Tongariki, Rapa Nui. Photograph property of Margaret Randall.

Destination: Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Book: Their Backs to the Sea(2009) by Margaret Randall

(review copy supplied by Wings Press, San Antonio)

In her journey to Easter Island, the well-traveled Margaret Randall, came to a place more remote than any she had visited or lived in before. The introductory stanzas of Their Backs to the Sea, imagining the arrival of the ancients who carved the giant totems, spells out the location of Rapa Nui..

Unyielding Pacific, 1,300 miles west of Chile,

1,260 southeast of Pitcairn,

at 27 point 9 south and 109 point 26 west

in the measurements we use today.

a journey of stars beckoned you then,

exhausted but ready,

to this speck of land.

The debate about whether we should ignore the writer’s life and just look at the work may never come to a satisfactory conclusion.  But I cannot help but think that knowing something of Margaret Randall’s life brings even more depth to her work.  Randall and Adele Barker comprised the panel I moderated at the Tucson Book Festival. Their subject was “Memoirs about Travel and Place,” because both have written about foreign places that they lived for an extended time.

Randalls’s long periods of living in Cuba (just after Castro came to power), and Mexico (during student uprisings), visiting North Vietnam(at the end of the Vietnamese War), and again living several years in Nicaragua were not trips taken to immerse oneself in culture or to study history, let alone lie on a beach.  A writer–essayist, memoirist, poet–and a photographer, Randall lived her political beliefs.  Her opposition to United States policy eventually led to her losing her U.S. citizenship. You can read more about that and the long struggle that finally restored her citizenship at her web site. You can also read more about her Cuban life in the newly released To Change the World: My Years in Cuba. Excerpts can also be read at the Havana Times web site, a site sympathetic to the country and government of Cuba.

I bought To Change the World at the Tucson Book Festival and am eager to read it, having read some of the excerpts at the Havana Times. Just to be perfectly clear, I am not sympathetic to Castro, and steeled myself to dislike an apologia for his revolution. However, Randall is far too intelligent to just parrot dogma. I found the excerpts I read to be fascinating, and a good counterpoint to the (my) unexamined attitude toward Castro.

Randall now lives in Albuquerque, and the travel to Easter Island was spurred by an article by playwright Edward Albee about how a visit to the island had affected him.

A Lone Moai, His Back to the Sea. Photograph Property of Margaret Randall

In the first half of her book, the poetry and photography beautifully portray the mysterious stone heads on the island, and she asks the questions that I have asked when seeing pictures of the carvings, weaving the physical descriptions through the facts and speculations of history and anthropology.

Even here, she sees the dangers of colonialism, and her contemplation of the ancients moves through time to Baghdad, and on to a loop between past and present and future–both personal and global. Thus the second half of the book moves from Easter Island to the contemplation of universal life questions, and asks more of the reader than simple tourism.

Fallen Moai

Margaret Randall kindly gave me permission to use her photographs here. They are copyrighted and are NOT available for your use, other than enjoying what you see here.

I hope that you will start or join a conversation here. Surely I have given you enough controversial topics to approach. Have at it!

Read about the other panelist from Tucson Festival of Books, Adele Barker, and about another South Sea Island experience. And don’t forget to recommend this post by clicking on one of the social media buttons below.

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Galleface, Sri Lanka

Destination: Sri Lanka

Book: Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka, (2010) by Adele Barker

(Book provided for review by Beacon Press)

When American professor Adele Barker spent a year in Sri Lanka, she had already lived for a long period in Moscow, where she studied Russian literature, and traveled outside the U.S. many other times. She teaches Russian Literature at the University of Arizona and won a Fulbright advanced scholar fellowship to teach and write in Sri Lanka during  2001-2002.

Barker planned an  account of her time in Sri Lanka that would look at the culture, the history, and the civil unrest in that country with its ethnic divide between the Ceylonese and Tamil populations. With her son, she settled in and began to learn the language and the customs as she taught literature to university students.

