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Summer Reading

Travel

The best of this season’s travel books are marked by a generational split. Three footloose writers in their 30s and 40s probe the back alleys of Ho Chi Minh City, the bike-choked streets of Amsterdam and the ­Taliban-haunted steppes of northern Afghanistan — sometimes paying a price for their curiosity. At the other end of the spectrum stand three recently minted septuagenarians with more than a century’s worth of globe-­trotting among them. Yet their own stumbles and setbacks prove that older doesn’t always mean wiser.

In THE LAST TRAIN TO ZONA VERDE: My Ultimate African Safari (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27), Paul Theroux sets out on a valedictory journey through the continent that has enthralled and repelled him since he worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi in the 1960s. A sequel to “Dark Star Safari,” his 2003 account of a troubled overland trip from Cairo to Cape Town, Theroux’s latest misadventure takes him up Africa’s southwest coast. The journey begins in the squatter camps of the Cape Flats, where an ever increasing tide of newcomers thwarts efforts to improve the people’s lot: “No sooner had a solution been found than a new solution was needed.”

In sparsely populated Namibia, Theroux finds poverty and desperation lurking behind the pretty, German-­flavored resort of Swakopmund, and joins a tattered remnant of the Ju/’hoansi, an ancient tribe of hunter-gatherers who have “gone from a fleet-footed bush-­dwelling people who chased down game to sedentary town-dwellers plagued by drunkenness and hunger.”

Theroux saves the worst for last, a drive through Angola by bus and bush taxi. Here he encounters xenophobic border officials, furtive Chinese businessmen and construction workers — and some of the beaten-down survivors of both three decades of civil war and the destructive legacy of the region’s Portuguese colonizers. “The crooked aristocrats and desperate peasants who planted themselves far from home, and finally fled,” he observes, “left nothing behind but derelict slave quarters, empty vinho verde bottles and gloomy churches.”

Theroux’s peevish mood lifts occasionally — on an ­elephant-back safari in the Okavango Delta and during a serendipitous meeting with three “birdlike and beautiful” teenage girls who have just finished an efundula, or initiation ceremony, in rural Angola. Yet much of this trip is a dispiriting slog through squalid bus stations and urban slums, enlivened by Theroux’s vivid evocations of misery as well as by his moral outrage. “The murderous, self-elected, megalomaniacal head of state with the morals of a fruit fly . . . is an obscene feature of African life that is not likely to disappear,” he writes at the end of this grim journey, which Theroux, now 72, makes clear will be his last through Africa. Advancing age seems only to have intensified his cantankerousness: “Often, in an overcrowded bus in Africa, I thought of nothing but death,” he admits, “and hating the trip I let out a ghastly laugh when I thought of anyone saying over my battered corpse, ‘He died doing what he loved.’ ”

Another septuagenarian, the novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Philip Caputo, ventures into more hospitable climes in THE LONGEST ROAD: Overland in Search of America, From Key West to the Arctic Ocean (Holt, $28; available in mid-July). Restless and reflective in the twilight of a distinguished career, Caputo rents a vintage Airstream trailer, hooks it to a truck and, with his wife and their two English setters, takes off. “The United States is too big, too complicated a mosaic of races and nationalities and walks of life to have a single pulse or even two or three,” he writes at the outset of his trip, taken in 2011 amid political divisiveness and recession. “But I thought I’d ask people, when possible, the question I’d put to myself: What holds us together?”

To find the answers, Caputo follows America’s back roads, retracing part of the route Lewis and Clark forged on their 1804-6 expedition. He joins the Natchez Trace, “spooling past beds of bloodroot and clover bordering deep forests” and crosses the Great Plains on the ­century-old Lincoln Highway before heading up the ­Pacific Coast to Alaska. Along the way he meets refugees from the burst housing bubble living off the grid in Tennessee, post-tornado do-gooders in Tuscaloosa and a Lakota Sioux chef-turned-TV-star in the Dakota Badlands. He also grapples with the challenges of trailer life.

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Credit...Golden Cosmos

Some of Caputo’s stopovers seem overly familiar, but he keeps the narrative moving with his observant eye and mordant sense of humor. In the dismal oil-company town of Deadhorse, north of the Arctic Circle, he notes one hotel’s efforts to make a virtue of its ugliness: “ ‘Overnight in camp-style rooms consistent with the industrial heritage of the region,’ reads its ad in The Milepost. Translation: Your room looks like a Dumpster with a window.”

Caputo and his wife reach the end of their journey on a “rocky brownish shoreline, where chunks of bleached driftwood were scattered like bones.” By the time they get home, he has heard plenty of theories about the glue that binds Americans together, including the “dynamic disequilibrium” of its federal government and a single word suggested by the Airstream’s owner back in Texas — “hope.”

