You Can't Get There from Here: A Year on the Fringes of a Shrinking World
10 best books like You Can't Get There from Here: A Year on the Fringes of a Shrinking World (Gayle Forman): Band-Aid for a Broken Leg, I Have Seen the World Begin: Travels through China, Cambodia, and Vietnam, Clear Waters Rising: A Mountain Walk Across Europe, A Writer's House in Wales, Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century, The Size of the World, The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters with Strangers, Power Concedes Nothing: One Woman's Quest for Social Justice in America, from the Courtroom to the Kill Zones, Crazy River: Exploration and Folly in East Africa, The Best American Travel Writing 2001
Band-Aid for a Broken Leg
| Author | Damien Brown |
| ISBN | 1743310218 |
A powerful, surprisingly funny, and ultimately uplifting account of life on the medical front line, and a moving testimony of the work done by Medecins Sans Frontieres
Damien Brown, a young doctor, thinks he's ready when he arrives for his first posting with Medecins Sans Frontieres in Africa....
I Have Seen the World Begin: Travels through China, Cambodia, and Vietnam
| Author | Carsten Jensen |
| ISBN | 0151007683 |
When Carsten Jensen set out by train from Denmark on a journey to the East, he expected to find lands of rich history and culture, and people undergoing radical change at the end of the twentieth century. In this illuminating narrative of his travels, there is this and much, much more.
Fusing...
Clear Waters Rising: A Mountain Walk Across Europe
| Author | Nicholas Crane |
| ISBN | 0140243321 |
Rather like Crane himself, I found this journey took far longer than expected, but what a superb odyssey! Here is a really excellent writer, who captures the mood and environment as he strides across no fewer than four mountain ranges that link the Atlantic Ocean to the Black Sea. Sleeping rough and spending...
A Writer's House in Wales
| Author | Jan Morris |
| ISBN | 0792265238 |
Through an exploration of her country home in Wales, acclaimed travel writer Jan Morris discovers the heart of her fascinating country and what it means to be Welsh. Trefan Morys, Morris's home between the sea and mountains of the remote northwest corner of Wales, is the 18th-century stable block of...
| Author | Daniel Hernandez |
| ISBN | 1416577033 |
MEXICO CITY, with some 20 million inhabitants, is the largest city in the Western Hemisphere. Enormous growth, raging crime, and tumultuous politics have also made it one of the most feared and misunderstood. Yet in the past decade, the city has become a hot spot for international business, fashion,...
By the time that travel writer Jeff Greenwald hit his late thirties, he had covered more ground than Magellan, Marco Polo, and Columbus combined. But he also came to a sobering conclusion: airplanes had reduced his exotic explorations to a series of long commutes. So he set out to rediscover the mass,...
| Author | Eric Hansen |
| ISBN | 0679771824 |
Eric Hansen survives a cyclone on a boat off the Australian coast, cradles a dying man in Calcutta, and drinks mind-altering kava in Vanuatu. He helps a widower search for his wife's wedding ring amid plane-crash wreckage in Borneo and accompanies topless dancers on a bird-watching expedition in California....
| Author | Connie Rice |
| ISBN | 1416575006 |
From one of the nation’s most influential civil rights attorneys—second cousin of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice—a noble, hard-hitting memoir chronicling the life of a fiercely powerful woman dedicated to public service.
Connie Rice has taken on the bus system, the...
| Author | Richard Grant |
| ISBN | 1439154147 |
NO ONE TRAVELS QUITE LIKE RICHARD GRANT and, really, no one should. In his last book, the adventure classic God's Middle Finger, he narrowly escaped death in Mexico's lawless Sierra Madre. Now, Grant has plunged with his trademark recklessness, wit, and curiosity into East Africa. Setting out to make...
| Author | Paul Theroux |
| ISBN | 0618118780 |
Already a best-selling addition to the series, this year’s Best American Travel Writing is a far-flung collection chosen by travel writer extraordinaire Paul Theroux, who has selected pieces about “the spell in the wilderness, the letter home from foreign parts, the dangerous adventure, the...
| Author | John Kenneth Galbraith |
| ISBN | 0395859980 |
Galbraith attempts to lay out what a good, humane society might look like, what values it might espouse, how it would treat people within and outside of its borders. He lists general principles and it is cheering that so many of them seem to have found their way into the Obama Administration’s plans....
Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths about Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer)
| Author | Stan Cox |
| ISBN | 1595584897 |
Losing our Cool shows how indoor climate control is colliding with an out-of-control outdoor climate. In America, energy consumed by home air-conditioning, and the resulting greenhouse emissions, have doubled in just over a decade, and energy to cool retail stores has risen by two-thirds. Now the...
| Author | David Ngaruri Kenney |
| ISBN | 0520255100 |
Asylum Denied is the gripping story of political refugee David Ngaruri Kenney's harrowing odyssey through the world of immigration processing in the United States. Kenney, while living in his native Kenya, led a boycott to protest his government's treatment of his fellow farmers. He was subsequently...
Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present
| Author | Anthony Pagden |
| ISBN | 0812967615 |
Written by one of the world’s foremost historians of human migration, Peoples and Empires is the story of the great European empires—the Roman, the Spanish, the French, the British—and their colonies, and the back-and-forth between “us” and “them,” culture and nature, civilization...
Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World
| Author | Seth Stevenson |
| ISBN | 1594484422 |
An eye-opening and fascinating slow travel journey from an acclaimed writer who circled the globe without ever leaving the ground.
In this age of globalism and high-speed travel, Seth Stevenson, the witty, thoughtful Slate columnist, takes us back to a time when travel meant putting one...
The Third Wave: A Volunteer Story
| Author | Alison Thompson |
| ISBN | 0385529163 |
Alison Thompson, a filmmaker living in New York City, was enjoying Christmas with her boyfriend in 2004 when she saw the news reports online: a 9.3 magnitude earthquake had struck the sea near Indonesia, triggering a massive tsunami that hit much of southern Asia. As she watched the death toll climb,...
Nomad's Hotel: Travels in Time and Space
| Author | Cees Nooteboom |
| ISBN | 1843430428 |
”Anyone who is travelling is always somewhere else, and therefore always absent. This holds good for oneself, and it holds good for the others, the friends; for although it is true that you are ‘somewhere else,’ and that, consequently, there is somewhere you are not, there is one place where you...
Sleeping Around: A Couch Surfing Tour Of The Globe
| Author | Brian Thacker |
| ISBN | 1741752108 |
Ein sehr amüsantes Buch, und für mich, als Reiseliteraturfan aller Art, sehr kurzweilig zu lesen. Von einigen nicht so wohlwollenden Rezensionen, die bemängelten, dass es in diesen Geschichten hauptsächlich ums Saufen geht, muss ich zwar zustimmen. Aber Brian Thacker schafft es, mit seiner...
Naked in Dangerous Places: The Chronicles of a Hungry, Scared, Lost, Homesick, but Otherwise Perfectly Happy Traveler
| Author | Cash Peters |
| ISBN | 0307396355 |
Finally, after years as a struggling radio host, Cash Peters has been given his own TV adventure show on a big-time travel network. The idea is simple: “Let’s dump him in an unfamiliar culture in a faraway land with no money and no place to stay, and see what happens.”
Unfortunately, there...
| Author | Pico Iyer |
| ISBN | 0517483181 |
In Tropical Classical the author of Video Nights in Katmandu and The Lady and the Monk visits a holy city in Ethiopia, where hooded worshippers practice a Christianity that has remained unchanged since the Middle Ages. He follows the bewilderingly complex route of Bombay's dabbawallahs, who each...
In the Land of No Right Angles
| Author | Daphne Beal |
| ISBN | 0307388069 |
Alex , a twenty-year-old American student, is spending the year in Nepal, backpacking and photographing. As a favor to Will – her American friend – she uses one of her Himalayan treks to seek out Maya, a young Nepali woman desperate to flee her traditional family to find work in Kathmandu. But helping...
30 Something and Over It: What Happens When You Wake Up And Don't Want to Go To Work Ever Again
| Author | Kasey Edwards |
| ISBN | 1845964462 |
Kasey Edwards has everything she's always wanted: a successful career and the lifestyle and assets to match. But she's empty and uninspired and doesn't want to go to work . . . Ever again.
Terrified that she'll spend the rest of her life wearing pinstripes and pretending to care about 'adding...
Me, Myself & Prague: An Unreliable Guide to Bohemia
| Author | Rachael Weiss |
| ISBN | 1741148200 |
Armed with a romantic soul and a pressing need to escape her overbearing family, Rachael Weiss heads for Prague with vague plans to write a great novel and perhaps, just perhaps, fall madly in love with an exotic Czech man with high cheekbones. They make it seem so easy, those other women who write...
Committed: A Rabble-Rouser's Memoir
| Author | Dan Mathews |
| ISBN | 0743291875 |
"Committed" is a bold, offbeat, globe-trotting memoir that shows how the most ridiculed punching bag in high school became an internationally renowned crusader for the most downtrodden individuals of all -- animals. This irresistibly entertaining book recounts the random incidents and soul-searching...
Going Sane: Maps of Happiness
| Author | Adam Phillips |
| ISBN | 0007155395 |
Writings on madness fill entire libraries, but until now nobody has thought to engage exclusively with the idea of sanity; we define it simply as that bland and nebulous state of not being mentally ill. But what is sanity? How broad, how eccentric is its range of behavior? And how do we go about crafting...
