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In the introduction to THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING 2000, editor Bill Bryson states that "you don't necessarily have to go far to achieve something memorable. You just have to be able to see things in a different way." This difference of perspective is what sets these writers apart from the pedestrian travel narrators. This "best of the best" compilation is most assuredly that, a one-stop, high quality cornucopia of great writing detailing mysterious places and dangerous journeys that have you anxious to embark immediately and, occasionally, feeling lucky you're making the journey from the relative safety of your armchair via that magic jet called the travel essay.
The continent of Africa is the setting for several pieces in this volume. With cynical flair, Tim Cahill describes his hectic --- not to mention extremely overcrowded --- journey down the Congo River via "This Teeming Ark," and Mark Hertsgaard speaks of the beauty and danger of "The Nile at Mile One." In the most harrowing of the pieces, Mark Ross details an expedition gone horribly wrong in "The Last Safari."
Tom Clynes meets "The Toughest Trucker in the World" in Australia, and Dave Eg gers finds that transportation is only a thumb away in "Hitchhiker's Cuba," while Rolf Potts witnesses the lengths to which Hollywood will travel in "Storming The Beach." Jeffrey Tayler finds an impoverished and forgotten people in Russia who are "Exiled Beyond Kilometer 101," while half a world away William T. Vollman is privileged to watch a new Canadian territory come into being in "The Very Short History of Nunavut." Closer to home, Bill Buford's nerve-wracking night camped out in Central Park is chronicled in "Lions and Tigers and Bears," and David Halberstam mourns lost innocence in "Nantucket On My Mind."
>From the humor of Clive Irving's "The First Drink of the Day" and P. J. O'Rourke's "Weird Karma" to the intensity of "From The Wonderful People Who Brought You The Killing Fields" by Patrick Symmes, the 25 essays in THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING 2000 have something for every taste. Each selection embodies what series editor Jason Wilson believes makes this unique genre shine:
"Travel writing is always about a specific moment in time. The writer imbues that moment with everything that he or she has experienced, observed, read, lived, bringing all of his or her talent to bear on it. When focused on that one moment, great travel writing can teach us something about the world no other genre can. Perhaps travel writing's foremost lesson is this: we may never walk this way again, and even if we do, we will never be the same people as we are right now. Most important, the world we move through will never be the same place again."
--- Reviewed by Vern Wiessner
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