The Booklist: Where I went on my holidays
As the holiday season is here, Bookhugger has compiled a selection of books on places where you may or may not wish to take your children…
Six Months in Sudan, by James Maskalyk
James Maskalyk set out for the contested border town of Abyei, Sudan, in 2007. The newest Médicins Sans Frontières’ doctor in the field, he arrived with only his training, full of desire to understand this most desperate part of the world. He returned home six months later profoundly affected by the experience.
Six Months in Sudan is an illuminating and affecting account of saving lives in one of the most harrowing and dangerous places on Earth. Read an extract from the memoir James Orbinski describes as ‘a rare window on the inner life of an aid worker, on what it means to be a humanitarian around the hard edges of war, and on the certain drive to go on.’
Strange Telescopes, by Daniel Kalder
When Daniel Kalder, acclaimed author of one of the most unusual and feted travel debuts of the twenty-first century, Lost Cosmanaut, descended into the sewers of Moscow in pursuit of the mythical lost city of tramps, he didn’t realise that he was embarking on a bizarre, year-long odyssey that would lead him thousands of miles across Russia to the Arctic Circle via the heart of Asia. Now he has returned, mad-eyed and bearded, to tell the tale.
After exploring the depths of Moscow’s ‘Underground Planet’, Kalder descends yet further to a Ukrainian vision of hell, chasing down demons and exorcists in the dubious afterglow of the Orange Revolution, before ascending to meet Vissarion Christ, one-time traffic cop, now messiah to thousands of followers calmly awaiting the apocalypse at the foot of his holy mountain in Siberia. Finally, in the long polar night at the edge of the world Kalder enters the only wooden skyscraper on the planet and encounters a man with a bizarre secret that may explain everything . ..
Salvation and damnation, humour and pathos and keen and caustic observations collide as Daniel Kalder expertly guides us through the alternative realities, rebels and opportunists, further expanding the possibilities of the travel memoir with this unique account of a modern day quest that reveals the astonishing lengths people will go to when they view the world through a ‘strange telescope’.
Wrong About Japan, by Peter Carey
In 2002, twice Booker-winning author Peter Carey travelled to Japan, accompanied by his son Charley. In this stunning memoir-cum-travelogue Carey charts this journey, as father and son look for the hidden puzzles and meanings within Manga and Anime, and what these particular art forms might reveal about Japanese culture and history. Tense, funny, honest and moving, Wrong About Japan offers a uniquely personal exploration of two very different cultures.
Bicycle Diaries, by David Byrne
Since the early 1980s, David Byrne has been riding a bike as his principal means of transportation in New York City. Two decades ago, he discovered folding bikes, and starting taking them on tour. Byrne’s choice was made out of convenience rather than political motivation, but the more cities he saw from his bicycle, the more he became hooked on this mode of transport and the sense of liberation it provided. Convinced that urban biking opens one’s eyes to the inner workings and rhythms of a city’s geography and population, Byrne began keeping a journal of his observations and insights.
An account of what he sees and who he meets as he pedals through metropolises from Berlin to Buenos Aires, Istanbul to San Francisco, Manila to New York, Bicycle Diaries also records Byrne’s thoughts on world music, urban planning, fashion, architecture, cultural dislocation, and much more, all with a highly personal mixture of humour, curiosity, and humility. Part-travelogue, part-journal, part-photo album, Bicycle Diaries is an eye-opening celebration of seeing the world at bike level.
Travels with a Typewriter, by Michael Frayn
A hugely entertaining collection of Michael Frayn’s travel writing from the sixties and seventies, including pieces on Germany, Cuba, Israel, Japan and Russiam.
In mid-career, Frayn took up his old trade of journalism, and wrote a series of occasional articles for the Observer about some of the places in the world that interested him. He wanted to describe ‘not the extraordinary but the ordinary, the typical, the everyday’, and his accounts became the starting point for some of the novels and plays he wrote later. From a kibbutz in Israel to summer rains in Japan, bicycles in Cambridge to Notting Hill at the end of the 1950s, they are glimpses of a world which sometimes seems tantalisingly familar, sometimes vanished forever.
Where Underpants Come From, by Joe Bennett
When Joe Bennett bought a five-pack of ‘Made in China’ underpants in his local New Zealand hypermarket for $8.59, he wondered who on earth could be making any money, let alone profit, from the exchange. How many processes and middlemen are involved? Where and how are the pants made? And who decides on the absorbent qualities of the gusset?
Where Underpants Come From tells you all you need to know – in fact, probably more – about this mystery of global commerce. Leaving his supermarket trolley behind Joe embarks on an odyssey to the new factory of the world, China, to trace his pants back to their source. Along the way he discovers the extraordinarily balanced and intricate web of contacts and exchanges that makes global trade possible — and rapidly elevating China to the status of world economic superpower. He also grapples with chopsticks, challenges his own prejudices and marvels at the contrasts in one of the world’s oldest, but fastest changing, societies. Funny, wise and insightful, it is another wonderful journey from the author of A Land of Two Halves and Mustn’t Grumble.
