Reviews
All the book reviews below are for The Independent unless otherwise stated:
A Winter on the Nile, By Anthony Sattin
In the wrong hands, the chance discovery that Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert took the same boat up the Nile on a day in November 1849 could have yielded a speculative novel or sub-Stoppardian play. Would Flaubert have been intrigued by Florence’s phlegmatic ways and wide-eyed idealism – and what might the 29-year-old Englishwoman have made of the novelist’s taste for hookahs and harems?
The Mango Orchard, By Robin Bayley
There’s a good, hyperventilated moment in Robin Bayley’s first book. He’s staying in a “casa de amor”, a cheap Colombian hotel that rents out rooms by the hour for casual sex, and by the night for travellers who can’t afford anything better. As he eats an unspecified fish, which tastes like carpet, he can hear everyone else having riotous sex or partying. Any maudlin self-pity or bad digestion is rudely interrupted by the sound of gunfire and a body landing on the roof over his head.
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, by Greg Grandin
Nothing demonstrates the eccentricity of this complicated, difficult tycoon more than ‘Fordlandia’, the huge rubber plantation in the Amazon the size of Tennessee that he bought sight-unseen in 1928 and then tried to turn into a production-line township of the sort that had worked so well for him in the States.
Three Ways to Capsize a Boat, By Chris Stewart
Chris Stewart’s beguiling tales of life on a Spanish farm have been a publishing phenomenon: produced by a small press, Driving over Lemons and its sequels have sold over a million copies. The charm lay in Stewart’s boho, ambling ways…
Two Planks and a Passion, By Roland Huntford
When, in 1911, Amundsen became the first man to raise a flag over the South Pole, one might have expected him to celebrate, or at least express quiet satisfaction at beating Scott’s British team. Instead, his first reflections were that “the skiing has been partly good, partly bad”. As Roland Huntford reminds us in a history of skiing full of intriguing surprises, his team saw themselves not as explorers, but as skiers…
Empires of the Indus, By Alice Albinia
How little we know about Pakistan. For a country at the troubled centre of geo-politics, with a population greater than Russia’s, the general perception gets not much further than “hard-line military state, with attitude”…
Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees, by Roger Deakin
……… Deakin’s extraordinary book; his last, as he died shortly after its completion. The original manuscript has been whorled down to a series of concentric and concise rings around its subject, and the result is some of the finest naturalist writing for many years: “In the pine top of my work table, the dark knots are boulders standing up in the rivers of grain, sending eddies and ripples spinning downstream, delivering the driftwood thought of a new journey to be taken, through trees.”…
The story of the Amazon, by John Hemming Daily Telegraph
A common presumption is that the Indian tribes of lowland Amazonia have always led a primitive and sparse existence, battling with disease and the rainforests, and that these miseries were made even more acute by the predations of white invaders. But when Europeans first arrived in 1500, they found a prosperous land with some four to five million inhabitants. Moreover, many of the Indians stood a foot taller than their Spanish conquerors, and were among the healthiest people on the continent; recent research shows that their diet as hunter-gatherers of fish and game was far more balanced than that of their Inca contemporaries in ancient Peru…
Panther Soup, by John Gimlette
It was Paul Fussell in his magisterial Wartime who picked out the pivotal moment when the American authorities realised what they were dealing with in the Second World War. They issued an edict that servicemen should no longer be issued with white underpants. The war in all its messy, scrappy detail – sniping and scuffling in the vegetable gardens of Western Europe by ordinary soldiers – has always been more difficult to convey than the grand strategies of the generals who sent them there…
In Arabian Nights, by Tahir Shah
There comes a time when even travel writers no longer feel like travelling; they return home, exhausted, to explore their roots. Tahir Shah, who has described his exotic adventures in Peru, India and Ethiopia, has reached that stage. His previous book, The Caliph’s House, began the process, describing life in his home in Casablanca. But a recent experience in Pakistan’s North West frontier accelerated it…
Travel: Stepping out in style from Congo to Crete
The best of 2007: travel books reviewed:
Philip Hensher used the death of Eric Newby last year to speculate in these pages that perhaps the travel book had died with him - that, in a largely discovered and explored world, there was nowhere left to go. Instead, travel writers have started to ask new questions about often familiar territory, inspired by Max Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn of 1998: his magical walk in the East Anglian flatlands…
Re-reading Márquez for Cheltenham Literature Festival 2007
Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez
Penguin New Edition, as part of a reissue of the complete set of his novels.
