Boldly Going: Travels Around the Globe

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A man who knows New Orleans like the back of his hand is only too glad to take visitors to both the famous and infamous sights. He sprinkles his walk with the history, literature, and lore of New Orleans of which there is plenty.

Aside from love, few actvities seem to promise us as much happiness as going traveling: taking off for somewhere else, somewhere far from home, a place with more interesting weather, customs, and landscapes. But although we are inundated with advice on where to travel, few people seem to talk about why we should go and how we can become more fulfilled by doing so. In The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton, author of How Proust Can Change Your Life, explores what the point of travel might be and modestly suggets how we can learn to be a little happier in our travels.

In the drolly comic tradition of Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods", a celebrated culture critic, British expatriate, and NPR essayist offers a lively and thoughtful account of his long, strange trip hitchhiking across the United States. of color photos.

Back in America after twenty years in Britain, Bill Bryson decided to reacquaint himself with his native country by walking the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail, which stretches from Georgia to Maine. The AT offers an astonishing land-scape of silent forests and sparkling lakes -- and to a writer with the comic genius of Bill Bryson, it also provides endless opportunities to witness the majestic silliness of his fellow human beings.

For a start there's the gloriously out-of-shape Stephen Katz, a buddy from Iowa along for the walk. Despite Katz's overwhelming desire to find cozy restaurants, he and Bryson eventually settle into their stride, and while on the trail they meet a bizarre assortment of hilarious characters. But A Walk in the Woods is more than just a laugh-out-loud hike. Bryson's acute eye is a wise witness to this beautiful but

"Let's get lost together . . ."
Lost in My Own Backyard brings acclaimed author Tim Cahill together with one of his--and America's--favorite destinations: Yellowstone, the world's first national park. Cahill has been "puttering around in the park" for a quarter of a century, slowly covering its vast scope and exploring its remote backwoods. So does this mean that he knows what he's doing? Hardly. "I live fifty miles from the park," says Cahill, "but proximity does not guarantee competence. I've spent entire afternoons not knowing exactly where I was, which is to say, I was lost in my own backyard."
Cahill stumbles from glacier to geyser, encounters wildlife (some of it, like bisons, weighing in the neighborhood of a ton), muses on the microbiology of thermal pools, gets spooked in the mysterious Hoodoos, sees moonbows arcing acros

This collection showcases Caputo's essays of worldwide adventure, each imbuedwith the powerful and memorable writing that made him famous.

Frank Conroy first visited Nantucket with a gang of college friends in 1955. They came on a whim, and for Conroy it was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with this "small, relaxed oasis in the ocean." This book, part travel diary, part memoir, is a hauntingly evocative and personal journey through Nantucket: its sweeping dunes, rugged moors, remote beaches, secret fishing spots, and hidden forests and cranberry bogs. Admirers of Conroy's classic and acclaimed memoir Stop-Time will again delight in what James Atlas, writing in the New York Times, called his "genius for close observation."
In Time and Tide, Conroy recounts the island's history from the glory days of the whaling boom to the present, when tourism dominates. He vividly evokes the clash of cultures between the working class and the super-rich, with the fragile ecology

In this celebration of one of America's oldest towns (incorporated in 1720), Michael Cunningham, author of the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours, brings us Provincetown, one of the most idiosyncratic and extraordinary towns in the United States, perched on the sandy tip at the end of Cape Cod.
Provincetown, eccentric, physically remote, and heartbreakingly beautiful, has been amenable and intriguing to outsiders for as long as it has existed. "It is the only small town I know of where those who live unconventionally seem to outnumber those who live within the prescribed bounds of home and licensed marriage, respectable job, and biological children," says Cunningham. "It is one of the places in the world you can disappear into. It is the Morocco of North America, the New Orleans of the north."
He first came to the plac

In After the Dance, one of Haiti's most renowned daughters returns to her homeland, taking readers on a stunning, exquisitely rendered journey beyond the hedonistic surface of Carnival and into its deep heart.
Edwidge Danticat had long been scared off from Carnival by a loved one, who spun tales of people dislocating hips from gyrating with too much abandon, losing their voices from singing too loudly, going deaf from the clamor of immense speakers, and being punched, stabbed, pummeled, or fondled by other lustful revelers. Now an adult, she resolves to return and exorcise her Carnival demons. She spends the week before Carnival in the area around Jacmel, exploring the rolling hills and lush forests and meeting the people who live and die in them. During her journeys she traces the heroic and tragic history of the island, from French

This isn't a self-help book; it's a book about how Geoff Dyer could do with a little help. In mordantly funny and thought-provoking prose, the author of Out of Sheer Rage describes a life most of us would love to live--and how that life frustrates and aggravates him.
As he travels from Amsterdam to Cambodia, Rome to Indonesia, Libya to Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert, Dyer flounders about in a sea of grievances, with fleeting moments of transcendental calm his only reward for living in a perpetual state of motion. But even as he recounts his side-splitting misadventures in each of these locales, Dyer is always able to sneak up and surprise you with insight into much more serious matters. Brilliantly riffing off our expectations of external and internal journeys, Dyer welcomes the reader as a companion, a fellow perambulator in se

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From the restaurant President Bush rates as his favorite Austin burger joint to the history of a city that birthed Janis Joplin, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and countless other music legends, it's all here in this slightly insane, surprisingly practical, and totally kick-ass guide to the coolest city in Texas by none other than Kinky Friedman.