After a year, she was sad to leave, but glad to rejoin her son, who came back to America before her.  Two years later, she awakened one morning to see news of the tsunami that hit Sri Lanka and knew that she must go back  and make this disaster part of her story.  The resulting memoir is written both journalistically and experientially. She interviewed dozens of people, read journals of former European settlers, and tried to understand the complexities of a country that few Americans can locate on a map.

In Not Quite Paradise,she poetically describes the landscape, birds, weather conditions, and shares her own emotions as she tries to wrap her mind around truly foreign concepts. Her rhythm relaxes into the tropical lassitude of people’s lives.

I was fortunate to moderate a panel at the Tucson Festival of Books with Adele Barker and Margaret Randall (see tomorrow’s post) talking about “Memoirs about Travel and Place.”  During their conversation, Barker said that she feels an obligation to help get aid to the people so damaged by first a war and then a devastating storm.

In Not Quite Paradise,  she ponders  “the subtle shifts in my own geography.” That is surely a thought that many travelers have as they learn how their travel has changed them. However, Barker is constantly aware of the danger of the outsider who fools oneself into thinking she is an insider or of the traveler admiring what she doesn’t understand.

“I took long bike rides down roads lined in the blue and rose pastel of Hindu temples, as the figures of Rama, Sita, Ganesh, and Shiva oversaw the progression of cyclists from their station on the outer walls of the temples.  Outside Nallur Temple, just blocks from where I was staying, the local peanut and popcorn lady sold her wares in the evening.  If the wind was blowing right, I could sometimes smell the proximity of the sea,” she writes.

And she continues, “But enough of this.  I catch myself beginning to wax romantic about it.  Except for the central downtown market area, where beans, onions, and over twenty different kinds of bananas shared a loud, raucous space with buses and sari shops, the city for the most part moved quietly. ..Just down the street from the guesthouse were dwellings essentially reduced to shells, relieved of everything that made them livable.  Outside walls had been obliterated, exposing all the rooms, where goats had now taken up residence. Spaces were filled in by vines that threaded their way in and out of grenade wounds and bullet scars.”

Barker’s constant vigilance in seeking the truth about people’s attitudes and in forcing herself to face truths not only about Sri Lanka, but about herself, serve as a reminder to any traveler who skims over the surface of a foreign culture and confuses, “I was there” with “I understand.”

Suggested websites and extended reading about Sri Lanka at the book’s pages at Beacon Press. Read about the other panelist from the Tucson Festival of Books, Margaret Randall’s book on Easter Island.

What do you know about Sri Lanka? What have been your sources of information? Have you been there? Would you like to go?

The photo is taken from Flickr under Creative Commons License. Please click on the photo to learn more about the photographer.

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The Grocer's Son

Destination: Provençe, France

Movie: The Grocer’s Son (Les Fils de l’epicier)(2008)

Some time ago, a reader recommended this movie, and it finally made it to the top of my Netflix list.  Thank you, whoever you were–stand up and take a bow for introducing The Grocer’s Son.

When I thought about why I enjoyed this movie, it became obvious that the director, Eric Guirado, did nothing extraordinary, but that made the movie delightful.

The movie explores family relationships–harsh father, two sons– one rebellious, one obedient, and a long-suffering mother. There are family secrets (mostly held by the obedient son). There is the familiar return of the prodigal as the younger son goes off to a city life, but with a family crisis, returns to the village to run the father’s business.

On top of the family story, a romance unfolds. Boy meets girl. boy loses girl. Girl comes back. (Okay, that’s a spoiler, but you KNEW she would, didn’t you?)

I think the very ordinariness of the film appealed to me.  Believable characters in a lush landscape.  As the young son, played by the very appealing Nicholas Cazalé, starts driving his father’s grocery truck to the even smaller settlements in the hills of Provençe, we meet the elderly customers. Clearly, these areas are dying as the inhabitants do not include young people. The elderly characters are interesting and so honest in their portrayals, that the film has the feel of a documentary at times.

