Tag: travel writing

LibraryPicks | The Hippie Trail: A History, Sharif Gemie & Brian Ireland | Manchester University Press

The Hippie Trail: A History by Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland is a rollicking and riveting read, chock-full of vivid anecdotes and insights. It is perfect for armchair travellers dreaming of happier times. How gentrified and commodified the world seems today!

“You can’t trust anybody who’s wearing a tie,” Jefferson Airplane

Gemie and Ireland appraise the broader social and political context, alongside the psychological and cultural worlds of the famously hirsute travellers. The resulting narrative is a blend of analysis and dialogues with eighty authors and interviewees who went on the trail in the late 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s on a quest for adventure, spirituality and escape from monotony, ending up – though not always – in Nepal. By the 1970s, Kathmandu was known as “the Benidorm of the dope trail”. (p. 104) 

Continue reading LibraryPicks | The Hippie Trail: A History, Sharif Gemie & Brian Ireland | Manchester University Press

Review | So It Goes – Travels in the Aran Isles, Xian and places in between, Nicolas Bouvier | Eland Publishing

“You don’t travel in order to deck yourself with exoticism and anecdotes like a Christmas tree, but so that the route plucks you, rinses you, wrings you out, makes you like one of those towels, threadbare with washing that are handed out with slivers of soap in brothels. You leave far behind you the excuses or curses of your birthplace, and in each filthy bundle lugged about in crowded waiting rooms, on little station platforms appalling in their heat and misery, you see your own coffin going by. Without this detachment and lucidity, how can you hope to convey what you have seen?” — from Nicolas Bouvier’s The Scorpion-Fish

The Swiss writer and photographer, Nicolas Bouvier, (1929-98) was a traveller in the real sense of the word, navigating different worlds and writing about forgotten people and changed places. He gives us alternative perspectives on places like the Balkans, Iran, Azerbaijan, Japan, China, Korea and the highlands of Scotland.

He is unusual in the way he writes, at times, in a stream of consciousness about the world around him and how he feels in the instant so directly and openly. In The Scorpion Fish, his description of a bomb blowing up a bus and the grisly aftermath is not only very beautifully written but mirrors his inner collapse and sense of physical decrepitude. Continue reading Review | So It Goes – Travels in the Aran Isles, Xian and places in between, Nicolas Bouvier | Eland Publishing

Review | Along the Amber Route, St Petersburg to Venice – C. J. Schüler | Book of the Week

“I am standing in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. In a glass case in front of me are some small, irregular beads of dark, honey-coloured amber. Discovered in a Mycenaean tomb in Crete by Sir Arthur Evans, they date from between 1700 and 1300 BC, the dawn of classical civilization. At around the same time, in north Wales, hundreds of amber beads were placed in a stone-lined tomb along with a body wrapped in the spectacular gold shoulder ornament known as the Mold Cape, now in the British Museum. Amber has been found in the tomb of Tutankhamun and in the ruins of Troy. The Etruscans imported large amounts of it, which they used to adorn jewellery, as doid the Romans after them.” So begins literary critic, cartographer and historian, C. J. Schüler’s illuminating and entertaining travelogue-cum-memoir following the Amber Route, retracing “some of the deepest fault lines in European history,” and his family’s hidden history as he goes.

A dinosaur DNA-carrying mosquito preserved inside a piece of amber was the catalyst for classic film Jurassic Park, based on the novel by Michael Crichton. As Schüler points out, this may have seemed far-fetched back in the 1990s, but not so now. A mosquito dating back to age of dinosaurs was found preserved in amber in 2019.
 Continue reading Review | Along the Amber Route, St Petersburg to Venice – C. J. Schüler | Book of the Week

BookBlasts® | Top 10 Reads for Independent Minds | May 2018

Just back from a break in Patmos, a paradise in the Aegean Sea, hence our May top 10 indie reads going up at the eleventh hour . . . The indie publishers of today are often compared to the indie record labels of yesteryear, so to enjoy total immersion in the wild and wonderful world of musical entrepreneurship, my perfect beach read was Taking Leave by island resident Jeremy Thomas (Timewell Press, 2006) — a first novel about “the record business and lives hilariously out of control,” as A. L. Kennedy put it. Stephen Fry had this to say, “Jeremy Thomas is a complete original. His writing, like his life, is a whirlwind of brilliance, wonder and  blunder, by turns hilarious and terrifying. Highly recommended.”  

Our May reads take in West China, the coastline of North West England, the Caribbean coastline of Colombia, Latvia, Liberia, Slovakia and Palestine.

@BalestierPress @Ofmooseandmen @Carcanet @CharcoPress @commapress @GalleyBeggars @hoperoadpublish @istros_books @PennedintheM @SaqiBooks Continue reading BookBlasts® | Top 10 Reads for Independent Minds | May 2018

BookBlast® Archive | Gael Elton Mayo, Letter from Brittany | Spanish American Courier, June 1954

In the northwest of Spain, Brittany, the west of England and Ireland, you find people with the same surnames. They are all Celts. When Breton and Cornish sailors meet at sea they understand each other’s dialects.

One remembers the saying that Brittany was originally joined on to Cornwall, but how Galicia fits into this is more mysterious, even though if you look at the map it isn’t so far – relatively speaking – from the south coast of Brittany to the north-west coast of Spain.

Continue reading BookBlast® Archive | Gael Elton Mayo, Letter from Brittany | Spanish American Courier, June 1954

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