Travel By JOSHUA HAMMER

The New York Times
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December 6, 2009
Holiday Books
Travel By JOSHUA HAMMER

This winter’s travel books offer a roughly even mix of vice and virtue. From prostitution, thievery and violence in Bangkok and Johannesburg to the classical antiquities and literary treasures of the Greek islands and Oxford, they explore both the dark and sunny sides of human nature. Which is more fun? It’s an open question.

In the wickedly enjoyable BANGKOK DAYS (North Point, $25), Lawrence Osborne, a down-and-out British writer living in New York, flies to Bangkok for a round of cheap dental work — and embarks on a romp through a city whose prime commodity is sex. Many of Osborne’s nocturnal rambles through the Thai capital’s bars, brothels and hotels are carried out in the company of other expats, including an Australian watercolorist named Dennis, “an elderly man with skin as white as fine library dust, with a fop of dyed blond hair falling between his eyes,” and McGinnis, a sinister air-conditioner salesman with a shaved head and a face “like that of a pleasant hoodlum who has just shot down a kite.” Osborne himself knows no shame: at one point, the cash-strapped writer picks up a middle-aged Japanese woman at the bar of the Peninsula Hotel and rips her off while she’s taking a shower: “I lifted my hand and pried into the handbag, knowing there must be money there. . . . I pulled out two thousand-baht notes, which felt like they had been extracted from the warm rollers of an A.T.M. only minutes earlier.”

Osborne also savors the city’s non-libidinous pleasures: gaudy Buddhist temples, exotic fruit and noodle stands, and the handful of tucked-away canals that have survived the asphalting of the old Bangkok. But it’s his descriptions of bar girls and their fellow travelers, of desperate couplings to ward off loneliness, that resonate. At one point, severely ill with a throat infection, Osborne finds himself in a hospital restaurant with a fellow patient who has just told him he’s dying: “Women on crutches with face masks flirted openly with men suffering from epileptic fits and sciatica. Hobbling, limping, squinting, this injured mass proved that the sex drive is the supreme of all instincts and cannot be suppressed even by terminal cancer. We lust till we die, we concluded with some relief, and ordered Tuscan white bean soup.”

In THE LAST RESORT: A Memoir of Zimbabwe (Harmony, $24.99), Douglas Rogers, a white Zimbabwean expatriate, tells of his wrenching return to the backpackers’ hotel his parents built and still operate in that country’s fertile eastern highlands. Swept up in Robert Mugabe’s farm seizures and Zimbabwe’s economic implosion, the elderly couple watch as the tourists flee, then struggle to hang on financially, scheming to keep the property from falling into the hands of Mugabe’s cronies.

Rogers’s tale is reminiscent of Peter Godwin’s “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun,” which described Godwin’s parents’ ruination in the capital, Harare. There are similar riffs on algae-infested swimming pools, break-ins, ­hyperinflated Zim dollars and rampages by thuggish “war veterans.” But Rogers skirts the bigger political picture and instead homes in on the hotel as a microcosm of a collapsed country. His mother starts writing a cookbook called “Recipes for Disaster: Adventures in the Kitchen of a Failed State.” His father rents out the property’s abandoned guest houses to a sleazy entrepreneur who turns them into a brothel. Eventually, the hotel fills with dispossessed white farmers, a whole new source of eye-witness accounts of the country’s devastation.

Rogers chronicles his parents’ encounters with a boisterous black-market currency trader nicknamed Miss Moneypenny and with a Mugabe loyalist who appoints himself the family’s protector. And always there are the maneuverings of a sinister — and never identified — figure known only as Top Man, a high-ranking official who covets the hotel and its land. Throughout, Rogers’s father battles to outwit Mugabe’s henchmen: “He thought back to all the schemes he had adopted over the years to ward off the war veterans, the settlers, the Top Man, the Commissar. He’d hauled out the shotgun. Grown the bush wild. Erected an electric fence around the house. Shot at baboons and the poachers’ dogs just to let the settlers know that he had a gun.” This vibrant, tragic and surprisingly funny book is the best account yet of ordinary life — for blacks and whites — under Mugabe’s dictatorship.