And when I learned that the director’s background includes many documentaries, it all made sense.

I fell in love with the sheepherder who had lost his sheep and his wife; the old man who scammed the grocer by not “hearing” the price; the wrinkled face of the woman who pondered her purchases and then bought the same thing each time.

But always there are the twisting roads and the green hills. These people live far away from the usual tourist haunts of France.  The director, interviewed in the film’s press kit, claims that he removed the most beautiful scenes because they would have distracted from the story. Imagine that. Provençe is even more beautiful than portrayed. As I plan my trip to France, these images of Provençe will continue to call to me.

Have you been to Provence? Have you ventured out on the country roads? Should I detour from my plan of doing only the north–Normandy and Brittany?

Among my many posts on France: Madame Bovary, French Writers,  Essays by an American in France, Travels With a Donkey, Mistress of Louis IV

and many more, particularly about Paris. You can find them with the search box at the top right of this page.

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Match up Australian choices with Go Backpacking’s list of travel movies that was featured here last Monday.

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Mansions on the Cliff Walk in Newport, Rhode Island

Book: We’re There Rhode Island (2005)by Elizabeth S. Grumbach

The subtitle says it all: Games, Puzzles and Fun Facts for Children as they Explore the Ocean State.

We’re There Rhode Island invites filling in the blanks, map reading, coloring, puzzle solving and (shhhh!) learning.

I loved the colorful layout and kid-friendly approach and language.  I think my favorite page is the back cover which invites the child to enter lists–the best and worst things eaten, places stayed, book read, ice cream, beach, etc.

Maybe other traveling parents and grandparents are better at this than me, but I tend to talk like a P.R. agent or glittery travel book, constantly telling the kids how great things are. Let’s face it, when you travel, not everything is so great, and giving a child permission to say some things just stink gives them a leg up on truly evaluating their surroundings and experiences.

My own visit to Rhode Island was long enough to qualify as a visit to the state, but too short to see anything beyond the beautiful town of Newport. I always love the ocean, and carry with me the image of sail boats departing from the pier that thrusts way out into the water.  The old portion of Rhode Island, brick colonial houses near the water takes you right back to the 18th century.  And then there is the excess of the “cottages” of the grand families like the Astors that line the Cliff Walk. When you go, do tour at least one of these tastefully opulent, if show-offy mansions.

It just happened that I discovered this book while searching for Rhode Island, but I could not wait to share it with parents and grandparents because the series also includes Boston, New York City, Washington D.C. and San Francisco. I got in touch with the author via her web page, (kidquest@cox.net) and she told me that she has travel books on London, Paris, Rome, Venice and Belize that she created for her children.

(I changed the wording below, so people would understand that this is an an offer from the author, relating to the last 5 mentioned books).

The author says: If you want to let people know that they can contact me if they are interested in having me print up pages from those books (8.5 x11, color, on a laser printer) I can always do that. She is talking about the non-United States cities–books that have not been published.

Might be worth taking a look. After all, we always need something to keep kids busy on the road.

Meanwhile, Kerry Dexter  over at Music Road suggests a Rhode Island music festival as part of her Music for the Road series that parallels the Great American Road Trip. I would love to go to that festival, and am so glad that Kerry pointed it out.

Please pass this post on to others who may be looking for children’s travel books or music for the road. You can use the tabs below for social networking, and even to e-mail the link to friends.

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THE Oscar

Well another year of Oscars are history, and as usual, I had not seen enough of the Acadamy Award nominees to judge, and those that I DID want to win did not.  I still think Meryl Streep was incredible in Julie and Julia, but then, maybe the Academy is just weary of honoring her year after year. Maybe they should just create a Meryl Streep award and give her that each year for her superior work, and then get on to giving out the also-ran awards to all the other folks in Hollywood.

Perhaps I’ll try harder to see the new movies next year, and we’ll give the Traveler’s Library Best Movie Destination award. What do you think?

