If it’s Tuesday, this must be yet another annual volume to dip into at random.
The inaugural issue of an anthology of the year’s best travel pieces.
In his introduction, Bryson (In a Sunburned Country, p. 684, etc.) declares that “travel writing . . . is the most accommodating . . . of genres.” Judging from the assemblage here, it might be more accurate to say that he has been the most accommodating of editors: while searching for the “year’s best” in travel-writing, Bryson has selected some pieces (from journals as diverse as The Washington Post and Coffee Journal) that might be more accurately described as sportswriting or foodwriting and squeezed them in, like duffels in an overhead compartment. In the two-dozen-plus pieces we get such marriages of mind and matter as Dave Eggers ferrying hitchhikers around public-transportation–deficient Cuba, David Halberstam reflecting on changes in the life of Nantucket over the decades since he first visited the island, and P.J. O’Rourke approaching a late-20th-century India with as many faces as a statue of Shiva has arms. The longest piece, Isabel Hilton’s engrossing narrative on the clandestine maneuvers of the Tibetan government-in-exile, seems more distinguished as reportage than travel-writing. You might begin to ask whether we need yet another anthology of this sort, but should you argue with a collection whose subjects range from Mark Ross’s harrowing firsthand report as a victim of machete-wielding guerrillas on the Uganda border to Steve Rushing whimsically teeing off for the first World Ice Golf Championship in Greenland? For the travel-writing purist, there are pieces from Jeffrey Tayler on his sojourn in westernmost China and—though the destination may not be the farthest-flung—Bill Buford’s simple and straightforward account of spending the night in Central Park. By perusing this anthology you can see that we are traveling more and in widely divergent “modes,” and that magazine editors are evidently giving writers less room to reflect on their journeys: all the pieces except Hilton’s end a bit too soon, some with cutting-the-trip-short abruptness.
If it’s Tuesday, this must be yet another annual volume to dip into at random.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2000
ISBN: 0-618-07466-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
Naughty good fun from an impossibly sardonic rogue, quickly rising to Twainian stature.
The undisputed champion of the self-conscious and the self-deprecating returns with yet more autobiographical gems from his apparently inexhaustible cache (Naked, 1997, etc.).
Sedaris at first mines what may be the most idiosyncratic, if innocuous, childhood since the McCourt clan. Here is father Lou, who’s propositioned, via phone, by married family friend Mrs. Midland (“Oh, Lou. It just feels so good to . . . talk to someone who really . . . understands”). Only years later is it divulged that “Mrs. Midland” was impersonated by Lou’s 12-year-old daughter Amy. (Lou, to the prankster’s relief, always politely declined Mrs. Midland’s overtures.) Meanwhile, Mrs. Sedaris—soon after she’s put a beloved sick cat to sleep—is terrorized by bogus reports of a “miraculous new cure for feline leukemia,” all orchestrated by her bitter children. Brilliant evildoing in this family is not unique to the author. Sedaris (also an essayist on National Public Radio) approaches comic preeminence as he details his futile attempts, as an adult, to learn the French language. Having moved to Paris, he enrolls in French class and struggles endlessly with the logic in assigning inanimate objects a gender (“Why refer to Lady Flesh Wound or Good Sir Dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?”). After months of this, Sedaris finds that the first French-spoken sentiment he’s fully understood has been directed to him by his sadistic teacher: “Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section.” Among these misadventures, Sedaris catalogs his many bugaboos: the cigarette ban in New York restaurants (“I’m always searching the menu in hope that some courageous young chef has finally recognized tobacco as a vegetable”); the appending of company Web addresses to television commercials (“Who really wants to know more about Procter & Gamble?”); and a scatological dilemma that would likely remain taboo in most households.
Naughty good fun from an impossibly sardonic rogue, quickly rising to Twainian stature.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-316-77772-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
PERSPECTIVES
This early reader is an excellent introduction to the March on Washington in 1963 and the important role in the march played by Martin Luther King Jr. Ruffin gives the book a good, dramatic start: “August 28, 1963. It is a hot summer day in Washington, D.C. More than 250,00 people are pouring into the city.” They have come to protest the treatment of African-Americans here in the US. With stirring original artwork mixed with photographs of the events (and the segregationist policies in the South, such as separate drinking fountains and entrances to public buildings), Ruffin writes of how an end to slavery didn’t mark true equality and that these rights had to be fought for—through marches and sit-ins and words, particularly those of Dr. King, and particularly on that fateful day in Washington. Within a year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed: “It does not change everything. But it is a beginning.” Lots of visual cues will help new readers through the fairly simple text, but it is the power of the story that will keep them turning the pages. (Easy reader. 6-8)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-448-42421-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
