African Silences
10 best books like African Silences (Peter Matthiessen): Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds, Malaria Dreams: An African Adventure, No Mercy: A Journey to the Heart of the Congo, Bad Trips, Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia, Muddling through in Madagascar, Spain, Mornings in Mexico, Angry Wind: Through Muslim Black Africa by Truck, Bus, Boat, and Camel, Mind Over Matter (Delta Expedition)
| Author | Scott Weidensaul |
| ISBN | 0865475911 |
Bird migration is the world's only true unifying natural phenomenon, stitching the continents together in a way that even the great weather systems fail to do. Scott Weidensaul follows awesome kettles of hawks over the Mexican coastal plains, bar-tailed godwits that hitchhike on gale winds 7,000...
Malaria Dreams is a book about the author and his friend's trip from West Africa to the Mediterranean in a questionable car, and it's well written. So why the one star?
I like adventure travel and adventure travel books better than the next guy usually- depending on who the next guy actually is,...
| Author | Redmond O'Hanlon |
| ISBN | 0679737324 |
Redmond O'Hanlon has journeyed among headhunters in deepest Borneo with the poet James Fenton, and amid the most reticent, imperilled and violent tribe in the Amazon Basin with a night-club manager. This, however, is his boldest journey yet. Accompanied by Lary Shaffer - an American friend and animal...
| Author | Keath Fraser |
| ISBN | 0394221516 |
As with any anthology, this collection of travel stories includes a range of quality. Some of these stories are quite good, transporting the reader to a specific place and time, immersing us in the writer’s experiences. Others are a bit more pedestrian, providing some interesting glimpses at other...
In 1996, Tom Bissell went to Uzbekistan as a naive Peace Corps volunteer. Though he lasted only a few months before illness and personal crisis forced him home, Bissell found himself entranced by this remote land. Five years later he returned to explore the shrinking Aral Sea, destroyed by Soviet irrigation...
| Author | Dervla Murphy |
| ISBN | 0879513608 |
I enjoy Dervla Murphy’s travel books. They are not guides and not books that might inspire you to travel. Usually she travels by bicycle, but this was not possible in Madagascar. Instead, she travels by local minibus, and much of the book describes the incredibly cramped conditions and terrible...
| Author | Jan Morris |
| ISBN | 0140054634 |
This is a one-stop read on Spain. Probably no book this short can offer as much insight and you have Morris' writing style as well. Naturally, the country has an enormous history from its Iberian settlement through it phases of Phoenician and Greek development spurred on by Mediterranean trade. Then...
| Author | D.H. Lawrence |
| ISBN | 1845118685 |
Much of D.H. Lawrence's life was defined by his passion for travel and it was those wanderings that gave life to some of his greatest novels. In the 1920s Lawrence travelled several times to Mexico, where he was fascinated by the clash of beauty and brutality, purity and darkness that he observed. The...
Hailed by Bill Bryson and the New York Times Book Review as a rising star among travel writers, Jeffrey Tayler penetrates one of the most isolated, forbidding regions on earth--the Sahel. This lower expanse of the Sahara, which marks the southern limit of Islam’s reach in West and Central Africa,...
| Author | Ranulph Fiennes |
| ISBN | 0385313217 |
Mind Over Matter is the death-defying and bone-chilling account of Fiennes's most remarkable achievement. For 1,350 miles at a rate of 14 miles a day, Fiennes and his partner Dr. Michael Stroud trudged across Antarctica. But the expedition's world records for both the longest unsupported polar journey...
| Author | Elizabeth Royte |
| ISBN | 0618257586 |
This mischievous behind-the-scenes account of life at a biological research station on a Panamanian island "conveys the uncertainties, frustrations, and joys of [scientific] field work" (Science). Journalist Elizabeth Royte weaves together her own adventures on Barro Colorado with tales of...
| Author | Eric Newby |
| ISBN | 0864426216 |
As they travel around the sea at the center of Western history, Eric Newby and his wife Wanda visit not only the better-known Meditteranean sights and cities but also venture into places where Westerners are few: Albania under Hoxha, the holy Muslim city of Fez, and a country about to disappear in civil...
Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, Vol 1
| Author | John Lloyd Stephens |
| ISBN | 0486209261 |
It takes a lot for me to give a book five stars. I'd give this one six, if I could. First, however, let me state that this book isn't for everyone. I read it because, as a student of Maya history for 25 years, it's required. I should have read it sooner. It's the true story of two men who traveled through the Maya...
The Panama Hat Trail: A Journey from South America
| Author | Tom Miller |
| ISBN | 0792263863 |
Next week I leave for a trip to Ecuador, so naturally I wanted to read something to put me in the mindset of a country I've never visited.
This book, while perhaps a bit dated by 2017 (we'll see once I get there), does a great job of exploring every step in the long process of turning Ecuadoran straw...
| Author | William Langewiesche |
| ISBN | 0679750061 |
It is as vast as the United States and so arid that most bacteria cannot survive there. Its loneliness is so extreme it is said thatmigratory birds will land beside travelers, just for the company. William Langewiesche came to the Sahara to see it as its inhabitants do, riding its public transport, braving...
| Author | Colin Thubron |
| ISBN | 0140124063 |
It was an unique journey - a 600 mile trek on foot around Cyprus, in the last year of the island's peace. Colin Thubron writes about it and with great immediacy, intertwining myth, history and personal anecdote. What emerges is a tapestry from which characters and places, architectures and landscape...
| Author | Paul Bowles |
| ISBN | 0061137375 |
Their Heads are Green and their Hands are Blue is an engaging collection of eight travel essays. Except for one essay on Central America, all of these pieces are concerned with locations in the Hindu, Buddhist, or Islamic worlds. A superb and observant traveler, Paul Bowles was a born wanderer who found...
| Author | Lieve Joris |
| ISBN | 0864423683 |
It usually happens to me that I reread a book and am disappointed, because I remember it being more interesting that it turns out. Well, this was an opposite case. I've read it perhaps 10 years ago, and I remember I was not impressed; but this time I couldn't put it down. As I spent three weeks in Syria approximately...
| Author | Ffyona Campbell |
| ISBN | 1857978137 |
When Ffyona Campbell vowed to walk around the world, she was only sixteen. By far the hardest stage of this incredible journey was Africa which she completed in September 1993. This personal account of her achievement tells of her relationship with the women of the villages she passed through, how she...
ARABIA is the story of Jonathan Raban's magic carpet ride through Bahrain, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Yemen, Egypt and Jordan. Not only does it reveal the Arabs and their culture, it also introduces us to a series of memorable individuals.
Much of the book's strength is the author's gift for friendships....
| Author | Lawrence Millman |
| ISBN | 0618082484 |
A classic of northern exploration and adventure, LAST PLACES is Lawrence Millman's marvelously told account of his journey along the ancient Viking sea routes that extend from Norway to Newfoundland. Traveling through landscapes of transcendent desolation, Millman wandered by way of the Shetland...
| Author | Paul Theroux |
| ISBN | 0395415012 |
This book is 50 short essays and articles, written between 1964-84, which include travel pieces, interviews, studies of favourite authors, autobiographical pieces, etc. I have included the table of contents for your reference.
This is my least favourite nonfiction Theroux (so far). Don't...
| Author | Adam Nicolson |
| ISBN | 0865476365 |
In 1937, Adam Nicolson’s father answered a newspaper ad—“Uninhabited islands for sale. Outer Hebrides, 600 acres . . . Puffins and seals. Apply . . . ”.
In this radiant and powerful book, Adam describes, and relives, his love affair with this enchantingly beautiful property, which...
| Author | Doris Lessing |
| ISBN | 0006546900 |
In this portrait of Doris Lessing's homeland, the author recounts the visits she made to Zimbabwe in 1982, 1988, 1989 and 1992, after being banned from the old Southern Rhodesia for 25 years for her political views and opposition to the minority white Government. The visits constitute a journey to the...