Meanwhile, here are two very thought-provoking lists of movies that make you want to go there from one of my favorite sites, Go BackPacking.  I know these lists have exteneded MY Netflix list a bunch. Enjoy!

Oh, and before you go, please note that my favorite movie site, Film Gecko has moved to this location. Jane Boursaw stays right on top of things, and by golly she even  picked Hurt Locker (filmed in Jordan)as best picture when everyone else was betting on Avatar (filmed in the imagination of creator James Cameron)!!.

Now, heeeeeeeere’s Go Back Packing:

From Go Backpacking–Top Ten travel movies with a bonus ten

Follow up to the original post: Go Backpacking

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See the entire video here,
and read more about Italy……

When I traveled to Italy two years ago, I read a Penguin book that combined Mary McCarthy’s two books–The Stones of Florence and Venice Observed These are two pieces of must-read travel literature for European travelers.

I will start with a warning–this is not light reading. And this is not an up-to-date guidebook.  Originally written in 1959, the Penguin edition I read was first reprinted in 1972.  McCarthy warns in a foreword:

The reader, I hope, will overlook a few inaccuracies in the description of present-day Florence.  The incessant changes of modern Florence keep it always ahead of the author.

Since that undated warning was written at least forty years ago, the incessant changes continue as the chic fashion shops, cooking schools, and restored Medici villas continue to open.  However, I don’t know about you, but I go to a city like Florence to see the past–not quite preserved in aspic–but at least preserved in a way that brash new-world Americans find quite amazing.

The Cathedral and the Oratory are still there. The shops on the bridge over the Arne may sell more modern merchandise, and be wired for electricity, but from the shore, you can see what medieval merchants saw. The cobblestones, the street layout, the public squares-all still there.  The art of DaVinci and Fra Angelico and so many others has moved from the private rooms of the wealthy to museums open to the public. (Thank goodness!)

McCarthy says, For the contemporary taste, there is too much Renaissance in Florence: too much ‘David’ (copies of Michelanelo’s gigantic white nude stand on the Piazza della Signoria and the Piazzale Michelangelo; the original is in the Acaemy), too much rusticated stone, too much glazed terracotta, too many Madonnas with Bambinos.

That certainly was not the attitude among the British and Americans in the day of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Once Florence was considered a required stop on the tour of the continent. Apparently that attitude to Florence forty years ago drove people away. I, on the other hand could happily move in to Florence and live there for months and months.

Am I just too quaint in my tastes? Or has something changed in the last decades? Did it start with My House in Provence, which drove people to the south of France and then proceed to Under the Tuscan Sun by Francis Mayes? Was it the earthquake that attracted American art students to Florence for restoration projects and drew world wide attention to the treasures in that city?

Italy is on my mind because last night I attended a reception sponsored by the Italian Tourism Board to launch a new promotional campaign.  As a travel writer, my impression of the Italian Tourism office is that they don’t try very hard–nor do they have to.  Americans flock to Italy.  Look at any travel bulletin board–Italy is one of the most popular destinations for Americans, and Florence holds its own as one of the top three destinations–Rome, Venice and Florence.

The Italian tourism reception, launching their new advertising campaign, Italia Much More,  confirmed the fact that they are the most popular European destination for American travelers.  They also had some good news in terms of people’s travel plans for the coming year.  People are beginning to plan trips once again, a fact that was confirmed by the many travel agents there.

For more articles on books about Italy, see David Farley’s suggestions, Venetian mysteries, a modern horror story in Florence, Italian Art for Travelers .

We loved Florence best of the three major cities, but our drive through the countryside of Le Marche crowned our vacation. You can read my article about Le Marche at Pen4Hire.com I also planted my tongue in cheek and wrote about why NOT to go to Venice at Your Life Is A Trip.com.