In HERE, THERE, ELSEWHERE: Stories From the Road (Little, Brown, $29.99), 73-year-old William Least Heat-Moon serves up an anthology of short essays culled from three decades of globe-trotting. The book includes several of the Missouri-born Heat-Moon’s overseas rambles: a trip to Nagano, where he fraternizes with Japanese World War II veterans, as well as an exploration of Mayan temples in the Yucatán jungle. But as he demonstrated in “Blue Highways” and “PrairyErth,” his finest writing is inspired by journeys close to home.

In “A Little Tour in Yoknapatawpha County,” Heat-Moon recounts a 1961 trip he took to rural Mississippi in hopes of meeting William Faulkner. Instead he finds the great writer’s stepson, Malcolm Franklin, who takes him on a tour of Faulkner’s haunts and introduces him to some of the old man’s relatives and friends. “Here was a man who had told stories while the fire sparked and dogs howled and the hunters raised tin cups of shine,” he writes of an encounter with Faulkner’s Uncle Buddy. “Out of him . . . had come tales that got turned into some of the grandest work in American literature.”

In “Crossing Kansas,” Heat-Moon recalls a 1947 boyhood trip across the state he calls America’s “billiard table,” whose placid agricultural landscapes belie its violent history. At night, “an outstater could envision — from behind the tinted Saf-T-Glas — dried up water holes, Comanches, bison skulls, the yellow gleam of prairie-wolf eyes, and death — or its promise — everywhere.”

Matt Gross’s new book, THE TURK WHO LOVED APPLES: And Other Tales of Losing My Way Around the World (Da Capo, paper, $15.99), begins with a flight to an unknown destination. “After dozens of trips abroad,” writes the former Frugal Traveler columnist for The New York Times, “to 60 countries on five continents, having produced hundreds of newspaper and magazine stories, I was once again setting off on an adventure, utterly ill informed.” Gross’s unusual assignment for the travel magazine Afar — a trip to a place whose identity he’ll discover only when he reaches the airport — sets the stage for a joyful meditation on the spontaneity and unpredictability of the traveling life.

Circling back to the 1990s, Gross recounts his near-­disastrous, post-college stint teaching English in Vietnam. Arriving in Ho Chi Minh City with barely any preparation, Gross struggles to find friendship in the alien metropolis. An invitation to lunch introduces him to a dubious delicacy known as “half-hatched egg.” “The duck was distinctly duckish — nearly fully formed, with a bulbous head and thin black feathers now floating free of its shiny, pale skin. As much as I loved eggs, and as much as I loved duck, this was not going to be easy.”

Gross ruminates on the loneliness of the road, the evanescent friendships that occasionally blossom into something deeper, the pleasures of wandering through cities without a map. Now settled in Brooklyn with his wife and daughters, he leaves little doubt that all his years of near-constant travel have only whetted his appetite for more. “The world,” he writes, has become “a massively expanding network of tiny points where anything at all could happen, and within each point another infinite web of possibilities.”

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THE CONQUEST OF EVEREST
Original Photographs From the Legendary First Ascent
By George Lowe and Huw Lewis-Jones
240 pp. Thames & Hudson. $39.95.
For the 60th anniversary, vertiginous photos by Lowe and recollections by Edmund Hillary, Tenzing Norgay and others. Above: Hillary, left, and Norgay at 27,300 feet, the day before reaching the summit.
Credit...The George Lowe Collection

In THE WORLD IS A CARPET: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village (Riverhead, $26.95), Anna Badkhen journeys to the hardscrabble Khorasan region of northern Afghanistan, famed for its Turkoman weavers, in order to follow the lives of a single family over the course of a year in a village called Oqa, “a dusty phantasm rising out of limitless sere plains and sand dunes beneath unending sky.” The cast of characters includes Baba Nazar, a grizzled and near-destitute hunter; his put-upon wife; their dreamer son; and their daughter-in-law, Thawra, a skilled weaver who is the family’s only breadwinner. Through weddings, funerals, Ramadan fasts and journeys to the nearby market town, Badkhen chronicles the young woman’s efforts to complete a magnificent carpet that will ensure the family’s security for another year.

Badkhen, a Farsi speaker and the author of two other books about Afghanistan, seems to be aiming to create a rural version of “The Bookseller of Kabul,” Asne Seierstad’s account of ordinary life after the fall of the Taliban. But Badkhen’s prose often bogs down beneath a pile of adjectives. She describes the “yogurt bow of the moon,” “diaphanous spheres of calligonum,” “the spongy, star-bejeweled March night” and “a flawless distillation of our ancestral restlessness” — and that’s just on the first page. Still, she does manage to capture the fatalistic ambience of a place where opium addiction is rampant, mobile phones are an impossible luxury and the Taliban lurk in the shadows. Here, she writes, men “squatted against hand-slapped mud walls . . . and pondered life and death in a country where war was not a marquee but a hideous and continuous sideshow that picked its victims at ­random.”

