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<B>The Galapagos’ allure</B> Charles Darwin went to the Galapagos in the 19th century and found the inspiration for his <B>Origin of the Species</B>. Jack Nelson went there in the 1960s for a very different reason.

To put it simply, Nelson was a draft dodger determined to stay out of Vietnam. Though people fly right into the Galapagos these days, his pilgrimage involved quite a bit more adventure, including a five-day ferry ride from the nearest mainland. Safely ensconced on the islands, he sent the U.S. draft board a photo of himself making an obscene gesture.

That was more than 30 years ago. Since then, Nelson has settled into a more conventional existence. He runs a small hotel, helps raise his girlfriend’s daughter and battles the myriad forces of greed that could destroy the Galapagos’ fragile ecology.

It’s around this colorful character that journalist Michael D’Orso loosely organizes his latest book, <I>Plundering Paradise: The Hand of Man on the Galapagos Islands</I>. D’Orso says in his introduction that people, not the raw forces of nature, are what he finds interesting. In the process of researching the Galapagos and its complex politics, he writes compellingly about its natural habitat, which includes ancient, 70-pound tortoises, marine iguanas and an abundance of rare finches. But D’Orso gets at the subject of the Galapagos’ natural wonders through profiles of offbeat characters like Nelson.

The prize in a tug of war between greed and environmental conservation, the Galapagos Islands belong to Ecuador and are at risk from that country’s turbulent government and sky-rocketing inflation. To poverty-stricken Ecuadorians, the riches of the Galapagos act as a powerful magnet.

The Darwin Research Station and Ecuador’s park service try to hold the line against poaching and diesel-dripping cruise ships, but they have limited funds, few personnel and only one boat with which to cruise the seas and enforce restrictions. Into this scene of bureaucratic frustration enters Sea Shepherd, a militant environmental group that lends its boat to the cause of enforcing fishing restrictions off the Galapagos’ coast. But even the unorthodox Sea Shepherds find themselves completely stymied by Ecuador’s network of official corruption.

In the end, D’Orso hopes "that the grandeur and beauty and wonder of the Galapagos will prevail. And that the goodness of man will allow it."

<B>The Galapagos' allure</B> Charles Darwin went to the Galapagos in the 19th century and found the inspiration for his <B>Origin of the Species</B>. Jack Nelson went there in the 1960s for a very different reason.

To put it simply, Nelson was a…

Interview by

Midway through our conversation about Fresh Air Fiend, Paul Theroux reminds me that during the 15 years in which he wrote the 49 travel essays and articles collected here, he also wrote a major book on China (Riding the Iron Rooster), three additional travel books, a controversial memoir about his friendship with V.S. Naipaul (In Sir Vidia’s Shadow), and more than a handful of novels (including My Secret History, Millroy the Magician, and Kowloon Tong). Something like a dozen books in all.

"It’s not that I was writing these pieces with my left hand," Theroux says, "but I was doing other things at the same time. These pieces illuminate those books, and those books derive somewhat from the experiences recorded here. There’s a certain synchronicity in writing travel pieces and also living my life as a novelist and a travel writer."

This is disheartening. You’d expect—perhaps even hope—that there’d be a significant decline in quality in these occasional pieces, written over the years for publications as varied as Outside magazine, The New York Times, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. And, no doubt, readers will have their favorites and less favorites among them. But in each of the pieces collected in Fresh Air Fiend, the immensely satisfying interplay of observation, wit, and insight (as well as a certain disquieting undertone) that we’ve come to expect from Paul Theroux is very much in evidence.

The essays and articles themselves range through time and across five continents. In the book’s first section, called "Time Travel," Theroux reflects on memory, creativity, and turning 50 and writes about the job of the travel writer. Later, in the book’s title essay, he explains his need for solitary exercise—bicycling, kayaking, sailing—to assuage "the loneliness of the long-distance writer." He spends a solitary week in the Maine woods in wintertime. He travels down the Zambezi River, and down the Yangtze. He writes of meeting Gerard d’Aboville, who rowed across the Pacific Ocean alone in a small boat in 1993. He kayaks in the Philippines and visits Hong Kong on the eve of the hand-over to China.

By my lights, the most interesting pieces in this collection are Theroux’s essays on books of travel. His introductions to reissues of his own books are shapely vignettes from a writer’s autobiography. His essays on the books of other writers — a surprising selection that includes Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod, Robinson Crusoe, and Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s memoir of the 1910-1913 Antarctic expedition, The Worst Journey in the World—will add volumes to the avid reader’s ever-growing pile.

"I can’t imagine ever being on a trip and not having something to read," Theroux says. "To me that would be a disaster." And what he reads while traveling becomes part of the background of his essays and articles.

Thus, in his piece on camping in the Maine woods, he mentions rereading Madame Bovary by flashlight. On a trip to London to promote one of his books, he reads F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. In Amsterdam he reads Henry James’s The Aspern Papers.

"In terms of selection, I take paperbacks that I happen to be reading at the time and ones that I have intended to read," Theroux says. "I’m an omnivorous reader, and if you read a lot, you always have a kind of reading program going, a sort of private scholarship. I have to know the interior of books. And I’m very interested in writers’s lives — what they’re doing at particular stages of their lives, what they’re writing. I recently realized that there were a number of Henry James stories that I hadn’t read. So I started to read all the stories that James wrote when he was around my age, from his early to his late 50s, the years he regarded as his middle years. He had a sort of nervous breakdown then. A lot of those stories are about an older, very James-like writer and a younger writer."

Guide books seem singularly lacking in Theroux’s reading program, probably because he sees a wide gulf between tourism and travel. "There really is an enormous difference between travel in its classic sense and tourism," he says. "Tourism—sightseeing—is expected to be fun. You do it in large groups, it’s very companionable, it’s comfortable, and it’s very pleasant. Travel has to do with discovery, difficulty, and inconvenience. It doesn’t always pay off. There’s a strong element of risk in travel. Time is usually not a constraint for the traveler, but every tourist is under a time constraint. The traveler doesn’t really know where he or she is going, but has a sense of discovery. Tourists know exactly what they want to see and they arrive with a lot of preconceived notions. There’s a kind of enlightenment in classic travel which has nothing to do with materialism or consumerism. By its very nature, travel is cheaper."

A recurrent theme in these essays is that the traveler must approach the world with humility. "If you’re arrogant, you miss a lot," Theroux says.

He adds, "You have to realize that you are just a traveler; you are not home. You need the people you meet. You need their protection. You need their good will. You can’t be presumptuous. You see all sorts of people traveling. There are some amazingly arrogant people who think that because they are American, for example, they can collect hospitality just because they come from a wonderful country that has been very generous. They are sometimes surprised that people don’t give them the respect they think they deserve. If you’re smart, you’ll be very polite, you’ll develop good manners."

According to Theroux, the travel writer—or any writer, for that matter—has the added obligation of telling the truth. His or her truth, that is, since Theroux also notes that every traveler’s journey is different.

Theroux has occasionally taken some heat for his sort of truthtelling. His essay on his friend and fellow travel-writer Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989), which is included in this volume, offended the bearers of the Chatwin flame—until corroborated by a recent biography. His book Riding the Iron Rooster was judged by some to be too harsh on China—until Tiannamen Square. His memoir about V.S. Naipaul continues to stir controversy.

"I have discovered," Theroux says, "that if you tell the truth, you are describing the future. There’s something prophetic about the truth. When you see it and describe it—without stereotypes and preconceptions, but with subtlety—a book can seem like prophecy. So I have no problem telling the truth. But I have a great problem with being untruthful. As my father used to say, ‘You can watch a thief, but you can’t watch a liar.’ "

Can it really be so simple? "It’s sometimes unbelievably difficult," Theroux says. "It’s the reason why it’s probably impossible for me to hold a job writing. I couldn’t work for a newspaper or a magazine or as a copy editor. I could be hired to write my own piece, but I can’t be hired to write someone else’s piece. Telling the truth can make you unemployable. But a writer is basically an unemployed person anyway. It’s something that you just have to live with."

Alden Mudge works for the California Council for the Humanities.

