Capturing Culture
Outstanding Writing Brings Home the Otherness of Exotic Lands
These eight books chart a course through a confusion of cultures, from Korea to Denmark, the Canadian Rockies to Prague. For places in between, there is an anthology of travel writing by the finest of contemporary writers, offering glimpses of places around the globe.
Curiosities are observed in all the books, for sure, but generally the observations are free of the sort of judgments that journalistic reports of foreign chaos and conflict, by their very tone and temperament, sully any yearning by a reader to actually visit the foreign places themselves.
Indeed, the purpose of this selection is to entertain and delight, and perhaps persuade the reluctant to witness for themselves. Happy traveling, as they say; and if you’re lucky, you’ll get to pet a tarantula.
A Geek in Korea
Discovering Asia’s New Kingdom of Cool
Daniel Tudor
Tuttle Publishing
Softcover $18.95 (160pp)
978-0-8048-4384-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Korea is different and takes some getting used to, Daniel Tudor declares. Unless, for instance, your culinary tastes run toward silkworm larvae, a common fare offered by street vendors. Tudor doesn’t confess his personal opinion about the wormy appetizer, but his enthusiasm for Korea, specifically South Korea, is apparent. (North Korea gets only four pages, and those deal mainly with how difficult it is to be admitted to the communist country and the requisite hiring of a “handler.”)
The first impression, judging by a vivid array of pictures in the book, is that Korea is a partying place, with K-Pop music, video-gaming emporiums, and sumptuous restaurants. But it is, of course, much more than that. It is one of the most competitive societies in the world: Eighty percent of its youth graduate from college. There are 500,000 graduates a year for whom only 100,000 jobs await.
Korea is a high-tech powerhouse (think Samsung) with the fastest broadband service in the world. Religion is important, with an ancient grounding in Buddhism and Confucianism. There is a burgeoning Christian movement. Yoido Full Gospel Church operates like a franchise and has more than a million members in affiliate churches all over the country.
The Korean War gets only passing reference. The modern-day Korea is very much a democracy and as messy in its politics as the Western countries with which it competes.
THOMAS BEVIER (November 27, 2014)
Prague
A Cultural Guide
Andrew Beattie
Interlink Publishing
Softcover $17.00 (256pp)
978-1-56656-956-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Prague, the focus city of revolutions and ethnic slaughters since the 9th century, has somehow maintained its architectural heritage and its literary and artistic fervor, according to Andrew Beattie, the author of this devilishly detailed (think Kafka) guide book.
He warns that a first-time visitor risks being overwhelmed by a confusion of buildings reminiscent of the medieval and Baroque and advises a pause for the iconic view across the River Vltava with the arches of the Charles Bridge in the foreground and the spires of the 14th century Saint Vitus Cathedral and castle buildings beyond.
Prague, with a population of 1.25 million, is now the capital of the Czech Republic, but it got that way only after imperialist subjugations, most recently by Nazi Germany—which decimated the city’s significant Jewish community—and the former Soviet Union.
Despite its grim history, Prague offers a plethora of art galleries, concert halls, nightclubs, and expanses of public parks, fit places for touristy relaxing. And there is great Bohemian beer, which helps explain why the Czech Republic boasts the highest per capita consumption of the beverage of any country in the world.
THOMAS BEVIER (November 27, 2014)
An Innocent Abroad
Life-Changing Trips from 35 Great Writers
Don George, editor
Lonely Planet Publications
Softcover $15.99 (320pp)
978-1-74360-360-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
There is an assumption that accomplished writers possess a more finely honed sense of observation than the rest of us. Or, at the very least, a heightened proclivity for the quirky. This anthology, which features the likes of Tim Cahill, Dave Eggers, Pico Iyer, and Ann Patchett, does little to dispel that notion.
For Patchett, it was the allure of tattoos after observing a Parisian waitress with a decorative scroll of flowers on her arm. Patchett’s traveling companion thought she’d opt for a fish on her shoulder blade, and for reasons unclear, Patchett considered a tiny cow on her bicep. But then, in Northern Ireland, they saw young men with tattoos celebrating guns and violence, which suggested that youthful passions do not connote wisdom and explains why a cow does not graze on Patchett’s arm.
