Tag Archives: Bert Latamore

Blue Ridge Road Trip/Book by Baldacci

Books, Destinations, Novel, United States, Virginia, , , , , , , , , ,
From Bert’s Skyline Photos

Destination: Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia, USA

Book: Wish You Well by David Baldacci

A GUEST POST BY BERT LATAMORE

My friend Bert Latamore is fortunate to live in the Blue Ridge area of Virginia, outside of Washington D.C. (The Blue Ridge Parkway continues south through the Carolinas). Bert and his wife love to explore the natural beauty and small communities and Bert photographs the mountains in their many moods.In this post he describes a novel that could very well lure the traveler to a road trip on the Blue Ridge.

Most people know David Baldacci as the author of high tension political adventure novels, and particularly for Absolute Power which was turned into a hit movie in the 1990s. However, Baldacci’s reach is greater than any one genre. Wish You Well , a coming of age novel set in 1940, tells about a 12-year-old girl who moves from New York City to her great-grandmother’s tiny mountain homestead in the Virginia Blue Ridge after an auto accident kills her father and leaves her mother comatose.

The Novel

Based in part on Baldacci’s mother’s experience growing up in the Blue Ridge, the book traces Louisa Mae Cardinal’s life in a place that had changed little in 100 years. In the process, this fine novel takes the reader on a tour of the Blue Ridge and the traditional life of the people who lived, struggled, and farmed there. It immerses the reader in the beauty and rhythms of a way of life that is now long gone.

From Bert’s Skyline Photos

Travel Today

Fortunately, while the old mountain farms are gone, the land and mountains of the Blue Ridge remain, largely unspoiled. And, thanks to FDR’s vision as realized in the Blue Ridge Parkway, the area is easily accessible to travelers. The Parkway, 75-years-old in 2010, stretches 469 miles, its two-lane road running along the ridgeline of the mountains that separate the East Coast from the continent to the West. It connects the Shenandoah National Park in the north to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the south. While Interstates in the valleys both east and west carry traffic at highway speeds, the Parkway offers a trip into an earlier, more beautiful, less hurried land.  While not as spectacular as the western National Parks, the Blue Ridge offers a leisurely driving adventure, where turns in the road open windows to gorgeous mountain views interspersed with historic sites such as Mabry Mill, a working water-powered grist mill set in a beautiful park. And Mr. Baldacci’s novel provides an ideal introduction, commentary, and sample of what you can find there.

The secret to the Parkway is to take a deep breath and surrender to the rhythms of a different time. The speed limit here is 45, sometimes 35. The object is not so much to get somewhere – if that is your need then the Interstates are a better choice – but rather to experience the environment as you drive through it. Plan on making numerous stops to admire, and photograph, the scenery, explore the pull overs, and just relax.

One warning – the Parkway does close in winter from time to time due to heavy snowfalls, so if you are planning a winter visit it is best to check ahead. And in summer the camping facilities and motels can be crowded, so reservations are always a good idea.

You can read Wish You Well in a trade paperback edition, or listen to a recording on cassette or CD. David Baldacci also started a foundation called Wish You Well to support family literacy.

 

Bert Latamore

Bert Latamore has been a writer all his adult life, and now specializes in writing about technology. He also serves as a book doctor and business report writer. His motto, “You provide the information; I craft the words.”
I met Bert about 15 years ago in an on-line group called “Aspiring Writers Club”. The core of that group continues to correspond by listserve.

The Photos: Bert Latamore took these photos along the Skyline Drive, part of the Shenandoah National Park. A road trip starting in Washington D.C. could follow the Skyline to the Blue Ridge Parkway and go all the way to Georgia. All rights reserved on Photographs.

More about David Baldacci in a post about Washington D.C. and two video interviews with Baldacci. In the 2nd of these interviews, he talks about his Wish You Well Foundation.

A Book About the Lost Mongolia

Books, Destinations, Mongolia, Novel, , , , , , , ,
Hustai National Park, Mongolia
Hustai National Park, Mongolia

 

Destination: Inner Mongolia

Book: Wolf Totem

 

Bert Latamore

Guest Bert Latamore talks about a book that won the first ever Man Asian Literary prize (partner of the Man Booker prize for writing in English).

Wolf Totem, a Tour Guide to Inner Mongolia

by Guest Bert Latamore

Some travel books tell you how to get somewhere and what to see when you get there. Others take you to place you will never get to see in person, and a very few take you into the heart of a unique place. Wolf Totem is one of that last group. A run-away best seller in  the PRC, it is the novelized autobiography of author Jiang Rong’s life in Inner Mongolia, living with the descendants of Genghis Kahn, during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s.

Partly inspired by now- Professor Jiang’s politics – the book carries an obvious message to the Han Chinese, by far the dominant ethnic group in China – Wolf Totem is a fabulous adventure story on a par with Kipling, wrapped around portrait of a unique place and people, wrapped around deep study of the complex love-hate relationship between the Mongol nomads and wolves and the central role that balance plays in the fragile Steppe ecology.

One word of warning – this is a huge, episodic, sometimes rambling book with little discernible plot, closer to 19th Century British and Russian novels than to modern American books in structure. Its unity comes from the land and people in which it is deeply rooted. It takes readers into the yurts of the Mongols and onto the vast plains of Inner Mongolia. It portrays a place full of breathtaking beauty and bloody horror, the annual cycle of the Mongol nomads, the battles they fight with the huge winter wolf pack for their very lives, their relationship with the half-wild dogs who stand beside them resolutely in that war, and their losing fight to preserve their way of life and the Steppe itself against the pressures of modern China.

Part of its power comes because Prof. Jang wrote in Chinese ideograms, which stand not for words but directly for the concepts behind them. This focuses the writer on meaning and insight rather than sound and spelling. And Prof. Jang is a very insightful thinker who has spent a lifetime analyzing his formative years as a Han Chinese student in Mongolia. And we are also fortunate that Penguin found the perfect translator for the English edition in Howard Goldblatt, whose sensitive work preserved the tone and insight Prof. Jang intended.

As a result, rather than a vacation tour, Wolf Totem is a full immersion into a place and culture that were little changed from the 12th Century, when Mongols conquered half the world. And sadly, it also is a chronicle of the destruction of both and of the disaster that happens when modern cultures try to exploit fragile ecosystems without understanding them, a lesson as relevant to the West today as it was to the PRC then. Today the once fertile plains of Inner Mongolia are a desert, and sandstorms reach as far as Beijing. In the early 1970s China literally ate up Mongolia in its quest to feed its huge population, and Jiang was there to witness and, ultimately, report on it.

So would I like to visit Inner Mongolia? Certainly not if we mean today’s ecological disaster. But if I could go there as it was when the young student Jiang Rong first saw it; if I could ride across it on horseback, see the proud Mongol horse herd thunder past, watch the wolves hunt antelope across a verdant landscape, and walk by beautiful, unspoiled lakes full of waterfowl as he did, yes, that would be the journey of a lifetime.

Photograph by “m d d”, from his Flickr collection, under Creative Commons license.

Bert Latamore has been a writer all his adult life, and now specializes in writing about technology. He also serves as a book doctor and business report writer. His motto, “You provide the information; I craft the words.”
I met Bert about 15 years ago in an on-line group called “Aspiring Writers Club”. The core of that group continues to correspond and despite the fact that we live at opposite ends of the country, I am happy to say that Bert and I (and our spouses) have met face to face more than once over the years. I have always admired his writing, and am very happy to have him guest here at A Travelers’ Library.