14 Sep '05 - + 20 - 25 The Best American Travel Writing 2003
The Best American Travel Writing 2003 (The Best American Series)
was a big departure from what I've otherwise been reading lately.
First, it's nonfiction (mostly). Second, it's written by
Americans, not the British.
I really enjoyed many of the 24 short stories in the collection,
although I wouldn't really categorize all of them as "travel writing."
Instead, quite a few of the stories were more about social causes than
about travel itself. For example, Daniel Mendelsohn's
What Happened to Uncle Shmiel?
followed the author and his siblings as they searched for clues to what
happened to their family in the Holocaust in Ukraine. Hank
Stuever's
Just One Word: Plastic is a warning about our
culture's over-reliance on credit cards that is related to travel only
in that the author had to drive 80 miles to Wilmington, Delaware to do
his reporting. Patrick Symmes's
Blood Wood is a story about
ecological damage in the Amazon rain forest for which the author had to
go to different parts of the country for his interviews.
Similarly,
Tom Clynes's They Shoot Poacher's, Don't They?
introduces us to a group of environmentalists in the Central African
Republic ready to kill poachers in order to save the animals.
All of these are well-written stories worth reading, but travel is
incidental to the point of each of them. Perhaps the guest
editor, Ian Frazier, is really into social causes; I don't know.
Fitting somewhat in the same mold was Michael Specter's
I Am Fashion.
Similar to the others I've discussed, this story touches on travel only
incidentally. Instead, it's a discussion of the life, music,
fashion design, and parties of Sean "Puff Daddy" "P. Diddy" Combs.
Huh?
That's not to say that the collection did not contain its share of fine travel writing.
Christopher Hitchens's
The Ballad of Route 66 has the author
describing the experiences discovered driving down the fabled road in a
new Corvette; it's interesting and funny. Kira Salak's
Mungo Made Me Do It
is a first-person account of her experience of kayaking the Niger river
600 miles from Old Ségou to Timbuktu solo, an unprecedented trip deadly
both from the water and from some of the people on the shore; I was
amazed she lived to write the story. Lawrence Millman's
Lost in the Arctic
is another tale of near-death and self-discovery recounting the
author's failed attempts to explore a previously-uncharted island in
the Canadian far north.
This is the first collection I've read from the
Best American Series, and I think I'll try to pick up another collection, perhaps
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2005 or
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005
or just staying with the Travel Writing series. Even though the
subject matter of the stories sometimes strayed more than I would have
expected, I found all the stories interesting (ok, not all. Bruce
McCall's
Winter Cruises Under Ten Dollars didn't succeed at being funny), and travel is obviously a subject in which I'm interested.
Thanks, Jeremy, for giving me this book. I shouldn't have waited two years to read it.
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