 

Midway through our conversation about Fresh Air Fiend, Paul Theroux reminds me that during the 15 years in which he wrote the 49 travel essays and articles collected here, he also wrote a major book on China (Riding the Iron Rooster), three additional travel books,…

Interview by

Paul Theroux is one of those writers who needs no introduction. Something of a firebrand early on, but always a critical darling, Theroux has made a career of observing human nature around the world, and regaling his readers with tales (both fact and fiction) of lands and people they will likely never get to see firsthand. Genre-jumping from travel literature to mainstream fiction and back again, Theroux's books have repeatedly appeared on both fiction and nonfiction bestseller lists: Saint Jack, The Mosquito Coast, The Old Patagonian Express, Sunrise with Seamonsters, the list goes on and on (and on).

In the mid-1970s, Theroux embarked on the journey that would become the basis for his bestseller The Great Railway Bazaar. An epic tale of an overland passage from London to the mysterious East, it was the inspiration for a generation of off-the-beaten-path travelers, including yours truly. Thirty years on, Theroux decided to reprise his journey, to see what changes time had wrought, both in the people and places he had visited, and in his perception of them. The chronicle of that trip is Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar.

It must be said, I lost control of my interview with Theroux in the first five minutes, if indeed I ever had it at all. The conversation scampered off in various directions, clearly with a mind of its own, with me furiously jotting down notes in hopes of being able to craft a cohesive narrative at some future date.

"I set off with the intention of writing a travel book," Theroux begins, speaking from his home in Cape Cod, "so in some ways my experiences will be different than those of a pleasure traveler. I write in longhand. I keep a journal or a notebook that I write in every day. I travel fairly light. I don't carry a laptop with me. My only concession to modern technology on this trip was a BlackBerry that doubled as a cell phone and an Internet receiver."

Once outside the sheltering cocoon of "civilized" Europe, Theroux found himself in the Blanche DuBois-esque situation of having to rely on the kindness of strangers: "It's just a question of trust. When I set off, I assume that I need to take risks. Otherwise, nothing will happen, and there will be no story." There isn't any danger of that in Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: Theroux is at the mercy of unkempt taxi drivers, daredevil motorcycle rickshaw pilots and all manner of other perilous ground transport providers, the proverbial accident waiting to happen (all of which must have played hell with his digestive system, but makes great edge-of-the-seat reading for the rest of us). In one vignette, he actually has to crawl in the window of a dilapidated jalopy because the door is broken. No mean feat for a man in his seventh decade.

I was particularly interested in reading and hearing what Theroux would have to say about Japan, my adopted homeland for half the year. He had a superb guide in the person of Japanese author Haruki Murakami, with whom he spent the day seeing the "insider's" Tokyo. "You travel, sometimes you get lucky," he says. "I got lucky and spent the day with Haruki. He knows the city intimately. To be with a writer in his city is the best way to get to know a place. The writer has the key; they are the 'noticers' of everything."

Nevertheless, I find myself a bit at odds with Theroux's depiction of Japan as a somewhat aloof place, less than welcoming to the traveler, and broach that topic with him: "That doesn't surprise me that you would have a different experience of it," he says. "If two people take the same trip, it's not really the same trip, is it? That's normal." He's right, of course.

There is no doubt a certain cachet to being a writer, both with the reading public and with other practitioners of the craft; it can open doors that otherwise might remain firmly closed. In addition to meeting with Murakami, Theroux was able to spend an afternoon chatting with iconic novelist Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey, Childhood's End) at his home in Sri Lanka shortly before Clarke's death in March. "He asked if I played table tennis." Theroux says. "It was his great hobby, his only sport. He was, of course, too old to play anymore. He was confined to a wheelchair." Theroux was more diplomatic in person: "I'll play you anytime, but I'm sure I'd lose." As an aside, I mention that some 25 years ago, while on a semester-at-sea program, my brother had the opportunity to visit Clarke in Sri Lanka, and had been soundly drubbed by the even-then-elderly pingpong hustler. "How good was your brother?" Theroux asks. "Not too darn bad," I reply, thinking of thumpings I had taken a time or two at his hands.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is likely unique in one respect; Theroux notes early on in the book: "What traveler backtracked to take the same trip again? None of the good ones that I know. Greene never returned to the Liberian bush, nor to Mexico, nor to Vietnam. In his late fifties, Waugh dismissed modern travel altogether as mere tourism and a waste of time . . . Robert Byron did not take the road to Oxiana again . . . Chatwin never returned to Patagonia." In revisiting the scenes of his earlier journey, Theroux takes note not only of the changes to the places, but also his markedly different outlook: "The first trip was about five months long. This trip lasted about a year with a short break in the middle. The first time out, I was homesick and very impatient. As you get older, I think you get more patient." This is quite evident in his writing, perhaps the most startling contrast in his work, particularly if you read the new book and one of his earlier travelogues back to back.

Theroux is among the most scrupulously honest of the contemporary traveler/observers, harkening back to a style pioneered by Sir Richard Burton and Robert Byron. He never goes for the sentimental anecdote or the easy laugh, although both can be found in his writing from time to time. Instead, he offers his readers a reporter's-eye view of strange lands: serious and thought-provoking, fleshing out the minuscule details that most of us would never notice on our own, thus giving his readers a sense of "being there," if only vicariously.

Bruce Tierney travels the world from home bases in Japan and eastern Canada.

Paul Theroux is one of those writers who needs no introduction. Something of a firebrand early on, but always a critical darling, Theroux has made a career of observing human nature around the world, and regaling his readers with tales (both fact and fiction) of…

Review by

Travel books generally adhere to one of two camps: the promotional (go here, see this, don’t miss) and the vicarious (sagas of astounding adventures few would dream of trying to duplicate). The new Crown Journeys series, which debuts this month with a pair of titles from Edwidge Danticat and Michael Cunningham, assays an offbeat category: The ruminative. The idea is to pair a litterateur with a setting he or she finds especially evocative and to create an extended, moseying-around essay a walk," both literal and figurative. Forthcoming matches include Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate) on Mexico, Myla Goldberg (Bee Season) on Prague, Christopher Buckley on Washington, D.C., and Roy Blount Jr. on New Orleans. Intriguing as the prospects may be, the two initial titles raise some interesting questions, such as: Can an author be too close to a subject, so entwined as to neglect the need to reach out to the reader? Might a writer accustomed to spinning fiction lose his or her way without a narrative thread? In After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (Crown, $16, 160 pages, ISBN 0609609084), Edwige Danticat, who has probed her conflicted relationship with her natal land in such novels as Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Farming of Bones maintains a sense of suspense by playing up her dread of actually attending carnival. Little wonder she’s apprehensive, having been raised on her Baptist minister uncle’s warnings that People always hurt themselves during carnival gyrating with so much abandon that they would dislocate their hips and shoulders and lose their voices while singing too loudly." Further, the author is warned, Not only could one be punched, stabbed, pummeled, or shot during carnival, young girls could be freely fondled, squeezed like sponges by dirty old, and not so old, men." Danticat has returned to the island as an adult with a journalistic mission to cover carnival, but the nervous girl in her makes her approach the task perhaps too portentously. She interviews officials, quotes poets from Ovid to Octavio Paz, and takes preparatory field trips: to a cemetery, to the final resting place of a rusting steam engine (sought out as a symbol of 19th-century industrial Jacmel"), to an art show of carnival masks, to a remote and rare forest (much of Haiti has long since been stripped, largely for fuel, and partly to rout out revolutionaries). Then finally, 127 pages into the book, she faces up to the dreaded day.

Is the wait worth it? Retroactively, yes. Impatience melts as you realize how carefully, while seeming to dance around the topic, Danticat has laid the groundwork for witnessing the event and beginning to understand it. Carnival, as she describes it, is frightening: The image of an AIDS-awareness activist, for instance, who growls with blackened teeth and flashes blood-stained panties is indelibly disturbing. The gathering is also clearly cathartic, not only for the locals who yearly confront their demons (both traditional and modern) and celebrate a cycle of renewal, but also for visitors, as well, including the many Haitians who, like Danticat, have had to move abroad and yearn to recapture a sense of belonging.