In 2002, Pete Jordan, a self-described “bike nut who had lived and cycled in cities all over America,” settled in the European metropolis that has become synonymous with cycling: Amsterdam. In his memoir, IN THE CITY OF BIKES: The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist (Harper Perennial, paper, $15.99), Jordan applies an anthropological eye to the city’s two-wheeler culture. Pedaling through the bike-clogged streets on a “lumbering and sluggish” ­single-speeder he nicknames Brownie, Jordan notes everything from the Dutch capacity to carry huge loads while cycling to the practice known as “dinking” — couples doubling up on a single bike. He amusingly documents the transition of his wife from a dilettante who can barely patch a tire to the owner of her own bicycle shop. And he rails against the impunity enjoyed by the city’s zwijntjesjagers — an army of professional bike thieves like Piet, who told a newspaper reporter that “in the previous eight years, to support his heroin habit, he had nabbed three bikes a day — for a total of nearly 9,000 bikes.”

Jordan weaves his own adventures into a précis of Dutch cycling history. Biking took off in the 1890s, he writes, when bike schools and velodromes opened across the city and Princess Wilhelmina, the future queen, developed a passion for this mode of transport. The flat terrain, the high cost of fuel and concern for the environment all created a friendly atmosphere for bikes. During World War II, Amsterdam’s Nazi occupiers, furious that cyclists refused to cede the road to military vehicles, all but declared war on them. Raids were carried out on the garages where a majority of Amsterdammers locked their bikes, only to be foiled when the owners were tipped off ahead of time. Jordan also recounts the story of the 1960s White Bicycle movement, a doomed collectivist-­anarchist campaign to provide free bicycles to Amsterdam’s citizenry. Eventually, though, Jordan’s determination to recount every twist-and-turn in Amsterdam’s cycle saga grows tiresome. And though his passion for the city’s bike culture shines through, his writing remains pedestrian.

A BOOK OF VOYAGES (Norton, $25.95), edited by the British novelist Patrick O’Brian, who died in 2000, rediscovers the extraordinary accounts of seafarers and other adventurers from the 17th and 18th centuries. O’Brian, the creator of the popular series of historical novels featuring the naval captain Jack Aubrey and his friend the physician Stephen Maturin, has a particular relish for what he calls, with understatement, “Unpleasant Journeys.” In one of these, Captain Boyce, a survivor of the 1727 fire and explosion that sank the Luxborough, a trading vessel owned by the South Seas Corporation, tells of being cast adrift in a 16-foot lifeboat with 22 other men and boys: “We had not a morsel of victuals, nor a drop of water; no mast, no sail, no compass to direct our course, and above 100 leagues from any land.” As men die, one by one, from thirst and exposure, their throats are cut by the living, who drink their blood and then cannibalize their corpses. “Finding the flesh very disagreeable,” Boyce recalled, “we confined ourselves to the hearts only.” He staggered ashore in Newfoundland with half a dozen others after six weeks at sea.

O’Brian lightens this ghastly flotilla of shipwrecks and survival stories with more upbeat narratives, like an account of the extravagant birthday bash of the great Mughal Jahangir in 1616. “The time was spent in bringing his greatest elephants before him,” reported Thomas Roe, the British ambassador to the Indian king’s court, “some of which being lord elephants, had their chains, bells and furniture of gold and silver, and many gilt banners and flags carried about them, and eight or 10 elephants waiting on each of them, clothed in gold, silk and silver.”

In 1961, the Soviet Jewish journalist and novelist Vasily Grossman traveled to Yerevan from his home in Moscow to translate the work of a celebrated local writer. Out of this two-month assignment came AN ARMENIAN SKETCHBOOK (New York Review Books, paper, $14.95), first published in a heavily edited Russian version in 1965, a few months after Grossman’s death. Working from a more complete 1988 text assembled by Grossman’s daughter, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler have prepared the book’s first English translation.

Journeying across this ancient nation, Grossman encounters an obdurate people who suffered greatly at the hands of the Turks and then the Soviets. “What expresses the soul of Armenia is stone,” he writes, taking in the rocky steppes that extend from Lake Sevan to the Ararat valley. “It is as if countless stonecutters have been at work. . . . They must have used wedges and hammers to dismantle huge mountains. They must have smashed them into splinters — splinters they could use to build huts, temples or the walls of fortresses.”

Seeing beneath their hard surfaces, Grossman is bewitched by the Armenians’ hospitality, openness and sensuality. He shares kebabs and cognac with new friends and marvels at the glories of the Yerevan market, “with the velvet of its peaches, the Baltic amber of its grapes, its juicy red-orange persimmons.” Grossman’s journey culminates with an invitation to a wedding in a timeless village where “the biblical myth of Mount Ararat seemed entirely contemporary.” In a simple barracks, the newlyweds’ friends and family gather, at one point expressing their solidarity with the Jewish victims of the Nazis. “I bow down in honor of their words about those who perished in clay ditches, earthen pits and gas chambers,” he writes in this moving memoir. “To the end of my life I will remember the speeches I heard in this village club.”

Joshua Hammer, a freelance foreign correspondent based in Berlin, is the author of three nonfiction books.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 24 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Travel. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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