Lazio, the area of Rome draws the most tourists, and Le Marche is way far down on the list–which is why I wanted to go there. Undiscovered is the most alluring word to me. If you have been there, what is your favorite region?  If not, where do you want to go?

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Dogtown, The Book

PEN New England honors Elyssa East for Dogtown as best non-fiction set in New England.  The relevant part of the press release is below. Just look at the great company that Elyssa is in!

You can see our take on Dogtown, the first inspiring travel literature in our Great American Road Trip Series.

The ceremony will also honor writers Anne Sanow, Meg Kearney, and Elyssa East as recipients of the 2010 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Awards, given annually to a New England author or a book with a New England setting. Ms. Sanow is being honored in the fiction category for Triple Time (University of Pittsburgh Press); Ms. Kearney in the poetry category for Home by Now (Four Way Books); and Ms. East in the non-fiction category for Dogtown (Free Press/ Simon & Schuster). Judges for the Winship Awards this year were authors Dorothy Allison (fiction), Tim Seibles (poetry), and Michael Steinberg (non-fiction).

The L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award was established by The Boston Globe in 1975 to honor long-time Boston Globe editor Laurence L. Winship. It has been awarded in the past to E.B. White, Andre Dubus, Susan Cheever, Tracy Kidder, Mary Oliver, Susan Quinn, Jill Ker Conway, Jan Swafford, Anita Shreve, Stanley Kunitz, Leo Damrosch, Jennifer Haigh, K.C. Frederick, Sebastian Junger, Louise Glick, Rishi Reddi, Kristen Laine, Ann Killough, Nancy Pearson, Patrick Tracey and Margot Livesey.

Ceremony at the JFK Library in Boston on March 28.

Yaaay!

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Sy Montgomery and the Good Good Pig

Destination: New Hampshire

Book: The Good, Good Pig:The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood, by Sy Montgomery.

Where would we be without librarians? While New England teems with good writing, going back to colonial days, I wanted something contemporary for our visit to New Hampshire.  Susan Reiner, a reader who lives in that state, contacted her local librarians and they suggested a book about a pig.

Should New Hampshirites be insulted? Heavens, no. Christopher Hogwood, star of this show, is aGood Good Pig. While Montgomery educates us about the porcine life–

piglets gain as much as five pounds a day–

the book tells us about a lot of good, good people in the small town and among the community of people who cared about Christopher.

Pigs are generally turned into pork chops by the time they are six months, so she was not sure how long a well-cared for pig would live.

Sy Montgomery described in the Boston Globe as “part Indiana Jones and part Emily Dickinson” writes about animals and nature for magazines like National Geographic, crafts documentaries, and she writes books for children.  Her study of animals takes her to interesting places–far too interesting for the more timid traveler like me.  She travels to an area teeming with tigers in India, to the bug-ridden Amazon, and cavorts with elephants and emus in the wild.

Her training and her belief that she is more closely related to non-humans than to humans, makes her the perfect person to explain why we should love a pig–specifically the lovable Christopher. 

Much is made of the intelligence of pigs, but the author failed to convince me.

Pigs have roughly the same intelligence as dogs.

Yes, he is an escape artist. Montgomery and the girls next door catalogue the various sounds he makes and believe that he greets different people with different tones and types of communication.

Montgomery and her husband, both writers, live on a property with a barn, although it is not a full-fledged farm.  The have a flock of chickens, called the Ladies, and soon after Christopher arrives they adopt an injured border collie. That is the limit of their livestock.

A bunch of pigs is called a drift.

Although the book concentrates on describing animals,human and otherwise, rather than dwelling on the landscape, Montgomery’s way with words brings us poetic treats like this:

It was the last day of August–an achingly beautiful, golden day when the air throbbed with cricket song and buzzed with dragonfly wings and smelled like ripening apples.

She writes with a directness and charm that seem just perfect when talking about small town New Hampshire–whose name, after all, starts with ham. Christopher, like his owner, is a vegetarian–but for a different reason (Sorry, you’ll have to read the book!)