Provincetown, that artsy sand-spit at the tip of Cape Cod which has served for centuries as an eccentric’s sanctuary" in Michael Cunningham’s apt phrase, is a far less foreboding place than Danticat’s Haiti. In fact, he asserts in Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown, it’s not in any way threatening, at least not to those with an appetite for the full range of human passions." True, men consort openly in the grass maze enroute to Herring Cove beach (a pastime which strikes him as innocently bacchanalian, more creaturely than lewd," and circumnavigatable in any event), and you cannot walk more than 100 yards down crowded Commercial Street without being flyered" by an eight-foot tall counting the bouffant transvestite advertising a revue. The author describes one such encounter, in which a towering drag queen amused a 4-year-old by repeatedly doffing, on command, his blue beehive wig to reveal the crewcut beneath: The child fell into paroxysms of laughter," he writes.

Cunningham, whose novel The Hours won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999, first came to town two decades ago as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, a cross-disciplinary incubator founded in 1968 by local luminaries such as Robert Motherwell and Stanley Kunitz. He admits his off-season sojourn was a total bust. Yet somehow, mired in a slough of despond and thwarted ambition, he fell in love with Provincetown, the way you might meet someone you consider strange, irritating, potentially dangerous but whom, eventually, you find yourself marrying." A summerer ever since, he understands the intricate weave of Provincetown’s social fabric far better than Peter Manso, whose gossipy potboiler Ptown, released in July, earned Land’s End some well-deserved collateral pre-publicity. Cunningham grasps the rhythms of the place and, like the many local poets he quotes (Kunitz, Mark Doty, Marie Howe, Alan Dugan, Mary Oliver), has a gift for touching on the timeless. He describes a certain segment of August, for instance, as a deep blue bowl of perfect days, noisier than winter but possessed of a similar underlying silence: A similar sense that the world is, and will always be, just this way calm and warm, bleached with brightness, its contrasts subdued by a shimmer that makes it difficult to determine precisely where the ocean ends and the sky begins." His often-rambling walk" is essentially a love sonnet whose sentiments are easily shared. Sandy MacDonald, the author of Quick Escapes Boston (Globe Pequot), lives in Cambridge and Nantucket in Massachusetts.

Travel books generally adhere to one of two camps: the promotional (go here, see this, don't miss) and the vicarious (sagas of astounding adventures few would dream of trying to duplicate). The new Crown Journeys series, which debuts this month with a pair of…

Review by

Travel books generally adhere to one of two camps: the promotional (go here, see this, don’t miss) and the vicarious (sagas of astounding adventures few would dream of trying to duplicate). The new Crown Journeys series, which debuts this month with a pair of titles from Edwidge Danticat and Michael Cunningham, assays an offbeat category: The ruminative. The idea is to pair a litterateur with a setting he or she finds especially evocative and to create an extended, moseying-around essay a walk,” both literal and figurative. Forthcoming matches include Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate) on Mexico, Myla Goldberg (Bee Season) on Prague, Christopher Buckley on Washington, D.C., and Roy Blount Jr. on New Orleans. Intriguing as the prospects may be, the two initial titles raise some interesting questions, such as: Can an author be too close to a subject, so entwined as to neglect the need to reach out to the reader? Might a writer accustomed to spinning fiction lose his or her way without a narrative thread? In After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti, Edwige Danticat, who has probed her conflicted relationship with her natal land in such novels as Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Farming of Bones maintains a sense of suspense by playing up her dread of actually attending carnival. Little wonder she’s apprehensive, having been raised on her Baptist minister uncle’s warnings that People always hurt themselves during carnival gyrating with so much abandon that they would dislocate their hips and shoulders and lose their voices while singing too loudly.” Further, the author is warned, Not only could one be punched, stabbed, pummeled, or shot during carnival, young girls could be freely fondled, squeezed like sponges by dirty old, and not so old, men.” Danticat has returned to the island as an adult with a journalistic mission to cover carnival, but the nervous girl in her makes her approach the task perhaps too portentously. She interviews officials, quotes poets from Ovid to Octavio Paz, and takes preparatory field trips: to a cemetery, to the final resting place of a rusting steam engine (sought out as a symbol of 19th-century industrial Jacmel”), to an art show of carnival masks, to a remote and rare forest (much of Haiti has long since been stripped, largely for fuel, and partly to rout out revolutionaries). Then finally, 127 pages into the book, she faces up to the dreaded day.

Is the wait worth it? Retroactively, yes. Impatience melts as you realize how carefully, while seeming to dance around the topic, Danticat has laid the groundwork for witnessing the event and beginning to understand it. Carnival, as she describes it, is frightening: The image of an AIDS-awareness activist, for instance, who growls with blackened teeth and flashes blood-stained panties is indelibly disturbing. The gathering is also clearly cathartic, not only for the locals who yearly confront their demons (both traditional and modern) and celebrate a cycle of renewal, but also for visitors, as well, including the many Haitians who, like Danticat, have had to move abroad and yearn to recapture a sense of belonging.

Provincetown, that artsy sand-spit at the tip of Cape Cod which has served for centuries as an eccentric’s sanctuary” in Michael Cunningham’s apt phrase, is a far less foreboding place than Danticat’s Haiti. In fact, he asserts in Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown ($16, 176 pages, ISBN 0609609076), it’s not in any way threatening, at least not to those with an appetite for the full range of human passions.” True, men consort openly in the grass maze enroute to Herring Cove beach (a pastime which strikes him as innocently bacchanalian, more creaturely than lewd,” and circumnavigatable in any event), and you cannot walk more than 100 yards down crowded Commercial Street without being flyered” by an eight-foot tall counting the bouffant transvestite advertising a revue. The author describes one such encounter, in which a towering drag queen amused a 4-year-old by repeatedly doffing, on command, his blue beehive wig to reveal the crewcut beneath: The child fell into paroxysms of laughter,” he writes.

Cunningham, whose novel The Hours won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999, first came to town two decades ago as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, a cross-disciplinary incubator founded in 1968 by local luminaries such as Robert Motherwell and Stanley Kunitz. He admits his off-season sojourn was a total bust. Yet somehow, mired in a slough of despond and thwarted ambition, he fell in love with Provincetown, the way you might meet someone you consider strange, irritating, potentially dangerous but whom, eventually, you find yourself marrying.” A summerer ever since, he understands the intricate weave of Provincetown’s social fabric far better than Peter Manso, whose gossipy potboiler Ptown, released in July, earned Land’s End some well-deserved collateral pre-publicity. Cunningham grasps the rhythms of the place and, like the many local poets he quotes (Kunitz, Mark Doty, Marie Howe, Alan Dugan, Mary Oliver), has a gift for touching on the timeless. He describes a certain segment of August, for instance, as a deep blue bowl of perfect days, noisier than winter but possessed of a similar underlying silence: A similar sense that the world is, and will always be, just this way calm and warm, bleached with brightness, its contrasts subdued by a shimmer that makes it difficult to determine precisely where the ocean ends and the sky begins.” His often-rambling walk” is essentially a love sonnet whose sentiments are easily shared. Sandy MacDonald, the author of Quick Escapes Boston (Globe Pequot), lives in Cambridge and Nantucket in Massachusetts.

Travel books generally adhere to one of two camps: the promotional (go here, see this, don't miss) and the vicarious (sagas of astounding adventures few would dream of trying to duplicate). The new Crown Journeys series, which debuts this month with a pair of titles…
Interview by

On the three scientific voyages he led between 1768 and his violent death in 1779, English Navy Captain James Cook explored and mapped vast regions of the previously uncharted world, filling in with astounding accuracy fully a third of the globe. Blue Latitudes is Tony Horwitz’s island-by-island account of those great discoveries and of the man whose infinite resourcefulness ensured their success.

"When I got into the story," Horwitz says, " I found out it was about cannibalism and sex and violence and adventure. Then I became fascinated with Cook, the man. He’s almost an Abe Lincoln story. He grew up in a mud hut in rural Yorkshire, the son of a day laborer, really at the very bottom of British society. Yet through natural talent and a lot of hard work, he rose to the top. He’s one of those astonishing, once-in-a-generation figures who come out of nowhere to transform the world." By poetic coincidence, Horwitz spoke to BookPage about the seafaring adventurer from another storied port, Nantucket, where he was resting up before embarking on his own perilous voyage the book tour.