No novelist since Proust has had a more acute sense of smell than Márquez . Penguin should have reissued these books with sprayed strips of paper interspersed between the leaves, like a perfumerie. The hot still air of his un-named Caribbean port , the ‘city of the Viceroys’, is enveloped by the ‘the tender breath of human shit, warm and sad’, against which his protagonists wear imported Cologne from Farina Gegenuber and the houses are filled with pots of heliotrope to perfume the dusk…
The Punishment Of Virtue, by Sarah Chayes
There has been a deluge of books in recent years that could be subtitled: “I fought with the Mujahideen and won.” The author, who is usually a foreign correspondent, will have first conspired at Greens Hotel in Peshawar, then slipped over the Afghan border in disguise and seen action at close quarters. After taking part in the fall of Kabul or Mazar-i-Sharif, the narrator will end his story with a pious reflection on how neither the British nor anybody else has ever been able to hold Afghanistan.
Sarah Chayes’s account is a welcome antidote to such tales of derring-do…
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)
‘Book of a Lifetime’
I first read Anna Karenina twenty years ago when travelling across the Peruvian desert on a long bus journey, and it has stayed with me ever since. The flatness of the desert, with looted and bleached bones from the Paracas tombs spilling right up to the highway, made a peculiarly complementary backdrop for Tolstoy’s tale as it played back and forth across the Russian steppe…
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The Ice Soldier, by Paul Watkins
Mountaineering books deal largely in failure. There is nothing climbers like so much as a good post-mortem of what can go wrong on a peak, from Nanga Parbat in 1934 to the disasters on Everest in 1996. Reaching a summit is anyway often a false ending: it is a commonplace of mountaineering that more lives are lost on the descent. Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void, the bestseller of the genre, is hardly a success story…
The Explorer’s Daughter by Kari Herbert
Too many recent books on polar exploration have been dull, survivalist accounts of how the author “got there” single-handed, at record-breaking speed. All too often they come home with a self-aggrandising tale of their own heroism. Sir Wally Herbert, who can lay claim to being Britain’s most eminent living explorer, would describe such journeys as “slam-dunk” affairs, where the value of discovery has been lost in the eagerness to be the fastest to an already-reached goal…
also see Hugh’s obituary for Sir Wally Herbert
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration
Robin Hanbury-Tenison (ed), The Seventy Great Journeys in History
Benedict Allen, Into the Abyss
The received history of exploration has always run as follows: Columbus and Vasco de Gama, fuelled by nationalistic ambition, a Renaissance curiosity about the world and good old-fashioned adventurism, kick-started a “golden age of discovery” that ran unbroken until the 19th century. In the process, the boundaries of the known world were extended immeasurably until the planet had been tightly girdled around, leaving slim pickings for any modern explorer today…
Through Siberia by Accident, by Dervla Murphy
With each succeeding travel book, writers can lose some of the spring in their step. The enthusiasm that launched their careers turns to a weary plod as the next commission sends them on a further journey. Dervla Murphy happily disproves the rule. This is her 20th travel book, but it reads as freshly as if it were her first…
A taste of adventure on the road to Utopia
The best of 2004: travel books reviewed
This year has seen travel books flex their muscles, taking on all comers from politics and food-writing to the Taliban and the philosophy of utopianism. Like the best of film documentary, travel writing has the licence to mix genres and view the world from some unexpected and refreshing angles…
Fifty Years on: Everest Books 2003
Everest: The Summit of Achievement eds S Venables & J Wright
Everest: The Official History by George Band
Everest by Chris Bonington
Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane
In the welter of self-congratulation for the 50th anniversary of the climbing of Everest, it is easy to forget how fragile the British achievement was. John Hunt’s first summit team of two British climbers failed, partly due to his poor positioning of their final camp. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were only the back-up, given their chance only because the New Zealander and the Sherpa had proved such a formidable load-carrying team on the approach. Tenzing had come close to summiting the mountain in 1952 with the Swiss, and would have been equally happy to have done so with them. Now he was simply finishing the job. The British were still struggling to work out which system of bottled oxygen worked best, closed or open circuit.
What really made the ascent possible was phenomenal luck with the weather – the best for many years – and the reconnaissance work done by Eric Shipton…
House of the Tiger King: a jungle obsession, by Tahir Shah
All of us, travel writers included, tend to pack too much baggage, intellectual or otherwise, when we set off on our journeys. Not Tahir Shah. He has made a literary virtue out of travelling light. For this latest quest, he sets off up the Amazon with not much more that a carrier bag full of Pot Noodles and a bottle of water, to help with the humidity and the drugs…
The Faber Book of Exploration by Benedict Allen (editor)
Explorers have always needed to write well. Unless they could beguile emperors or patrons back home with tales of their exploits, they were unlikely ever to get another commission, or to achieve any fame. Who now remembers Ney Alias, the British civil servant who travelled across 4,800 miles of largely unexplored territory between Peking and Nijni Novogorod in 1872, but left not a word behind?…