From its roots as the quintessential Western pastime, rodeo has grown into an international, prime-time television sport. Steeped in tradition and spirit, the rodeo calls aspiring cowboys and cowgirls to its rough-and-tumble fame as they repeatedly risk their lives for eight seconds of triumph. In Chasing the Rodeo, Kip Stratton takes us into the addictive core of bull …
First published more than thirty years ago, Paul Theroux’s strange, unique, and hugely entertaining railway odyssey has become a modern classic of travel literature. Here Theroux recounts his early adventures on an unusual grand continental tour. Asia’s fabled trains — the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Frontier Mail, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Mandalay …
In his introduction, guest editor Andrew McCarthy says that the best travel writing is “the anonymous and solitary traveler capturing a moment in time and place, giving meaning to his or her travels.” The stories in The Best American Travel Writing 2015 demonstrate just that spirit, whether it is the story of a marine returning to Iraq a decade after …
The Journals of Lewis and Clark are “the first report on the West, on the United States over the hill and beyond the sunset, on the province of the American future” (Bernard DeVoto). In 1803, the great expanse of the Louisiana Purchase was an empty canvas. Keenly aware that the course of the nation’s destiny lay westward—and …
In Dark Star Safari the wittily observant and endearingly irascible Paul Theroux takes readers the length of Africa by rattletrap bus, dugout canoe, cattle truck, armed convoy, ferry, and train. In the course of his epic and enlightening journey, he endures danger, delay, and dismaying circumstances.Gauging the state of affairs, he talks to Africans, aid workers, missionaries, and …
“Theroux is at his best when he tells [people’s] stories, happy and sad . . . Theroux’s great mission had always been to transport us beyond that reading chair, to challenge himself—and thus, to challenge us.” — Boston GlobeA decade ago, Paul Theroux’s best-selling Dark Star Safari chronicled his epic overland voyage from Cairo to Cape Town, providing …
In January 2002 Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan-surviving by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers. 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’ …
House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East
“Wonderful . . . One of the finest memoirs I’ve read.” — Philip Caputo, Washington PostIn the summer of 2006, racing through Lebanon to report on the Israeli invasion, Anthony Shadid found himself in his family’s ancestral hometown of Marjayoun. There, he discovered his great-grandfather’s once magnificent estate in near ruins, devastated by war. One year later, Shadid …
Starting with a rush-hour subway ride to South Station in Boston to catch the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago, Theroux winds up on the poky, wandering Old Patagonian Express steam engine, which comes to a halt in a desolate land of cracked hills and thorn bushes. But with Theroux the view along the way is what matters: …
Every December an envelope bearing a stamp from the North Pole would arrive for J.R.R. Tolkien’s children. Inside would be a letter in a strange, spidery handwriting and a beautiful colored drawing or painting. The letters were from Father Christmas. They told wonderful tales of life at the North Pole: how the reindeer got loose and …