Although the book is meticulously detailed about Cook and his travels, Horwitz has not written a conventional history. He tells more about following Cook’s trail than he does about the original voyages, although he does weave the two strands of narrative tightly together. Not only does the author seek to see and imagine what the captain encountered, he also hopes to find out what Cook still means to the modern world. In these politically correct times, is he perceived as a discoverer or a despoiler? The resurgence of indigenous cultures is both clarifying and distorting his legacy, Horwitz concludes. "For too long, Cook was viewed in the West only in heroic terms, as this great navigator who set off to discover the world. We know what’s happened since in terms of exploitation and the devastation of native cultures. The exact same thing happened here in America. Lewis and Clark are heroes to many of us. Yet, at the same time, we have to recognize the damage that happened in their wake. . . . So I think it’s important to recognize all that. On the other hand, I don’t think we should swing to the opposite extreme, where we assume that these men were monsters." To his evident dismay, Horwitz finds that in Tahiti, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii (where the disenchanted locals killed and butchered Cook) and elsewhere he anchored, the explorer is either fading in stature or has been forgotten altogether. Even in his own country, he is a much-diminished presence.

Horwitz first became interested in Cook in the early 1980s when he moved to Sydney after his marriage to native Australian and fellow writer Geraldine Brooks. "I arrived there really knowing very little about the place and in a state of some bewilderment," he says. "I guess, as a history buff, I started boning up on the local history. And the white history of Australia effectively begins with Captain Cook." Horwitz, a former Wall Street Journal reporter whose earlier books include Confederates In the Attic and Baghdad Without a Map, estimates he spent 18 months following Cook’s transoceanic routes and another year writing the book.

Sometimes Horwitz traveled alone, but he was often accompanied and upstaged on his journeys by his friend, the hilarious Roger Williamson, an Englishman transplanted to Australia. Where Horwitz is open and earnest in approaching new experiences, Williamson simply wants to know where the liquor and women are. His are the blunt opinions Horwitz dare not utter. In Yorkshire, after a particularly strenuous evening, Williamson awakens to greet the gray dawn thusly, "Still leaden. Like my stomach. All the forces of nature are focused on my gut. . . . It’s absolutely woeful here. Can we pack up and go now? Head for Costa del Sol for a week? Cook probably sailed near there."

"He’s a foil for me," Horwitz explains, "and I think, honestly, I hide behind him a bit in the book. He’s so quotable that I couldn’t resist the urge to let him do most of the talking. Traveling can get very lonely, and at least I had a mate along for much of the trip."

In trailing Cook, Horwitz shipped out on every available conveyance from rental cars and jet planes to an Alaskan ferry and a replica of the explorer’s most famous vessel, the Endeavour. It was not his intent, he says, to replicate Cook’s actual hardships or to simulate his interminable separations from home and family. Horwitz was rarely away for more than six weeks and makes little mention of his own feelings. "I guess one thing I find annoying sometimes with travel books," he says, "is that they’re all about self-discovery. In Cook’s day, it was about discovery, pure and simple."

As Horwitz sees it, Cook still has something to teach us. "When we talk about the global village’ that we live in today," he says, "it began to a great extent with Cook’s voyages. The part I found most compelling was the drama of first contact between Cook and his men and foreign cultures. He stepped off his ship dozens of times into a complete unknown. I became struck by how open and curious they were and how closed and suspicious we’ve become by comparison. We’re living in a moment when we’re scared of ‘the other.’ Many of us are scared even to fly, yet [Cook] wasn’t afraid of climbing onto a wooden boat and sailing off the edge of the known world, over and over again. He remained open to the cultures he encountered, and, for the most part, he did find a way to communicate and get along. It’s striking to me that here we are over two centuries later and not doing very well at that job."

Edward Morris works out of Nashville and satisfies all his nautical urges at the beach near his summer home in Martha’s Vineyard.

 

 

On the three scientific voyages he led between 1768 and his violent death in 1779, English Navy Captain James Cook explored and mapped vast regions of the previously uncharted world, filling in with astounding accuracy fully a third of the globe. Blue Latitudes is…

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Like many writers, novelist Isabel Allende thinks of herself as an outsider. "I have always been by temperament a dissident and a rebel," she says during a call to her home in Marin County, California. "This has been my struggle all my life."

But it’s one thing to be somewhat alienated from family and social class, as Allende was in her youth, and quite another to be sent into exile from your homeland. Allende fled her native Chile shortly after a CIA-assisted coup on Tuesday, September 11, 1973, led to the overthrow and death of her uncle Salvador Allende Gossens, the democratically elected president of Chile. The coup resulted in a brutal military dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet. From exile in Venezuela, on January 8, 1981, Allende began writing a letter to her grandfather, an old-school Chilean who was nearing his 100th birthday and in failing health. The letter soon developed into Allende’s mesmerizing first novel, The House of the Spirits, which marked the beginning of her extraordinary literary career.

Outsiders almost always have an intense and ambivalent longing for the inside. This is certainly true of Allende. While her marvelous new memoir, My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile, offers stinging criticism of her native land – its machismo, its religious and political oppression, its shameful treatment of native populations – Allende’s love for Chile is so evident and eloquent that many readers will consider packing their bags and booking the next flight to Santiago.

"When you are born in a place, especially a small place that feels like a village, you put up with the bad things and love the good things," Allende says. "There is a strong sense of community, of family, or extended family that still exists there. People in Chile will tell you, No, that’s over, it’s gone, it’s not like it was before.’ But coming from the United States, it’s the first thing that you see."

Allende has lived in the San Francisco Bay area since she met and married an American attorney, whose life and adventures were the basis for her novel The Infinite Plan. "California resembles Chile more than any other place in the United States," she says. "Not only the landscape and the vegetation and the weather, but the fact that some sense of Hispanic culture is very present here. My husband says that Chile looks like California looked 40 years ago."

Since Pinochet stepped down in 1994 and democratic institutions have slowly returned to Chile, Allende has been making annual visits home to see her mother, stepfather and members of her large extended family. Some of her family members read the manuscript for My Invented Country and, she says, "everyone had a different opinion." "I thought the book was going to be terribly criticized in Chile. But, actually, it was pirated immediately, it was sold in the streets, it became number one on the bestseller list, and the reviews have been great."

This is a surprise, and Allende explains it this way: "Many years ago when I was young, I used to write feminist articles, humorous articles, making fun of men and the things that men do because they are so macho. I would get loads of fan letters from men who enjoyed the articles and said they had a friend just like the man I described. It was always a friend. It was never them. I think that is what happened with this book. Readers think this is how the other Chileans are."

Allende’s sense of humor in conversation and on the page is enthralling. And as readers of her novels and previous memoir, Paula, know, she is a gifted storyteller who forges an enchanting amalgam of memory and imagination. "Memory and imagination are so closely intertwined that I can hardly separate them," Allende says. "If you and I see the same event, we will perceive it differently and we will remember it differently. When I wrote my very first memoir, which was Paula, I was in an altered state. My daughter Paula was dying. But even so, in the process of writing the book, I was perfectly conscious of the fact that I would choose what I was going to write and what I was going to omit, what adjectives I was selecting to describe a situation. That is an exercise in imagination; that’s a choice. Because if we were to remember without imagination, we would use no adjectives. It would be just nouns. But in life we remember the color, the flavor, the emotion. Not the facts."

According to Allende, the facts of life are mixed. "The world is a horrible place but also a wonderful place. For every horrible person out there doing evil, a thousand people are doing good. But good is silent, discrete, unassuming, whereas evil is so noisy. We only hear about the evil in the world."

In the Chile of Allende’s youth and, in a more menacing way under the dictatorship, "life was supposed to be uncomfortable and unsafe. . . . Even if you broke your neck tripping on the sidewalk there was no one to blame. It was your own fate."

This perspective made it very difficult for Allende to feel at home in the United States. "When I came here I had the feeling that this country was invulnerable, invincible, that the people had the arrogance of the winners, and that I could never belong here. The idea that you could go through life without fear, that you could go through life always feeling safe, that you are insured against every hazard of life, was just so foreign to me."

