Word: hemingway
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Travel writers used to know what they were doing. Hemingway was the model: bluff and swaggering, machete for a pen, wouldn't be caught dead in a fanny pack. But since Papa's time, travel writers have become either less macho or more honest or both. Now they're our fellow road worriers: jet-lagged, air enraged, lost their laptops three changes back, their dignity sometime before that...
...relief. Hemingway made you feel like a lazy chump for missing out on the running of the bulls in Pamplona, but the new breed of travel books gives you the oxymoronic pleasure of being both over there and back here at the same time. As Alain de Botton puts it in The Art of Travel (Pantheon; 272 pages), "We may best be able to inhabit a place when we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there." As travel books go, The Art of Travel is on the unconventional side. It isn't about traveling anywhere...
...Hemingway had met Robert Twigger on the road, he would probably have beaten him up and taken his per diem. The shy, scholarly Twigger's The Extinction Club (William Morrow; 222 pages) is about the elusive Pere David's deer, an anatomical cocktail of an animal with backward-facing horns, a long, thick camel neck and a donkey's tail. For centuries the only Pere David's in the world lived in a walled park outside Beijing, where they were hunted exclusively by the Emperor of China, until an enterprising missionary (the eponymous Pere) smuggled a few specimens...
...Meow Mix. In one documented case, two lions stalked and killed 135 people during construction of a bridge across the Tsavo River. Joined by a rotating cast of biologists, local tribesmen and scary big-game hunters, Caputo heads into the African scrub to find the lions. This is darkest Hemingway country--the ghost of Francis Macomber haunts every page--but Caputo is blessedly free of Papa's ego. He's not afraid to describe an unsuccessful spear-throwing lesson with a Masai warrior or the distinctly un-Hemingwayesque experience of passing out from taking too much malaria medicine. He also...
...reigning literary lion of post-Hemingway travel writers is V.S. Naipaul, who won last year's Nobel Prize for Literature. The Writer and the World (Knopf; 524 pages) brings together his best short work, most of which has been languishing uncollected for decades. A native of the tiny island of Trinidad, Naipaul is a travel writer almost by default--he is a foreigner everywhere he goes--and it's a privilege to look through his outsider's X-ray eyes at Mobutu's Zaire, or at a would-be revolutionary in Guyana, or at a holy man in Bombay...