I’m a food and travel journalist, raised by a Greek father and a British mother. I’ve always been obsessed with the fostering of my Greek culture, heritage, and identity and have been particularly interested in the duality of my two identities, since moving to England from Greece as a young girl. During my teenage years in grey and drizzly England, the food we ate as a family transported me to my grandmothers’ white-washed alleyway, dotted with geraniums and bursting with the colours and flavours of Greece. Since then I’ve become obsessed with what food and time-perfected recipes can tell us about our heritage.
The Colossus of Maroussi is a book all wanderers and visitors of Greece should dip into at least once.
It’s a travelogue that drips with humour from the brilliant Henry Miller. It is a collection of fantastic prose inspired by the islands and mainland that Miller visited in the early 20th Century. It offers great wit and wisdom as well as cultural insights that still feel incredibly relevant to Greece today, despite the book being published in the 1940s.
When I think of great travel literature, this book is a classic. It speaks on the Greek people - their strength, stoicism, and humour - and chronicles a time in Greece before mass tourism descended and changed the islands forever.
Like the ancient colossus that stood over the harbor of Rhodes, Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi stands as a seminal classic in travel literature. It has preceded the footsteps of prominent travel writers such as Pico Iyer and Rolf Potts. The book Miller would later cite as his favorite began with a young woman's seductive description of Greece. Miller headed out with his friend Lawrence Durrell to explore the Grecian countryside: a flock of sheep nearly tramples the two as they lie naked on a beach; the Greek poet Katsmbalis, the "colossus" of Miller's book, stirs every rooster within…
I’m the co-author of The Divorce Seekers, an intimate glimpse into life on Nevada’s most exclusive divorce ranch, the Flying M E. From 1947-1949, my late husband, William L. “Bill” McGee, was the dude wrangler on the Flying M E, twenty miles south of Reno. We spent four years gathering photos (many from former guests on the ranch or their offspring) and conducting interviews. My book is the only book on the subject written from the perspective of a former divorce ranch wrangler. I’ve become passionate about this subject and, thanks to my work on this book, am now regarded as an “expert” on the Nevada divorce ranch era.
Besides having the pleasure of being interviewed by the delightful Ms. Barber, she has written an excellent book covering Reno’s history and its current challenge of re-inventing itself now that the town is no longer a destination for easy divorce and gambling.
When Pittsburgh socialite Laura Corey rolled into Reno, Nevada, in 1905 for a six-month stay, her goal was a divorce from the president of U.S. Steel. Her visit also provided a provocative glimpse into the city's future.With its rugged landscape and rough-edged culture, Reno had little to offer early twentieth-century visitors besides the gambling and prostitution that had remained unregulated since Nevada's silver-mining heyday. But the possibility of easy divorce attracted national media attention, East Coast notables, and Hollywood stars, and soon the 'Reno Cure' was all the rage. Almost overnight, Reno was on the map.Alicia Barber traces the transformation…
Creepy,
charming, and set slightly outside the realm of lived experience, this tale of
a man left behind in a resort town when his family returns home (or do they?)
somehow becomes a gripping, vital tale about the existential crisis that is
human life.
"Marie NDiaye is so intelligent, so composed, so good, that any description of her work feels like an understatement." ―The New York Review of Books
Herman’s wife and child are nowhere to be found, and the weather in the village, perfectly agreeable just days earlier, has taken a sudden turn for the worse. Tourist season is over. It’s time for the vacationing Parisians, Herman and his family included, to abandon their rural getaways and return to normal life. But where has Herman’s family gone? Concerned, he sets out into the oppressive rain and cold for news of their whereabouts. The…
Although my travels had taken me to Asia numerous times, Japan eluded me until my teen daughter and I spent three weeks there following the country’s re-opening from covid. The trip exceeded all of our expectations, but facing the country’s impenetrable language and complex transportation system felt intimidating. To prepare, I devoured a shelf full of guidebooks. I learned that each has its strengths and weaknesses, but these books and our own adventures greatly informed my decision to write First-Time Japan. I was especially fortunate to collaborate with Japan tour guide Roy Ozaki, who contributed greatly to the book and gave me essential insights into Japan’s people, places, and culture.
If you find traditional guidebooks overwhelming (and I do!), this nice little primer is a great way to get your feet wet thinking about your Japanese adventure.