Exactly 28 years after her uncle’s violent demise led to her exile from Chile, on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Allende discovered a suddenly vulnerable America and felt she "had gained a country." In conversation, Allende says My Invented Country "was born out of a crazy idea when my grandson Alejandro said ‘I think you are going to live at least three more years,’ and I wondered, well, where do I want to live them." That is no doubt true. But it is also true that the two September 11s mark the metaphorical beginning and end of Allende’s nostalgic journey. The path she follows between these two points vividly illustrates the good humor, humane spirit, tough mind and open heart we will all require to create a viable home in our new world.

 

Like many writers, novelist Isabel Allende thinks of herself as an outsider. "I have always been by temperament a dissident and a rebel," she says during a call to her home in Marin County, California. "This has been my struggle all my life."

But…

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Kinky Friedman’s psychedelic tour of the Texas capitalOn a sunny Saturday morning in Austin, Texas, I’m trying to get Kinky Friedman on the phone, a process that’s proving as complicated as the plot of one of his mystery novels. Treated to the greeting on his answering machine, I get an earful of exuberance: “This is Richard K.D. ‘Big Dick’ Friedman, the next guvenuuuhhh of the great state of Texas! Please leave a message!”Although the word “governor” is punctuated by a slow, faux, Southern drawl, the recording isn’t a prank. Armed with a Texas – sized persona, the support of author Molly Ivins and a slew of memorable slogans (including “How Hard Could It Be?” and “Why the Hell Not?”), the popular author and songwriter intends to run for office in 2006. But more on that later.When I finally reach him at his ranch in the Texas Hill Country for a discussion of his new book, The Great Psychedelic Armadillo Picnic: A “Walk” in Austin, Friedman is flustered. “My cigar clipper just blew up. I’m having a rough morning here,” he says. But he’s soon at ease and explaining the challenges of writing a book about the city in which he grew up. The son of a University of Texas professor, Friedman himself attended UT before joining the Peace Corps and embarking on a career as a writer/musician.”My big problem in writing the book was that every restaurant I like went belly – up about 20 years ago,” explains Friedman, who will turn 60 next month. “Now I have a choice of writing about what used to be there, or grumbling about how it’s changed. I tried to be a good spiritual sport about it. If it had been someplace like Hawaii, say, it would not have been difficult to write the book, because I don’t have any history there.”Readers shouldn’t fear: Armadillo is an easy ride, a quick trip unmarred by the author’s inner conflict. Providing plenty of background on the Texas capital, along with games, quizzes and Austin – based anecdotes, Armadillo is vintage Friedman, an unconventional little travel guide that offers a whimsical mosaic of one of the hottest spots in the country. With chapters on outdoor attractions, noteworthy landmarks and shopping, Armadillo delivers a sense of the city’s singular appeal, a taste of the town’s laid – back allure. Best of all, the book bears the stamp of the inimitable Kinkster. No doubt about it, reading this brief volume is a blast.”Austin is a town that really does have native charm,” Friedman says. “But like all the rest of America, and the world – wherever people go – some of the charm starts to slip away. All cities look the same, mostly, so outsiders are usually amazed when they see Austin, because it’s a beautiful, natural city.”It’s also a town with enough live music to rival Nashville. To get a taste of the true Texas sound, Armadillo tells fans where to go (The Broken Spoke, Threadgill’s), and who to hear (Billy Joe Shaver, Toni Price). A list of the city’s top 12 restaurants directs visitors to the tastiest spots in a city full of good food. (“After a night of festivities,” Friedman writes, “a little food is necessary so you don’t wake up feeling like there’s a small Aryan child playing an accordion in your head.”) For historical context, there’s also a section on famous Austinites – a hodgepodge of one – of – a – kind characters such as Jerry Jeff Walker, O. Henry and Charles Whitman, the guy who climbed the Texas Tower at UT in the summer of 1966 and shot 45 people.When discussing his own books, Friedman is demure. Of his work as a novelist, he says, “Everybody finds what they can do. Writing mysteries is something that seems to have clicked, because now there’s about, hell, 19 of them that I’ve churned out – I mean carefully crafted.” He cites Paul Theroux, Charles Bukowski, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson as his favorite authors. His final mystery novel, due out in April, is called Ten Little New Yorkers, and in it, the Kinkster dies. That’s right, the popular series, which features a private eye named Kinky Friedman, is finally winding down.”It’s a literary suicide, which I guess is more than a literary suicide since I am the character,” says Friedman. “It’s close to a real suicide. I’ve attempted to kill myself for years now,” he says. “The way I think I’ll do it is to jump through a ceiling fan. I was trying to do it the other night at Antone’s [a bar in Austin], and this fellow was giving me an assist, a leg up, but I still couldn’t reach it.”Extinguishing the Kinky character will, of course, result in many disappointed readers. “Let’s say I do kill myself,” speculates Friedman. “Who could Kinky Friedman readers read who would pick up the slack? I donct know what they will do.”Next up for Friedman: a career shift, as he hopes to become the next governor of Texas. For once, Kinky ain’t kidding. He plans to run as an Independent and feels his prospects are “looking very, very good. The first poll in which my name was included, done by the San Antonio Express – News, came out extremely well. The question was who would you pay $250 to go to dinner with? The list was George Bush, Dick Cheney, John Kerry, John Edwards, Hilary Clinton and Kinky Friedman. I came in third,” the author says, “right behind Bush and Hilary Clinton.”The move into Texas politics seems natural for Friedman, a bachelor who has said he is married to the good ole Lone Star State. Indeed, his new book is nothing if not a reflection of his affection for home. That’s partly why The Great Psychedelic Armadillo Picnic succeeds so well in capturing the attraction of Austin.”The city does seem to be a magnet for people,” Friedman says. “I notice as I travel around the world, the one place people really want to come to is Austin. Part of the reason is that the world does love Texas. It may not love America, but it loves Texas.”So does Kinky.

Kinky Friedman's psychedelic tour of the Texas capitalOn a sunny Saturday morning in Austin, Texas, I'm trying to get Kinky Friedman on the phone, a process that's proving as complicated as the plot of one of his mystery novels. Treated to the greeting on his…
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Life in the hills of Italy seems so fulfilling for Frances Mayes, one might wonder why she would ever leave, even if, as she says, she can no longer sit quietly reading at the local trattorias and cafes. It was an ongoing search for places that feel as comfortable as her adopted Tuscan hometown of Cortona that inspired the grand tour at the heart of her latest book, A Year in the World: Journeys of a Passionate Traveller. Fans of Under The Tuscan Sun and its sequel Bella Tuscany shouldn’t despair, however, because Mayes also spends time in her beloved Tuscan farmhouse, Bramasole—which is, as always, endearingly in need of attention (a falling wall here, a nest of mice there, water issues).

Mayes and her husband, fellow poet Ed Mayes, divide their time between Italy and America, where they recently relocated from the Bay Area to North Carolina. Though she has written a guide to infusing life with the style and spirit of Tuscany and developed a line of Tuscan-inspired furniture with Drexel Heritage, Mayes laughingly tells BookPage during a break from unpacking that her new house is merely "taking on the air of less chaos," rather than that of Tuscany.

Mayes and her husband made the move to North Carolina to be near her daughter and three-year-old grandson, Willie. "He’s been to Italy five times already," she says. Last summer, the couple enrolled the youngster in a nursery school near Bramasole. "Of course he started picking up Italian," she says with obvious pride, adding that she would love for him to achieve fluency in the language, something to which she and Ed still aspire. Mayes says she wants to impart to her grandson a sense of being a world citizen.

This idea of belonging to the world is the central theme of A Year in the World. In fact, Mayes had originally planned to call the book "At Home in the World," but changed the title when another book came out with that name. Her finished book condenses five years of travel into one, arranged by month. In January, for example, Mayes and Ed are in Spain, where she is delighted by Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza museum. In August, the couple joins friends in Turkey for an experience straight out of Agatha Christie—day tours of archeological sites, night swims in the Mediterranean and accommodations onboard a yacht. "Fortunately no one got pushed over," Mayes says with a laugh.

Mayes displays her deep talent for description throughout the book, whether in discussing scenery, shopping for tiles or simply retreating to her hotel for a candle-lit bath or curling up with a stack of books. She is in her element, as ever, recounting meals—even those she hasn’t eaten. A visit to the Alhambra in Granada, for example, inspires the following reverie: "A few rugs, a pile of cushions, a brazier, and we’d be ready to rinse our hands in orange flower water, relax, and settle down for a feast of lamb tagine, stuffed eggplants and cabbages flavored with coriander and cinnamon, preserved lemons, chickpeas with saffron, and a pastry pie of pigeons."

