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With winter upon us, you might be thinking of heading off, maybe to a tropical beach or maybe just home for the holidays. Here are a few reviews on books that will kick-start your plans for roaming—or at least keep you entertained on the plane. To find more book reviews, photography, maps and great reading, visit www.geist.com or subscribe now with Geist's Best Friends of Abebooks deal.
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Jennifer Duncan
In Frontier Spirit: The Brave Women of the Klondike by Jennifer Duncan, we meet women who escaped the prison of propriety and domesticity by joining the Gold Rush to the Yukon. Some travelled on their own; others followed their husbands; one carried on up the trail after her husband chickened out. This book is a collection of short accounts, so reading it is a bit like watching hockey highlights... [Read more of the review]
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Kenneth White
Karen Connelly's travel memoir One Room in a Castle opens with an apt epigraph from Kenneth White: "The world is open before you. All you need to do—and want to do—is walk through it." Across the Territories, White's most recent book of travels, describes eleven excursions that range through territories "from Orkney to Rangiroa." These personal travel essays are not travelogue: they do not suggest an itinerary, nor do they recommend restaurants or hotels. [Read more of the review]
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Bob Gaulke
Bob Gaulke's description of his travels in Salvador (a region of Brazil), in The Nervous Tourist, evokes the age of imperialism. His background-and education afford him the opportunity to make a decent living teaching English, but he is very much an outsider, trying to negotiate his enthusiasm and wariness of culture, politics and local customs. It is the allure of Brazilian music that tempts Gaulke overseas, but he is not a post-colonial tourist. [Read more of the review]
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Douglas Coupland
When Douglas Coupland said that he did not make public appearances in his hometown because he didn't want to be "recognized," I stopped reading his books. A few years later a colleague of mine from the BBC interviewed him at his home and reported that he was welcoming and polite, so I was willing to consider changing my opinion. [Read more of the review]
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Roo Borson
Last summer I hiked up to a fire lookout in Alberta to visit a friend who lives there for part of each year, and tucked in my sturdy pack was Roo Borson's Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida, which I was taking to my friend as a talisman from the place beyond her secluded wood. I had gone some distance along the very gruelling trek, which crosses and follows the North Saskatchewan River through Alberta's Siffleur Wilderness, before it occurred to me that I was taking a book called Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida on a short journey upriver toward Cline Lookout. [Read more of the review]
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W. G. Sebald
When W. G. Sebald died in an automobile accident in December 2001, just four of his books were available in English translation. Those four books had earned him considerable praise (Michael Ondaatje called him "the most interesting and ambitious writer working in Britain today") and critical attention (Austerlitz won a National Book Critics Circle Award). Four more books by Sebald have been published since his death, and with the latest, Campo Santo, translated by Anthea Bell, there are signs that the well of previously unpublished (or untranslated) material is finally beginning to run dry. [Read more of the review]
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Vincenzo Pietropaolo
In Making Home in Havana, Vincenzo Pietropaolo, a photographer, and Cecelia Lawless, a professor of romance studies, explore the notion of "home" in two Havana neighbourhoods. Havana is the site of anachronism for the rest of the Americas: when we look at Havana in photographs and movies, we feel the power of memory in the unrepaired facades of another age, the decaying old Fords and Chevrolets, and a dystopian glimpse of the future seems to beckon and to offer a warning at the same time. [Read more of the review]
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