A young Richard Ford had an enlightening moment when hashish merchants in a truck cut off his car, blocking his way on a mountain road in Morocco. As Ford prepared to defend himself and his young wife with only an empty Coke bottle for a weapon, the men emerged smiling to sell their product. Ford declined but since then has kept a vow to never travel to someplace he doesn’t have good business to be.
Tony Wheeler is reminded of the “curiously erotic flavor” of cabbage soup when he recalls a trip to Yugoslavia. Mary Karr learned to be wary of the 250 varieties of snakes in Guatemala and to alleviate her fear of spiders by discovering that to stroke a tarantula’s belly is to find that it feels not unlike a bunny’s.
THOMAS BEVIER (November 27, 2014)
Wild Life
Travel Adventures of a Worldly Woman
Lisa Alpine
Dancing Words Press
Softcover $14.95 (206pp)
978-0-9842293-6-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
When you’re hitchhiking about in foreign lands, whether in France, Morocco, or perhaps New Zealand, it helps—as California-girl Lisa Alpine discovered—to be “young, blond, persistent, and female.” And to get along, once you’ve reached an approximate destination in hardscrabble exotica, you should be friendly, fearless, and sometimes counter intuitively trusting.
There is daring, humor, and even a bit of Eros in the fourteen stories that span her life from the innocence of eighteen, when she was struck with wanderlust, into middle age. “I am a woman who wanders and wonders and writes,” she explains.
And what wandering there’s been, beginning in Paris, where she tasted art by licking a Monet. In Vienna, she asked an old woman, who turned out to be a survivor of Auschwitz, where she might find cheap lodging and ended up as the woman’s house guest.
She met the chauffeur of Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones in Switzerland and was offered a job babysitting Richards’s two children, but after witnessing a temper tantrum by Richards’s live-in girlfriend, declined and took a job as a bartender, offering free drinks in order to get her slave-driving boss, who held her passport as ransom, to fire her.
She had the sort of inevitable adventure that tests us all, coping with her mother’s dementia before her death on Mother’s Day, 2011. In a bittersweet way, it was probably her most admirable adventure of all.
THOMAS BEVIER (November 27, 2014)
First Wilderness
My Quest in the Territory of Alaska
Sam Keith
Alaska Northwest Books
Softcover $17.99 (268pp)
978-1-941821-09-1
Buy: Amazon
Sam Keith is remembered for chronicling the life in the Alaska wilderness of his friend Dick Proenneke, arguably the world’s most famous recluse. He did it in One Man’s Wilderness, which has sold 400,000 copies since its publication in 1973. The book, along with movie footage Keith shot, was the basis for one of PBS’s most popular documentaries.
This book is a prequel, honed by his son-in-law, Brian Lies, an author and illustrator of children’s books, from an unpublished manuscript and letters Keith wrote to his family about his own Alaska adventures. While his adventures were less eccentric than Proenneke’s, they were still considerable: an eight-day hunt for Kodiak bear, working eighty-hour weeks on a paving crew to beat the first frost, daring potential poachers as a backcountry stream guard for the Alaska Fish and Wildlife Service.
He went to Alaska after graduation with a degree in English from Cornell in 1952 because “I hear the call of northern places.” After answering the call, he returned to Massachusetts and a career as a middle-school teacher. He returned to Alaska in 1970 and renewed his friendship with Proenneke.
After One Man’s Wilderness came out, the two had a slight falling out because the last thing Proenneke wanted was fame. They mended fences before both men died in 2003, before the PBS documentary was aired. Neither saw it.
THOMAS BEVIER (November 27, 2014)
Climber’s Paradise
Making Canada’s Mountain Parks, 1906-1974
PearlAnn Reichwein
The University of Alberta Press
Softcover $45.00 (432pp)
978-0-88864-674-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
The question of the moment in 1907 among the male majority of the Alpine Club of Canada (ACC) involved the proper attire for women for climbing. They ruled, after little debate, that “no lady climbing, who wears skirts, will be allowed to take a place on a rope. … Knickerbockers or bloomers with puttees or gaiters and sweater will be found to be serviceable and safe.” In camp, however, skirts were the order of the day.