Sure, most of us could do without the pigeons, but Mayes is an intrepid gastronomic explorer. "I feel like my whole appreciation of food has just expanded enormously because of these travels," she says. "To me, that is the quickest way into a culture: what they eat and how they celebrate and how they gather around the table and who’s at the table. Those things reveal so much about values and family and friendship and just the everyday life in a place." In A Year in the World, Mayes’ search for a regional cookbook in Lisbon leads her to a chef who gives her an impromptu cooking class, a slice of perhaps the best chocolate cake on the planet and a list of restaurants for sampling both authentic and extrapolated Portuguese cuisine.

These chance encounters and other little accidents of travel are another theme of the book. Whether it’s a passport left behind, a hotel power outage, transporting goatskin rugs or a fortuitous Internet search for accommodations in Fez, Mayes and Ed carry on with a spirit that should inspire any traveler—actual or armchair. But for all of that, travel doesn’t necessarily come easy for Mayes and she longs for a perfect pre-departure evening, right down to a skillfully packed suitcase, a good night’s sleep and no mishaps.

Mayes faces a perennial tug-of-war between setting off or staying at home. Even when striking out on the ambitious itinerary of A Year in the World she had one thing in mind: home. "I went to places that I had always dreamed of as places to live," she says. "For me, it was an exploration of the idea of home. I decided to go to these places and see what it would take to be at home there." So she threw herself into her research, consulting both literary and nuts-and-bolts travel guides. "I love to read the poetry and the history, hear the music, and do all of the things that people who live there actually do," she says. A Year in the World is laced with those references.

This immersion ties into what Mayes refers to as the "arc" of travel, a cycle that begins before the trip and continues when one returns home with a memento or two and perhaps new friends. "People we met on our trip—the rug dealer in Istanbul, the chef in Portugal—they have both been to visit us," she says. "The chef came to Italy with his wife and stayed with us and the rug dealer has been to California two or three times. Lots of little correspondences go on; that’s how the trip keeps on going."

Obviously another way the trips continue for Mayes is through her cooking. "The Portuguese soups, particularly, I have just grown to love," she says. "We’ve made quite a few of them in Italy." She pauses, then adds, "One odd aspect of living in two places is that the book you want is always in the other place, so I don’t have the Portuguese cookbooks here." With those treasured cookbooks far from her new home in North Carolina, the American South has influenced Mayes’ kitchen instead. "It’s surprising how quickly I’ve started cooking the old recipes again," Mayes, a Georgia native, says. "I’m going to be paying for it now," she laughs.

After five years of travelling, she says returning to the South feels natural and appropriate; she feels right at home. And yet, Mayes is already preparing for more travels—following her book tour she’ll be off to India.

Author photo by Edward Mayes.

Life in the hills of Italy seems so fulfilling for Frances Mayes, one might wonder why she would ever leave, even if, as she says, she can no longer sit quietly reading at the local trattorias and cafes. It was an ongoing search for places…

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In Wide-Open World: How Volunteering Around the Globe Changed one Family’s Life Forever, John Marshall brings the reader along on his family's six-month volunteering vacation. With two teenage kids who struggled to be connected to the world beyond their electronic devices, a 20-year marriage in urgent need of a rebirth, and a desire to be of service, the Marshalls set off to work in some of the most remote places on earth.

At the time you embarked on your journey, you had two teenagers: a 17-year-old son (Logan) and a 14-year-old daughter (Jackson). What was their reaction when you told them they would be leaving their school, friends and comfortable life to travel with mom and dad for six months to go work for free in Third World countries?
My son was into it. He was excited by the possibility. But my daughter Jackson was a harder sell. "Freshman year is kind of a big deal," she told me. But she came around. It was really an amazing chance to unplug them both and allow them to look up from cell phones or computers and see the world. It was also a great chance for us to spend time as a family. Now that they're off to college, I cherish our time on the trip even more.

Logan and Jackson Marshall in a classroom in Thailand.

 

Along your journey, you worked with wild animals in Costa Rica, muscled through organic farms in New Zealand, taught English in a remote village in Thailand, worked with orphans in India and helped in a Buddhist school in the Himalayas. Was there a part of the trip that you found most meaningful for your family?
Each stop had its own lesson to teach. At our first stop in Costa Rica, our kids got chewed out for not working hard enough and that really motivated them to try harder for the rest of the trip. But I think the orphanage in India was the most transformative. Certainly it was for me. Volunteering in the developing world is a jolt of reality. It's easy to sit at home and talk about the poor, to be sad in a general sense about world hunger or global poverty. But when I actually met real people who are poor and hungry . . . they were not what I was imagining. That was certainly true for orphaned children. Before leaving home, I thought of them as some general, faceless mass of regrettable humanity. But when I got to know them, one on one, as children, it's been impossible for me to return home and live as if they do not exist.

When you were at the orphanage in India, you connected with a 13-year-old boy named Job. His name was very symbolic of what he’d been through, and the faith he had. Can you explain why he was so important to you and what you learned from him?
For whatever reason two people connect, Job and I loved each other. He started as a funny, over-acting joker, acting as my bodyguard, giving up his seat whenever I entered the room, fanning me if the air was hot. But this was just his way of saying how much he liked me. I'm now his sponsor at the orphanage, and we're in touch all the time. But during our trip, Job symbolized to me the real power of volunteering. By traveling, by serving, we connect with people we would otherwise never meet. Just by showing up. Just by trying. If you asked Job who gave more, he would say that Uncle John did. That's what he called me. If you asked me, I would say that Job did. And that's the beauty of service. Everyone feels like they're getting a lot more than they're giving. It's the perfect exchange.

Which part of the trip had the most effect on your son?
I think Thailand was Logan's favorite. He was a little shy going into this trip. But in Thailand, he really came into his own. It didn't hurt that he was adored by the girls at the school where we were teaching. No kidding, they shrieked like he was a pop star at times, asking him for autographs, wanting to pose with him for pictures. Our daughter Jackson was also adored by the Thai boys, but Thailand was Logan's moment to shine. He taught his own English classes at just 17, made lots of friends, had a blast. It was fun to watch.

The Marshall family on Mt. Fyfe in New Zealand.

 

I find that a lot of teenagers in the United States suffer from lack of confidence, despite their parents spending their whole childhood telling them how special and wonderful they are. Do you see this lack of confidence in kids in other cultures? What part of the trip taught your kids most about confidence?
Yes and no. Some countries are extremely humble as a cultural norm. In Ladakh, in the north of India, we stayed in a Buddhist community and, as a rule, they were extremely soft spoken and modest. The children we met in rural Thailand were also quite shy at times. As for Western children, I feel we don't ask enough of them and perhaps their lack of confidence comes from never having really been challenged. On the road, our kids needed to work, and they really stepped up. On farms in New Zealand, they worked for three to five hours a day, which they rarely did at home. They taught their own English classes, three classes a day, five days a week. They worked alongside the orphans in the orphanage laundry and kitchen, which was a big, constant job. It was all hard, demanding work, but they did it. And now they know they can do it. Confidence comes from experience that pushes you beyond what you thought you were capable of—not from empty affirmations by well-meaning parents. Yes, you're special and wonderful. Now go clean out the anteater cage.

I have witnessed relationships between girls being very complex and difficult here. Was there something about your daughter’s experiences in the trip that may have helped her socially when she returned?
I think being a girl in America is a tough job. It's hard all over the world, but the U.S. has its own brand of teen challenges. Before she went on the trip, Jackson was a typical teenager. She loved her phone and her Facebook page, and she saw herself as the center of the world, which is pretty normal. But on the trip, she began to focus out and realize that other people had much bigger problems than she did. She also made friends with girls her age who were orphaned at birth or extremely poor, and this has a power to put the materialism and our celebrity-obsessed culture in a new perspective.

Her friends are still very important to her and she still loves her phone, but she's much less concerned by "First World" problems, as she says.

