frequent disapproval  of things like “unfortunate restorations” for instance.

Each section starts with a clear, hand-drawn map, and diagrams for the major buildings help you follow the descriptions. The index divides everything by building type–there’s that architecture thing again–and I would have preferred place and people names, but is already quite a thick book.

Some people will find this book packed with extraneous information, like names of architects, and lacking essential things like prices of hotel rooms, for instance. However, for the traveler who appreciates digging deeply into the culture and history of a place, this will be a valuable addition to the Traveler’s Library–whether she has actual or virtual strolling in mind. Palgrave McMillan and publisher Tauris Parke Paperbacks should be congratulated and supported in their efforts to keep alive great classics of travel literature.

This book was furnished for review by Palgrave McMillan and the picture of tile work from Topakpi palace is used courtesy of Creative Commons license from Flickr. Click on the picture to get more information.

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Book Cover

Destination: Southern Arizona

Book: Historic Walking Guides: Tombstone & Bisbee Arizona (NEW 2010) by Jane Eppinga

Curious staffers of other Congressmen go into the office of an Arizona Congressman, look at the map, and point with wonder at Tombstone. “You mean that’s a real place?”

Yep! Even though Tombstone in some ways lives on as a mythical Western town, best known for Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday, it is still “The Town Too Tough to Die” and one of the prime tourist attractions in the state.  Jane Eppinga, a prolific writer about Arizona history, says that when she signs her travel books in Tombstone, she meets travelers from Romania, Ireland, Hungary, Canada, and lots and lots of Germans and Brits.

Eppinga  is a meticulous researcher who checks and double checks every fact in her books–eight in print and three coming soon. So I was happy to pull her away from her keyboard long enough to answer a few questions about her career and her latest book, [amazonify]0955928176::text::::Historic Walking Guides: Tombstone & Bisbee Arizona [/amazonify].

A Traveler’s Library: How did your interest in writing about historic Arizona get started?

Jane Eppinga: About thirty years ago, I started writing for the Arizona Capitol Times, [a newspaper published in Phoenix about state government.]..  I was in the [Arizona] Historical Society… They wanted a history column, and asked the Historical Society for recommendations. They recommended me. And then my books came along, and that’s how I got started.

ATL: What was the first book?

JE: The first book that I ever did was Henry Ossian Flipper, the first West Point black graduate. Flipper was a resident of Nogales. That was 1995.

ATL: Why is a British publisher publishing a book about two small towns in Arizona?

Tombstone Gunfight

J. E.:The Brits and the Germans are crazy about Tombstone. The editor/publisher of DestinWorld has been to Tombstone and they absolutely love that place. When they hold the Rendezvous of Gunfighters in early September, whole groups come from Great Britain.

ATL: Did you personally go to all the places in the book?

JE: I have over the years. I did not do the 1000-Step Walk in Bisbee. [Bisbee is an old mining town built on steep hills.]… it is usually in October.

ATL: What do you recommend as “don’t miss” places in each town?

J.E.:

Tombstone: They’ve got to go to a gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and be aware that it is not the actual O. K. Corral where the gunfight took place. After that, I would say, it is that marvelous Court House. It is open, and it is a State Park. It is just a jewel of Victorian architecture.

Bisbee: Stop at the Mining Museum. It is a auxiliary of the Smithsonian.   The second thing I would do there is take the underground mine tour. Led by guys who worked in the mines when the underground mining was going on. They know what they are talking about.

ATL: What books about the area do you recommend for a traveler’s library?

J.E.:

• Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend by Casey Tefertiller
• And Die in the West:The Story of the O.K. Corral Gunfight by Paula Marks
• Tombstone, Arizona ‘Too Tough To die’ :The rise and Fall and Resurrection of a Silver Camp: 1878 to 1990 by Lynn Bailey
• Going Back to Bisbee by Richard Shelton

Jane Eppinga

The Historic Walking Guides: Tombstone and Bisbee lays out nine walks, plus travel information. If you are not traveling, but want to learn about the history of gunfighters and miners in the Southwest, this is a good book for a traveler’s library.

Thanks, Jane. And congratulations for your national award on your book,[amazonify]0762745975::text:::: They Made Their Mark,[/amazonify] about women geographers. Good luck with your latest project, a  guide to ALL the museums in Arizona and your blog about museums.

The photo of the book cover and of the author are courtesy of Jane Eppinga. The Tombstone photograph is by Vera Marie Badertscher, all rights reserved. If you click on the book titles and go to Amazon and then BUY any book or item they sell, I will make a few cents.

Where would you like to visit in the Southwest? LAST DAY to leave me a note telling me why YOU should get the t-shirt that says “I guess there will never be enough books.”

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Running on the Map

Put Your Place on the Map

Have you read a book or movie that really nailed your state, your region, your country?  The place where you live?  What reading or viewing do you recommend to people who want to see what your territory is like? Add your choices to A Traveler’s Library.

TAKE TWO MINUTES–TAKE A SURVEY

Please click here to take this brief  survey and make suggestions of books and movies that best represent your state, region, or country.

Of course, you can leave comments as usual, but it is much easier for me to keep track of your replies to this question if you actually fill in the very short survey. Let me know in the comments section if you have any problems with the poll.

THANKS for your help.

Photograph by Archibald Jude

This content is a post from: A Traveler's Library To comment on this post or search for related information, click on the link to A Traveler's Library. We'll leave a light on for you.

©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.