This incident serves as a reminder of how shifting mores change, even while the ACC, which has a present-day membership of ten thousand, played a central role in the political, environmental, and economic concerns during the development of the nation’s mountain parks. A significant change has been from an emphasis on serving the pretentions of the elite, with exclusive lodges and the like, to the interests of the so-called common man, who is on a short budget and yearns for family camping.
Reichwein, a professor at the University of Alberta and a mountaineer herself, traces not only the history of the ACC, but also gives an account of the nation’s evolving attitudes toward wilderness, along with a great deal about the geography and the appeal of the mountainous Canadian West.
The book is scholarly—meticulously and exhaustively researched, replete with quotes from journals and government reports—and its appeal may be limited to readers familiar with the ACC. There are eighty pages of appendixes, notes, and references, which most readers may skip after getting past the bloomer thing.
THOMAS BEVIER (November 27, 2014)
Eat Smart in Denmark
How to Decipher the Menu, Know the Market Foods & Embark on a Tasting Adventure
Carol L. Schroeder
Katrina A. Schroeder
Ginkgo Press
Unknown $15.95 (160pp)
978-1-938489-02-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Aside from the fact that many favorite food dishes in Denmark are unpronounceable—unless, of course, you’re Danish—the country is one of the more robust foodie destinations in the world. It is not happenstance that Copenhagen’s Noma was rated #1 four times in the World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards, sponsored by S. Pellegrino.
Restaurants range from French to Japanese, but Carol L. Schroeder and Katrina A. Schroeder, the authors of Eat Smart in Denmark, advise that when in Denmark, stick with the Danish thing. The Schroeders are an American mother and daughter who have embraced their heritage. Their romp through Danish diet runs from that of Paleolithic hunters, who favored reindeer, through to the Vikings, who were great at fermenting, and onward to the present day and what has been called the New Nordic Cuisine movement.
For a tourist, a sweet introduction might be a good old-fashioned gammeldags, a fancy ice cream cone, followed by a hit of salmiak lakrids, a salty licorice. Danes love ice cream and licorice. And then, a visit to the Iron Age kitchen in Ribe, Denmark’s oldest town, founded around 700, might be in order. There you can taste the fiskesuppe (fish soup) that the Tollund Man, whose remains are on display, so much enjoyed.
The book includes a number of recipes and also some helpful phrases for use in restaurants and food markets. In a restaurant, the first thing to say is Kan jeg se menyen (May I see the menu?), and the second thing to say is Hvad anbefaler du? (What do you recommend today?).
THOMAS BEVIER (November 27, 2014)
The Peace of Blue
Water Journeys
Bill Belleville
University of Florida Press
Softcover $24.95 (230pp)
978-0-8130-6009-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In one of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems, which Bill Belleville quotes, she wrote that Florida is “the state that floats in brackish water / held together by mangrove roots.” That sentiment serves to bolster one of his main points: that symmetry in one’s life “isn’t the half-mad early-morning drivers on a Florida interstate exhaling road rage. … Nor is it the perfect geometry of walled and gated neighborhoods.”
Florida is all of that, for sure, with walls of condominium developments blocking water views, and sprawling commercial developments besides. Even so, Belleville has found harmony in the “splendid visual link between what others once saw in natural systems in Florida, and what exists now.” He has paddled endless stretches of those systems. He also ventured to Cuba and other islands south of Florida in the Caribbean Basin, of which much of Florida is a part.
In tightly woven essays, he strives to argue, without letting “pragmatic data about water … overwhelm that story,” that the watery wilderness is threatened. To preserve it, he writes, “depends on the kindness of strangers upstream,” especially the dredgers and drainers that make way for walled worlds and glitzy resorts.
“Now, periodic droughts and the fires that follow in their wake continue that human driven work,” he warns. And he finds it logical that he should worry about the health of a tiny spring.
THOMAS BEVIER (November 27, 2014)
Thomas Bevier, a former staff writer for the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press, is a freelance writer living in Northern Michigan.
Thomas Bevier