Thanks, Susan and New Hampshire librarians for a good, good read– and it DOES make me want to go to New Hampshire.

Take a look at Music Roads for some music by a New Hampshire native to slip into your CD as you travel to New Hampshire.

Is there a famous literary animal who hails from your state or country? Tell us the story.

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The overall winner also won best writing and best design. Needless to say, The Pioneer Woman is a worthwhile stop on your daily blog tour. Congratulations to all the winners and thanks to the Bloggies.

Here’s our February count-down.

Most Popular Posts

1. On a travel Tuesday, I went to a museum in Sweden and learned that King Gustavus Goofed.
2. The movie Julie and Julia. People debated the merits of the book and the blog that led to the movie.
3. For our first stop on our Great American Road Trip, Massachusetts, I talked about a new book, Dogtown–an offbeat and rather spooky destination.
4. In 4P we talked with writer and photographer Peter West Carey about his fund raising efforts for an ambitious trip and he shared some favorite travel literature. (He hit only 1/3 of his goal, but is currently in Africa for a month.)
5. Our fourth stop on the Great American Road Trip, Maine , meant lobster and lobster fishing. Everybody had an opinion about lobster ice cream.

Readers Who Comment (A Lot!)

In the past, I have named 5 readers who comment 5 or more times.  I am happy to report that the chat-level has risen considerable in the library–and this is one library where there is no shushing of conversation.

In February, the following community members contributed more than TEN times:

• Anjuli made the most comments in the past month, and claims she is getting buried by all the books I recommend. She blogs at bhulbhulaiyan (which I have not asked her to translate.)
• Jessie Voigts, of Wandering Educators, made the new, bigger number list. Thank you loyal friend.
• Alexandra Grabbe always gives us a shout from out on the edge of Cape Cod where she runs a green bed and breakfast, Chezsven, and blogs about it.
• Richard Mussler-Wright doesn’t have a blog, but that is okay, ’cause he has plenty of interesting things to say right here.

And these folks posted five or more:

• Laura Baran, the luckiest person I know, won the Hotel Monteleone trip in the Passports with Purpose drawing and then won Three prizes in the Great Travel Literature Giveaway that launched the year here. Happily she commented 7 times, even without the promise of prizes.
• Kerry Dexter, my partner on the Great American Road Trip, who suggests Music for the Road over at Music Road, paid us five visits. Always glad to see you Kerry, because you always have good information–like where to get Lobster Ice Cream!

I was thrilled to see a bunch of people commenting three or four times, and lots of brand new faces this month. Please come back next month, all of you.

People Who Send Traffic Our Way

I’m skipping over the obvious referrals that come from Google searches, photo searches, Facebook, Twitter and Stumble Upon.  Here are some people who helped A Traveler’s Library in February, and how they did it:

• The Bloggies Yes, when we were nominated for best travel blog, it meant that lots of people got curious.  Thank you Bloggies for sending nearly 500 viewers, mostly new! (To put that in perspective, the other top referrers total just over 100 visitors.)
• Lonely Planet A Traveler’s Library shares much of its comment with the Lonely Planet site as a selected Blog Sherpa.
• FoXnMad Anil did a lovely guest post for A Traveler’s Library, and then talked about it on his site, so people came back here for a look.
• Travel Blissful Erica Johannsson mentioned the post, Piano Shop on the Left Bank in one of her “Must Read” posts and her readers dutifully came here.
• Wandering Educators, where I do a guest column each month.

And, finally, three who sent ten each:

• Music Road, where each Wednesday, we trade links to promote the Great American Road/Music Trip.
• Mothering, where I left a comment sent some traffic here.
• Mother of All Trips has A Traveler’s Library on the blog roll.

I hope that you can find something of interest here, and if you are a blogger, you can learn something that will help you in the future. Meanwhile thanks to ALL the readers, and to ALL the contributors and commenters, and special hugs to those whose links drive traffic to A Traveler’s Library.

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