Ivan Vladislavic’s PORTRAIT WITH KEYS: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (Norton, paper, $14.95) is an unsettling portrait of Zimbabwe’s southern neighbor. Written as a series of snapshots of life during the first years after apartheid, this memoir-cum-prose poem from the South African-born son of Polish immigrants describes a city overwhelmed by poverty and crime. Among the emblematic details he shares with readers are the manholes Johannesburg’s growing homeless population uses as personal storage spaces, the ubiquitous “Gorillas” (expandable steel bars) employed by car owners to immobilize their steering wheels, and his own bulging key ring, filled with keys for burglar alarms, security doors and other barriers against thieves and marauders. Vladi­slavic also follows the bizarre story of a real-life gorilla, Max, a denizen of the Johannesburg Zoo who is shot during a scuffle with an escaping robber and survives his wounds to become a local hero.

Seizing on unexpected details, Vladislavic describes the blurring lines between white and black Johannesburg. “The township is made of cardboard and hardboard,” he writes of the slapdash signs for painters, builders and other service providers that begin appearing across formerly whites-only enclaves: “Handpainted on unprimed plaster, scribbled on the undersides of things. . . . Tied to a fence with string, leaning against a yield sign, propped up by a brick, secured with a twist of wire, nailed to a tree trunk.”

Yet too many of Vladislavic’s mini-chapters consist of pointless anecdotes: allusions to friends and lovers who show up once or twice and never appear again, mystifying descriptions of construction sites and storage bins, monotonous encounters with inebriated beggars, parking attendants and other hustlers. However, his descriptions of a long-privileged, long-sheltered tribe, grappling with new realities, can be painfully effective. Gazing at his fellow white South Africans in an airport terminal, he writes: “In a brush cut’s yellow nap, the drawstring of a Woolworths track suit, a splay-heeled foot in a rubber slipslop, a way of lounging against one another like seals, we recognize our kind. Relieved and repulsed, we slip back into the brown water of South African speech.”

Justin Cartwright’s OXFORD REVISITED (Bloomsbury, $18) is a loving tribute to a different sort of cityscape. A South African-born novelist who graduated from Oxford University in the 1960s, Cartwright returns to the medieval campus nearly four decades later on a combination nostalgic tour and journalistic inquiry. Seeking to define the university’s greatness, Cartwright offers erudite meditations on everything from the solidity of its buildings (the color of their limestone is “a washed-out russet, like the skin of an obsolete apple”) to the fiercely individualistic lives of its students. These include the German Rhodes scholar Adam von Trott zu Solz, drawn home before World War II and executed for his part in the 1944 bomb plot against Hitler.

Cartwright visits the New Bodleian Library, where he inspects an original edition of Shakespeare’s First Folio and finds in the library’s “outward-looking, interested, open-minded” atmosphere a metaphor for Oxford itself. He offers sharply observed homages to the thinkers and writers — Isaiah Berlin, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Dodgson — who shaped Oxford’s discourse, and maps out the university’s peculiar mix of silly rituals and sublime intellectual life. In addition, the book retraces Cartwright’s own journey from callow teenager to confident young scholar-athlete. “That first October,” he writes of his early days on campus, “the shadows lengthening and then fading on the Front Quad, the bells pealing all over Oxford, figures cycling . . . through the thickening gloom, the soft halation of lights on walls, I had the overwhelming feeling that life had just begun.”

In TRAVELING WITH POMEGRANATES: A Mother-­Daughter Story (Viking, $25.95), Sue Monk Kidd (author of the novel “The Secret Life of Bees”) and her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, embark on a series of European journeys to heal a rift in their relationship. The story unfolds between 1998 and 2000, when Kidd, then in her early 50s, was experiencing both menopause and writer’s block and her daughter was coping with depression after a failed romance and a graduate school rejection. Mother and daughter take turns narrating this sometimes overwrought tale, which evokes the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone to explore themes of death and rebirth, and the complex relationship between mother and daughter.

Kidd’s passages have some lovely turns of phrase. Of a visit to a ruined Greek temple dedicated to the sorceress Hecate she writes: “A flight of steps leads up to a rectangular terrace where prickly cacti grow wild in the stone crevices like an incarnation of the crone Goddess herself — vexing, unbridled, subversive, tough and vibrantly green.” Kidd is brutally honest about her conflicted feelings toward Ann: “Perhaps all mothers of daughters possess a secret talking mirror that announces when their young womanhood begins to fade and their daughters’ begin to blossom.” The experience “can unleash a lacerating jealousy” or “usher in fears that I’ve sworn I’d never have. Of invisibility, anonymity, irrelevance. And deeper down, fears of decline and death.”