Unlike the weightier guidebooks mentioned above, this one picks out a more select group of sightseeing recommendations. For each one, the authors provide a nice bit of background along with details you need to know.
The book is highly readable and unconfusing, and having taken my teen daughter to Japan myself, I would recommend this for kids to read before a trip. It won’t answer every question, but will help point you in the right directions.
I first went as a student to Beijing in 1984 with a camera and a suitcase of film but not much of a plan. I found myself in a country whose young people were suddenly empowered to put their skills to use rather than let state planning order every aspect of their lives. My academic studies rapidly evolved into a vocation to photograph the changes around me. There was a demand for this: one of my first assignments being for Life magazine and then a slew of US and European publications eager to expand their coverage of all that was reshaping China and in turn the world. I chose street-level life as the most relatable to an international audience and in recent years also for Chinese eager to see how this era began.
Spontaneous photojournalism has not been a feature of the People’s Republic as the state-run media prefers rigid control of any media message. One of the most distinguished early practitioners of documentary photography to challenge this dull approach was Wang Fuchun. His book on life on the long-distance trains that trundled across the country delighted and informed first his compatriots and then the world. Most of the journeys he witnessed were in the age before mass tourism and are a far cry from the world-beating high-speed trains of the 21st century. It feels like ancient history but steam-powered locomotives were still produced in China until the 1990s, the last country to give up the coal-burning dinosaurs.
China's economy has developed rapidly for 40 years. Railway is the artery of this land and is also a mirror for the rise of the Chinese economy. As a railway worker, the photographer Wang Fuchun takes pictures for people on the train to record the feelings and emotions in the narrow space on the train with almost instinctive observation and reflection. He expands the carriage of transportation vehicles to the stage of life, the space of flowing history, the platform for social contact, the happy theater and the mobile caravan. It is accumulated as time goes by and condenses life…
I grew up in Valladolid, a semi-rural city of Yucatan. My parents loved the history and archaeology of the Yucatan peninsula, which not long ago was a single cultural and linguistic entity. I grew up dreaming of becoming an archaeologist. With time, I became fascinated with people and sociality within and beyond Yucatan, so I became an anthropologist. I trained as an anthropologist in Mexico and Canada, and have done research in Canada, Italy, Mexico, and Spain. I live and work in Yucatan, as a professor of anthropology. Good ethnographies are what anthropology is about, and those I write about here are some of the best.
In the 1970s, my parents took me and my siblings to the Camino Real, one of the first hotels ever built in Cancun.
We sat on canvas chairs on the beach and my dad played the guitar. Fiddler crabs walked around us, the stars shone brightly, and we enjoyed the music and the sound of crashing waves. Tourism and its evils, however, soon became a nightmare for peninsular Yucatecans.
Through the city of Cancun, the natural reserve Calakmul, the village of Tekit and the hotels in former sisal haciendas, this ethnography shows how, even when living standards improved, local people have become geographically immobilized and resource-impoverished.
The tourist industry is predatory. It destroys natural resources, transforms places into what the rich think of as paradise, and displaces and disempowers local people.
Tourism has become one of the most powerful forces organizing the predatory geographies of late capitalism. It creates entangled futures of exploitation and dependence, extracting resources and labor, and eclipsing other ways of doing, living, and imagining life. And yet, tourism also creates jobs, encourages infrastructure development, and in many places inspires the only possibility of hope and well-being. Stuck with Tourism explores the ambivalent nature of tourism by drawing on ethnographic evidence from the Mexican Yucatan Peninsula, a region voraciously transformed by tourism development over the past forty years. Contrasting labor and lived experiences at the beach resorts of…
I’ve loved nature and being outdoors since childhood, when I would escape our apartment complex by berry-picking in a park or sneaking onto the lush grounds of a local mental hospital. I grew up in Queens, New York, at a time of rapid development, and mourned as trees were felled for housing. I became an avid hiker, canoeist, and gardener as an adult, and serve on the board of an environmental organization in Montauk, Long Island. What we lose when we lose our connection to nature, saving our last wild places, and leaving a sustainable world to the next generation are key themes in my forthcoming novel--and personal motivation.
I found this to be one of the most compelling novels I’ve read to draw me deep into the fabric of the hardscrabble life of a New England community down on its luck with the crash of the cod fishing industry.
The sympathetic but thwarted characters are all entangled in dangerous waters of one kind or another, from drug smuggling to physical danger to marital issues. I was as fascinated to learn about the economics and lifestyle of the fishing life as I was moved by the struggles of characters caught in a complex net of change outside their control.