How do you think this trip changed you and your wife as parents?
Parents don't often get the chance to see their children's best selves. We hear about it from other parents, how well they behaved at a friend’s house or at school. But on our trip, we got to see it every day. When they didn't think we were watching, we'd see them reading to a child at the orphanage, or playing with a group of younger children at the Thai school. Working hard, being kind. I don't think the trip changed my wife and me as parents. If anything, it just made us feel that our kids would be just fine when they left home, which is all we've ever tried to give them.

John Marshall with Sweetie

 

I was really touched when you asked a teenage girl in the Himalayas what she was most grateful for and she answered without hesitation, “I am most grateful for my beloved parents. They provide me with all that I have and they are like precious jewels I have been given but do not deserve.” What is it that we’re getting wrong as parents that our kids would NEVER say this about us here in America?
In American culture, we glorify youth. Children have all the answers. It's like the Bart Simpson-ification of our country. Like Homer, parents are idiots. Children are the cool ones. But other countries don't pump this message down their children's throats. Parents are revered, respected. And really, why shouldn't they be? It really struck me on the trip. Anyone who is a parent and tries to raise their children with love, sacrifices on a dozen simultaneous levels. And yet every cultural message our kids hear is that we parents are fools. When you meet children who love their parents as "precious jewels," it's not hard to see that they have something to teach us.

You describe an encounter in Tibet with a poor boy on the street. He felt the need to give you something, though he had nothing. He pulled out a half-eaten filthy fruit from his pocket, and insisted that you take it. What did that moment mean to you?
This was in the tiny village of Stok that is like a time capsule for rural Tibet. The people make their own clothes, farm the land, live as a community. It's a very simple way of life, but they survive by sharing with one another. Most of the time, when children approach you on the street, they are begging. But this boy and his two friends saw me and, true to their upbringing, wanted to give me something. I thought they were begging, but they weren't. And when I saw how happy they were to give me the only things they had—a few dirty apricots and a half eaten apple—it was a great lesson in the joy that can come from giving.

What would you say to parents like me, who have a secret desire to up and leave for a year of “voluntourism” but feel like it would be impossible?
It's not impossible, Daniela! Really, if we can do it, so can you. We were not rich and bored. I didn't have a book deal before we left. We took out a home equity loan to make it happen. The trick is to decide to do it. Not dream of it or desire it but make a commitment to get out the door. For people who are interested, I have a section at the back of the book that spells out how much we paid and exactly what we did. If that helps anyone make their dream of family volunteer travel come true, I will be extremely honored. For anyone who does go, I encourage you to go with a learner's mind and a sense of humility. You will not change the world. It's the world that will change you.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Marshall's book.

Daniela Weil was born and raised in Sao Paolo, Brazil, and now lives in Houston with her daughter Lucy. Trained as a whale biologist, Weil is also a writer and illustrator whose work includes both children’s books and scientific illustrations. She is the creator of the web comic The World According to Lucy, which chronicles the experiences of an introverted adoptive mom parenting the fearless, free-spirited Lucy.

In Wide-Open World: How Volunteering Around the Globe Changed one Family’s Life Forever, John Marshall brings the reader along on his family's six-month volunteering vacation. With two teenage kids who struggled to be connected to the world beyond their electronic devices, a 20-year marriage in urgent need of a rebirth, and a desire to be of service, the Marshalls set off to work in some of the most remote places on earth.
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Just in time for Jazz Fest 2016, which opens today, New Orleans transplant, publishing veteran, music lover and bon vivant Michael Murphy has compiled a lively new guide to the city's vibrant music scene. Hear Dat New Orleans is the latest in a trio of guides from Murphy and Countryman Press, following the entertaining and informative Eat Dat New Orleans, which chronicles the restaurants and food culture, and Fear Dat New Orleans, which captures the spookiest parts of the crescent city.

Perfect for first-time visitors who want to hear authentic jazz, blues, R&B, Cajun or Zydeco music, Hear Dat New Orleans offers an overview of each genre—the history, the iconic performers, the musical genius behind it all—and pointers on the best venues for live performances. Murphy's trademark wit is in evidence thoughout, with entries that are hilarious as well as practical. ("The performers are drastically better than the current Bourbon Street cover bands that butcher ’70s hits by Journey and Foreigner, and there are no 18-year-old boys threatening to throw up on you," he writes of the scene on Frenchmen Street.)

A former vice president of sales for Random House and publisher of William Morrow, Murphy moved to New Orleans for good in 2009 after decades of enjoying the city's unique culture. Though he makes no claim to being a music authority (“My last gig was searching for the notes of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ on a plastic flutophone in the third grade”) he knows what he likes and relishes the chance to help newcomers find the best New Orleans has to offer. 

We asked Murphy for some personal music recommendations and reflections on NOLA's music scene.

You grew up in the Midwest. When were you first introduced to New Orleans music and how did you become so well-versed in the subject?
I came to New Orleans the very first time in May 1983. I worked for Random House and came down from New York to work with author Anne Rice. I had never been to New Orleans before and bought into the lie that the city was all girls-gone-wild and frat-boy debauchery. I didn’t want to come. By day two, I had been completely seduced like so many before me and knew I was home. You aren’t so much “introduced” to New Orleans music as overwhelmed by it—as Ellis Marsalis notes, it practically bubbles up from the street. New Orleans jazz, blues, brass band and bounce music define the city every bit as much as Cajun and Creole cuisine. 

What surprised you the most in your research for Hear Dat?
Rather than surprise, I would characterize writing Hear Dat as more driven by fear and intimidation. My first two books better fit my irreverent (some might say “snotty”) sensibility. It’s OK to make fun of restaurants in Eat Dat and you’re supposed to make fun of ghost stories in Fear Dat. But, getting too puckish with musicians can seem personal and cruel. The text was much harder for me to write and, in reading the finished book, I noted that I apologized three or four times for musicians left out. After delivering the manuscript to my publisher, the next day I ran across Davis Rogan in the Quarter. My reaction was a big OMG. Davis is a huge personality, highly opinionated and not afraid to express those opinions. I envisioned mean tweets from Davis Rogan, one-star Amazon reviews, and possibly in-person confrontations. I was able to get him in the final book. 

What accounts for New Orleans’ very special place in the history of American music?
I can no better answer the question than form an opinion as to why Russia has the best ballet dancers or why Mexico produces so many great boxers. It just kind of is. New Orleans musical icon and wild man, Ernie K-Doe, says, “I’m not sure, but I’m almost positive all music came from New Orleans.” And as Lenny Kravitz says, “New Orleans is the heart, soul and music of America.” I have little to add or amplify.

What are three musical experiences that no first-time visitor to New Orleans should miss?
• Preservation Hall, with shows overnight at 8:00, 9:00 and 10:00 p.m., seems fairly must-do. 
• Meschiya Lake has a string of Best Female Performer awards from 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015.
• Wandering Frenchmen Street, letting your ear be your guide as you stroll past 12 music clubs in two and a half blocks rounds out the three musical experiences.

Of course, I could scrap all three and toss tens of other three-experience combinations to make up additional must-do lists.

Jazz, blues and R&B dominate the New Orleans music scene, but there are other entirely original (or “discordant”) sounds to be heard. Do you have a favorite performer or group that falls outside the established styles?
As I write in Hear Dat, there’s a restaurant in New Orleans called Dis & Dem. On their menu is “The Only Omelette” and listed right below is “The Only Other Omelette.”
I have several #1 favorite outsider musicians. I love Helen Gillet, who plays the cello in ways you’ve never heard nor imagine it played. I love the Bingo Show, which I describe as a New Orleans hard-edged, slightly deviant version of Cirque du Soleil. I love DeBauche who describe themselves as a Russian Mafia Band. There are many discordant, outside the mainstream musicians who move me greatly. 

There’s some fascinating material in the book’s appendices, including lists of Top 20 venues, Top 20 historic musicians and 50 essential songs. All were compiled with input from “expert” judges. We’re going to put you on the spot: If you had to pick just one, what song would be at the top of your personal New Orleans song list?
I’ll cry foul! One song seems impossible and, even if I chose one, I’d change my mind as soon as I sent my response. High on my list would be some songs that didn’t make the Top 50 list in the appendix. I adore Black Minute Waltz by James Booker. He takes the classical Chopin song and makes it quintessentially New Orleans. I’m equally a sucker for Do It Again by Galactic with Cheeky Blakk, which is an amazingly great song built around two-word lyrics (two words which BookPage would never print).