Sometimes a city can be like a bird. Just as the magpie is an inveterate collector, hoarding beautiful eclectic bits to line its nest, so Prague retains fragments from bygone regimes and centuries past to create a city of juxtaposition that is alternately exquisite and bizarre.
Prague's personality is expressed as much by its obvious beauty as by its overlooked details. This unforgettable place is brought to life by acclaimed author Myla Goldberg, a former Prague expat, whose first novel, "Bee Season, captivated so many with its unique voice and exhilarating prose.
Myla Goldberg lived in Prague in 1993, just as the process of Westernization was getting under way, the city straddling a past it wished to shed and a future it was eager to embrace. In 2003, she returned to see what the pursuit of capitalism had wrought and to observe

The acclaimed author of "The End of Nature takes a three-week walk from his current home in Vermont to his former home in the Adirondacks and reflects on the deep hope he finds in the two landscapes.
Bill McKibben begins his journey atop Vermont's Mt. Abraham, with a stunning view to the west that introduces us to the broad Champlain Valley of Vermont, the expanse of Lake Champlain, and behind it the towering wall of the Adirondacks. "In my experience," McKibben tells us, "the world contains no finer blend of soil and rock and water and forest than that found in this scene laid out before me--a few just as fine, perhaps, but none finer. And no place where the essential human skills--cooperation, husbandry, restraint--offer more possibility for competent and graceful inhabitation, for working out the answers that the planet is posing i

"[I]n a larger sense, we can not dedicate--we can not consecrate--we can not hallow--this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our power to add or detract."
--President Abraham Lincoln
James M. McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom, and arguably the finest Civil War historian in the world, walks us through the site of the bloodiest and perhaps most consequential battle ever fought by Americans.
The events that occurred at Gettysburg are etched into our collective memory, as they served to change the course of the Civil War and with it the course of history. More than any other place in the United States, Gettysburg is indeed hallowed ground. It's no surprise that it is one of the nation's most visited sites (nearly two million annual visitors)

"One lifetime is not enough for Rome," the famous saying goes, and anyone who's ever been there knows these words to be true. In City of the Soul, William Murray begins to show us why.
Growing up in Rome and spending much of his life in the city, William Murray is an expert guide as he takes us on an intimate walking tour of some of Rome's most glorious achievements, illuminating the history and the mythology that define the city. Murray leads us through the centro, the city's historic downtown center. He writes about the Villa Borghese, the Piazza di Spagna, and the Trevi Fountain and describes such singular attractions as the Capuchin Church of Santa Maria della Concezione, whose macabre crypt has impressed visitors from Mark Twain to the Marquis de Sade.
As he walks, he reveals stories that only a longtime resident would know,

Susan Orlean has been called "a national treasure" by "The Washington Post and "a kind of latter-day Tocqueville" by "The New York Times Book Review. In addition to having written classic articles for "The New Yorker, she was played, with some creative liberties, by Meryl Streep in her Golden Globe Award--winning performance in the film "Adaptation.
Now, in "My Kind of Place, the real Susan Orlean takes readers on a series of remarkable journeys in this uniquely witty, sophisticated, and far-flung travel book. In this irresistible collection of adventures far and near, Orlean conducts a tour of the world via its subcultures, from the heart of the African music scene in Paris to the World Taxidermy Championships in Springfield, Illinois-and even into her own apartment, where she imagines a very famous houseguest taking advantage of her

Want to know where Chuck Palahniuk's tonsils currently reside?
Been looking for a naked mannequin to hide in your kitchen cabinets?
Curious about Chuck's debut in an MTV music video?
What goes on at the Scum Center?
How do you get to the Apocalypse Cafe?
In the closest thing he may ever write to an autobiography, Chuck Palahniuk provides answers to all these questions and more as he takes you through the streets, sewers, and local haunts of Portland, Oregon. According to Katherine Dunn, author of the cult classic Geek Love, Portland is the home of America's "fugitives and refugees." Get to know these folks, the "most cracked of the crackpots," as Palahniuk calls them, and come along with him on an adventure through the parts of Portland you might not otherwise believe actually exist. No other travel guide will give you

Oakland is a blues city, brawling and husky . . .
Often overshadowed by San Francisco, its twinkling sister city across the Bay, Oakland is itself an American wonder. The city is surrounded by and filled with natural beauty--mountains and hills and lakes and a bay--and architecture that mirrors its history as a Spanish mission, Gold Rush outpost, and home of the West's most devious robber barons. It's also a city of artists and blue-collar workers, the birthplace of the Black Panthers, neighbor to Berkeley, and home to a vibrant and volatile stew of immigrants and refugees.
In Blues City, Ishmael Reed, one of our most brilliant essayists, takes us on a tour of Oakland, exploring its fascinating history, its beautiful hills and waterfronts, and its odd cultural juxtapositions. He takes us into a year in the life of this amazing cit

In September 1960, John Steinbeck and his poodle, Charley, embarked on a journey across America. A picaresque tale, this chronicle of their trip meanders along scenic backroads and speeds along anonymous superhighways, moving from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases. Travels with Charley is animated by Steinbeck's attention to the specific details of the natural world and his sense of how the lives of people are intimately connected to the rhythms of nature - to weather, geography, the cycles of the seasons. His keen ear for the transactions among people is evident, too, as he records the interests and obsessions that preoccupy the Americans he encounters along the way.

Great writer's 1897 account of circumnavigating the globe by steamship. Brimming with ironic, tongue-in-cheek humor, the book describes shark fishing in Australia, riding the rails in India, tiger hunting, diamond mining in South Africa, much more; also peoples, climate, flora and fauna, customs, religion, politics, food, etc. 197 illustrations.