Eventually the pair reconcile and overcome their self-doubt — Sue through the burst of inspiration that led to her best-selling novel, Ann through a loving new boyfriend and a fledgling career as a writer. But too much of the book consists of pedestrian jaunts through all-too-familiar tourist locales — the Acropolis, the Louvre, even a bateau-mouche on the Seine. Kidd’s ruminations on aging grow tiresome, as does her daughter’s wallowing in misery. Eventually you wish they’d just lighten up.

In his introduction to the 2009 edition of THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, paper, $14), this year’s guest editor, Simon Winchester, laments the sorry state of American globe-trotting. Constrained by isolation and a historical lack of empire as well as a dismissive attitude toward foreign places, Americans, he argues, have never developed the wanderlust that characterizes their British cousins. (In United States high schools, Winchester points out, the word geography “is buried in a shallow grave . . . known as the social studies and humanities programs.”) Still, the contributions in this book prove that a restless, intrepid spirit isn’t unwelcome to American readers.

In “The Generals in Their Labyrinth,” which originally appeared in Outside magazine, the indefatigable Patrick Symmes travels to Myanmar on the eve of the 2008 cyclone that claimed more than 100,000 lives. As the weather worsens, Symmes makes his way to Naypyidaw, the Burmese junta’s newly built capital in the bush, “an open-air prison where functionaries twirl their fingers at make-work jobs and generals loot the budget.” Symmes — who wisely gives up on a plan to sneak into the house-prison of the Nobel Peace laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in Yangon — vividly captures the paranoia and callousness of one of the world’s most appalling dictatorships.

Roger Cohen, a former foreign correspondent who is now a columnist for The International Herald Tribune, meets dissidents, revolutionaries and ordinary Cubans in his clear-eyed Times Magazine article “The End of the End of the Revolution,” and finds a population trapped in the grip of a senseless economic system, desperately awaiting the end of the American embargo.

Also memorable are Caroline Alexander’s “Tigerland,” about her trip to the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve, at the mouth of the Ganges River, for a look at one of the world’s rarest creatures, and Eric Weiner’s brief essay “My Servant,” about his relationship through the years with his Indian houseboy. Perhaps the most disturbing contribution is Paul Salopek’s “Lost in the Sahel,” which recounts this Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist’s arrest and detention in Darfur. “He was built square as a butcher’s block, and at age 30 his hair was leached of color,” Salopek writes of Corporal Salah, the “chief whip man” at the prison in the town of El Fasher, where Salopek is detained on charges of being a spy. A brute who dreams of being a doctor, Corporal Salah “spoke to his victims tenderly, urging them not to be afraid, even as he scourged the hide on their backs.”

If that kind of scene quashes your urge to hit the road, you needn’t give up on new — even foreign — experiences. In fact, many of the most pleasant adventures can be found without traveling very far from home. The latest evidence appears in NEW YORK’S UNIQUE and UNEXPECTED ­PLACES (Universe, $24.95), by Judith Stonehill and Alexandra Stonehill, and NEW YORK: The Big City and Its Little Neighborhoods (Universe, paper, $25), by Naomi Fertitta. The Stonehills’ delightful book is a guide to lesser-known but worthwhile museums, markets, shops, gardens and even a wilderness refuge. Among the highlights: the Map Room at the New York Public Library (a geography buff’s dream, packed with nautical charts, frontier-expedition maps and Dutch-colonial drawings that expose Manhattan’s “hilly topography”) and the garden at the Church of St. Luke in the Fields, a hidden oasis of crab apple trees, roses and magnolias.

Fertitta’s book serves up mini-profiles of 20 ethnic enclaves across New York City, from Flatbush’s Little West Indies and Astoria’s Little Egypt to Little Senegal in Harlem. Her colorful juxtaposition of faces, foods and architecture is a bracing reminder of the city’s diversity. “In the course of exploring 20 neighborhoods, I was humbled,” Fertitta confesses, “by the fact that not only had I been unfamiliar with the ‘outer’ boroughs but, in fact, hardly knew these areas of Manhattan that were often only a short subway ride from my home. My great realization was that in my quest for sophistication, I had become just a provincial New Yorker who thought that the city began and ended at my front door.”

Joshua Hammer, a former bureau chief for Newsweek, is a freelance foreign correspondent. He is writing a book about German colonialism in southern Africa.

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