Allen Toussaint, who contributed the “Overture” to Hear Dat, died just a few weeks after the book was completed. How would you characterize Toussaint’s place in the pantheon of New Orleans musical greats?
New Orleans has many great musicians, but a handful of icons. Louis Armstrong, Professor Longhair, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Domino. Allen Toussaint not only belongs on this short list, but he belongs at the top of the pantheon. Mr. Toussaint was an exceptionally talented and generous person. New Orleans lost something essential last Fall with his passing, but I feel confident his music will live forever.

Is New Orleans resting on its musical laurels? Or continuing to break new ground?
When visitors come to New Orleans, they expect and we need to deliver traditional jazz. But, to be the musical hub, New Orleans needs to experiment and grow. With the immense variety of Lil Wayne, Big Freedia, Tank and the Banga’s, Quintron, Galactic, Hurray for the Riff Raff, Cole Williams, I think we’ve got new ground covered.

You write that no other city (including Nashville!) is as passionate about its music as New Orleans. Describe your personal, perfect night of soaking up the sounds of New Orleans. Who/what/where?
A perfect night is about discovering something new, particularly with a visitor new to the city. I love New Orleans and want others to love it as well. I had such a perfect night about a year ago when a dear friend and her husband were visiting New Orleans from Washington, D.C. I took them to Tipitina’s to hear Helen Gillet. The warm-up band, Sweet Crude, blew all three of us away. Then I watched as their jaws dropped, listening to Helen Gillet. And finally, we were all transported by The Wild Magnolias. It was a night where I got to watch two people, new to New Orleans, totally fall in love with my city and a night my love was taken to a deeper level.

Just in time for Jazz Fest 2016, which opens today, New Orleans transplant, publishing veteran, music lover and bon vivant Michael Murphy has written Hear Dat New Orleans, a lively new guide to the city's vibrant music scene.

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In Shoba Narayan’s delightful memoir, The Milk Lady of Bangalore, she recalls moving from America to India and the many joys she found there—the most unexpected being cows. In India, where cows are considered holy, bovines roam the street, and Narayan forges a friendship with the woman who sells fresh milk across from her home. In this Q&A, Narayan tells us about her bovine infatuation, surprising uses for cow dung and her career back-up plan.

Sarala, your milk lady, believes that “more than any creature, cows are connected to humans.” Another person told you that “cows are the most evolved animal, after humans.” What are your thoughts on these statements?
I started as a skeptic. I would roll my eyes at these statements and then try to figure out what the agenda was. I think those of us city-dwellers who have lost our connection to nature—the birds, bees and, ahem, bovines that surround us—are depriving ourselves of a vital link that is part of our evolution and ecology. Such statements reveal the connection that people like Sarala have maintained with all species great and small. Their lives are the richer for it. I am now trying to emulate and engineer such connections. It is easier to do in India.

You write that if anyone had suggested that youd be writing about cows, you would have yelled “Get out!” in an Elaine-Jerry Seinfeld kind or way. Now you're in love with them. Did you pick cows as a subject, or did they pick you?
Cows picked me. I used to see them all over the place in India. I didn’t realize then that they would arrive at my doorstep. The story too, unspooled over 10 years. Like the slow and sensuous gait of a cow, this was a tale that took its own time to come to life.

Unlike your previous book, the recipe-filled Monsoon Diary, this book contains only one recipe: for panchagavya, a mixture of cow dung, cow urine, yogurt, bananas and other ingredients. You describe an incredible number of uses for cow dung and cow urine, including urine as an elixir, which you tasted. Do you recommend it?
Look, I know that you guys are now rolling your eyes like I once did. Do I believe in esoteric alternative remedies that most people would mock? Yes. Do I imbibe cow urine tablets on a daily basis? No. Do I realize that this situation is ripe for satire? Yes. Do I add panchagavya to the manure for my garden? Most definitely. And I grow wonderful heirloom tomatoes, purple eggplant, beans, pumpkin, basil and tons of herbs. So there you have it.

You grew up in India, where cows are holy. Then you immigrated to America for college and journalism school, and eventually returned to India with your husband and two daughters. How has your view of cows changed throughout these transitions?
Well, it is hard to find a live cow walking the streets in the U.S. So my interest in cows remained dormant while I lived stateside. It was hibernating perhaps. When I returned to India, my interest renewed with fresh zeal because I saw cows as animals I had grown up with but also as symbols of Indian culture and the Indian ethos where fantasy and reality seem to blend in kaleidoscopic color.

What does your family think about your cow adventures? Are they as fond as cows as you are?
My husband tolerates it. My kids openly laugh at me while (I hope) secretly being proud of my peculiarities. My parents and in-laws who belong to the earlier generation of Indians heartily approve. My aunts and uncles use me as an example when they talk to their own children who are now in America. “Look at Shoba. See how connected she has become to her Indian roots,” they will say. My cousins all resent me for becoming an Indian role model in a way that they simply cannot emulate. I mean, how can you sit in Buffalo, New York, and compete for family approval with a cousin who has gone and bought a cow?

“The reason I want to buy milk from a cow,” you explain, “is because I am trying to recapture the simple times of my childhood, particularly after the intricate dance that I have undertaken for the last twenty years as an immigrant in America.” Can you explain how it feels for you to taste a glass of fresh, raw milk, and how it helps you reconnect with your native country?
I hate to burst this bubble, but I don’t drink raw milk. Years in America have made me a tad cautious. So all milk in my house, even my cow’s milk, is subject to strict standards of, shall we say, sanitation. We double-boil it and use it to set yogurt. For my everyday milk for coffee, I am, as I say in the book, still using pasteurized milk.

That said, I touch every passing cow. I am not queasy about dung. I don’t mind squatting on the sidewalk to milk a cow. These are the ways in which I reconnect with my culture.

Has Sarala read your book or articles that you’ve written about her?
Well, she doesn’t read English. But she knows about all my articles and my book because my newspaper sent a photographer to shoot her and her family for some columns I wrote about her in India. So every time one was published, I would walk across the street, where she milks her cows, and show her the piece. She would glance at her photo and nod her approval but it was not a big deal to her.

Sarala seems to have acted as a personal tour guide when you moved back to India, showing you so much about your new home, its people and ways. You write touchingly about your relationship and also mention how financial inequities at times made you feel uncomfortable around her as well as others. Are you still living in India, and do you plan to stay?
Yes, and yes. Still living in India. Plan to stay. For now. We have developed deep connections here to our large and extended family. My daughter goes to college in Pittsburgh, so we come back every year to visit. We go to New York, D.C., Florida and Pittsburgh—all places we have friends and family. I imagine that we might eventually spend time in California because my daughter studies engineering and, who knows, she may end up in Silicon Valley. We loved our 20 years in America and we could see moving back, but that won’t likely be for at least another few years.

You came to own a cow during the process of writing this book, which you donated to Sarala. Can you give us an update on Anantha, the cow that you and your husband named after his sister?
She is still around. Cows are often roaming untethered in Bangalore, so I meet Anantha on the streets sometimes and I speak with Sarala about her. I worry about her getting hit on the road. But life in India is all about relationships and most people quickly develop a keen sense of the balance between attachment and detachment. So I try to stay close with my cow but not too close.

You write that your life goal is to be a stand-up comic. How’s that going?
Not very well, I am afraid. I am taking classes with Second City, Chicago, but online classes can only help you so much. Now that would bring me back to America in a heartbeat: To study comedy for a year would be a dream. And it is easier to do in the States. I did a comedy Masterclass with Steven Martin online. All my classmates kept writing about their gigs in their posts. I don’t have a single gig in India.

You never planned to write cows until one “literally walked up to me.” What’s next? Have you bumped into anything new?
Hahahaha. Nice one. You know, that is such a nice line that I don’t want to add anything to it. Let me wait for the next story to bump into me. I can’t imagine what it will be.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Milk Lady of Bangalore.

In this Q&A, The Milk Lady of Bangalore author Shoba Narayan tells us about her bovine infatuation, surprising uses for cow dung and her career back-up plan.  

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