Yayabiko

The first time I read Kurt Vonnegut’s classic, Slaughterhouse Five, was twenty or so years ago when I was sitting in Harry Cargas’ Protest Literature course at college.  In the years since, I’ve picked up the book two or three times for another read.  It’s a quick book, the writing light, the pages thin.  A [...]

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Patrick Symmes is my favorite travel author. He wrote an article for Outside magazine about the Khmer Rouge that is the best travel article I’ve ever read. I’ve read nearly everything I can find from him and it was with great anticipation that I started into a book he published in 2000 called [...]

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<Synopsis from Powell’s>
Simon rode a motorcycle around the world in the seventies, when such a thing was unheard of. In four years he covered 78,000 miles through 45 countries, living with peasants and presidents, in prisons and palaces, through wars and revolutions. What distinguishes this book is that Simon was already an accomplished writer. In [...]

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The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud
“Marina Thwaite, Danielle Minkoff and Julian Clarke were buddies at Brown, certain that they would soon do something important in the world. But as all near 30, Danielle is struggling as a TV documentary maker, and Julius is barely surviving financially as a [...]

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The Places In Between by Rory Stewart
“We never really find out why Stewart decided to walk across Afghanistan only a few months after the Taliban were deposed, but what emerges from the last leg of his two-year journey across Asia is a lesson in good travel writing. By turns harrowing and meditative, Stewart’s trek through [...]

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The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
“A wonderful work…. This is one of those unforgettable stories that stay with you for years. All the great themes of literature and of life are the fabric of this extraordinary novel: love, honor, guilt, fear redemption…. It is so powerful that for a long time everything I read after [...]

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Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
“Gilbert (The Last American Man) grafts the structure of romantic fiction upon the inquiries of reporting in this sprawling yet methodical travelogue of soul-searching and self-discovery. Plagued with despair after a nasty divorce, the author, in her early 30s, divides a year equally among three dissimilar countries, exploring her competing [...]

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