This is the story of empty oceans and the men who fish them. It's the story of Rosaline, a New England fishing community facing the loss of its traditional way of life, struggling against the imposition of fishing quotas, the closing of the local cannery and the encroachment of the heritage industry, which exploits with nostalgia a way of life before it has even given up its last breath. It's the story of the denizens of Rosaline: John Fitz and his best friend Chris who work on John's father's fishing boat, The Pearl; barmaid Kate, indifferent mother and neglected wife…
I love books that tell me things about history that I didn’t know. Here, Lucy Lethbridge turns in a fascinating non-fiction on the early years of the tourist trade.
The book is full of memorable ‘Fancy That!’ anecdotes and also sheds light on the foibles and snobbery of the British. For example, some feared the arrival of rail transport, which allowed ordinary people to travel to exciting new places, would foster moral lassitude and idleness.
And what about the Swiss health resort of Davos, which almost overnight became a magnet for tourists and invalids seeking clean, rejuvenating Alpine fresh air but was rapidly rendered unfit for purpose because the huge influx of visitors overwhelmed the town’s basic sanitary system?
*FOYLES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH*
'I really can't recommend this enough - especially if you are going on holiday' Tom Holland
'Delightful ... Lucy Lethbridge has written a glorious romp of a book' Kathryn Hughes, The Mail on Sunday
'It is the paramount wish of every English heart, ever addicted to vagabondizing, to hasten to the Continent...'
In 1815 the Battle of Waterloo brought to an end the Napoleonic Wars and the European continent opened up once again to British tourists. The nineteenth century was to be an age driven by steam technology, mass-industrialisation and movement, and, in the…
I am the son of Irish rural immigrants who at the age of nearly eighty already occupies several vanished worlds myself: London in the 1950s and 60s, the old world of the European peasantry, and a time when the greatest war in human history was still a daily presence. I spent most of my life as an academic historian writing books for an academic audience. Then, to my surprise, at the tender age of seventy, I discovered that I could write prose that had a certain grace and dignity and which seemed to move people as well as inform them. So, I began a second career as what is called a “writer.”
Norman Lewis was what is usually called a travel writer. Today’s travel writers, however, pale beside him.
I read this book when it first came out in 1984. It describes the three summers in the late 1940s when Lewis lived and worked in a very remote fishing village on what is now called the Costa Brava. He records with utmost sympathy and acuteness of observation the last days of the old world of Mediterranean Spain before it became completely obliterated by mass tourism.
The book touched me deeply, for I had seen the last vestiges of other parts of Spain only a decade or so after Lewis. The book is a kind of monument for all parts of the world submerged by mass tourism.
After World War II, Norman Lewis returned to Spain and settled in the remote fishing village of Farol, on what is now Costa Brava. Voices of the Old Sea describes his three successive summers in that almost medieval community where life revolved around the seasonal sardine catches, Alcade's bar, and satisfying feuds with neighbouring villages. It's lucky Lewis was there when he was. Soon after, Spain was discovered by its neighbours in a more prosperous northern Europe, and the tourist tide that ensued flowed inexorably over the old ways of the town and its inhabitants.
I’ve been fascinated by fictional royal stories ever since I was a little kid watching them unfold in children’s movies. Once I became a reader, I quickly became a fan of the genre. There’s such an escapism that comes with reading books about royals. And since America has no monarch, the books offer a fantasy and fairy-tale aspect to the reading. I read these books to relax, to fall in love with love, and to cheer for the ordinary person finding something extraordinary in their world—real orfictional.
I love everything Sariah Wilson writes but Royal Dateholds a special place in my heart. It’s got that Cinderella-esque feel to the story, with a backdrop that includes skiing, an awesome BFF, a country I wish was real, and a journalist heroine. The book has a depth of emotion that may have you reaching for tissues and cheering at the end.
Kat MacTaggart is a girl who has a plan for everything—including her holiday ski trip to Monterra with her best friend. Everything is going according to plan until she finds herself careening out of control down a mountainside and being rescued by a guy who looks like Superman’s hotter Italian cousin.
HRH Prince Nico is intrigued by the woman he saved on the slopes and her refusal to date him. He offers Kat a deal—let him show her his country and he’ll pay her to write articles that will help Monterra’s tourism industry.…
