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It was recommended to me last summer that I read Lonely Planet’s Travel Writing. I expected the book to be about the art, but instead it focused more on the details of how one enters the travel writing and scene and how to get published – something I have little interest in. If you’re serious about making travel writing a profession, particularly if you’re interested in writing for guide books, then this may be a worthwhile read. For the rest of us… just write.
Michael Maren’s The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity shatters the glossy image of NGOs as humanitarian organizations concerned with the betterment of third-world peoples. Instead, he claims Aid as a new kind of colonization. Focusing on Somalia, Maren shows that NGOs there not only didn’t help refugees, but actively killed them. That NGOs supported the power of Siyaad Barre and, later, Mohamed Farah Aydiid. And that NGOs were largely responsible for continuing and worsening famine conditions in the early ‘90’s. In the end, he shows them as no more than Corporations concerned with profit.
It’s an excellent book. Not only for exposing the Aid industry, but for the history and understanding of Somalia.
Three Worlds Gone Mad: The Hunter, The Hammer, and Heaven gets back to what RYP does best: storytelling. The book documents Robert Young Pelton’s journeys to three different war-zones (Sierra Leone, Chechnya, and Bougainville) and his attempts to understand the place and its people. Like in DP, Pelton manages to explain the places better than any history text. Where else are you able to see from the eyes of pirate hunting mercs, American ex-CIA jihadists, and hermit rebel leaders? Unconstrained from the limits of a journalism, Pelton shows us firsthand a world outside of our own – a glimpse into war-torn regions of the world – and the ordinary people who inhabit them.
I highly recommend this book to and fans of RYP and, for those who have never read his works, this is a good place to start.
I picked up the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin at one of those library book sales a few years ago for something like $1. It’s been sitting on my bookshelf, neglected, ever since – though I kept telling myself I’d read it one day. Finally, I have.
I enjoyed the book a good deal. Though I can’t say I agree with all of Franklin’s politics or his racist leanings, I did enjoy the writing style and the insight into the times. It’s impressive how varied a man he was, seemingly every institution and employment being touched by him at some point. (And the book only goes to 30 years before his death.) I wouldn’t use the book as a mold to shape my life to, which was the book’s intention, but it’s still a good read.
The Fairhaven Folktales of Dirty Dan Harris by Michael Sean Sullivan is a fun little bit of local history. It concerns the life and times of “Dirty” Danial Harris, the sailor and whiskey smuggler who founded the town of Fairhaven in the 1800s. Dirty Dan had a reputation as quite the story teller in his time, this book being the recounting of his tales that were orally passed down after his death.
It was staring up at the sky one day at the NVC that I decided to learn what the clouds meant. So, upon return, I picked up a copy of Basic Essentials Weather Forecasting by Michael Hodgson. The book serves as a short introduction to the topic of amateur weather forecasting, a chapter of it devoted to the science of clouds. The subject, I think, is not for me – a lot of it went over my head (too many big words like cumulonimbus) – but I did manage to take a good deal from the book. I’d recommend it for anyone who spends a deal of time in the outdoors, as the ability to predict stormy weather is a useful one.
The Complete Guide to Lock Picking by Eddie the Wire is something of a classic on the subject. I find that when talking to lock specialists, I’m always referred to it at one point or another. It’s a short book. At only 80 pages, it obviously isn’t very indepth. I found the author to brush over some topics too quickly, and was also lacking in pictures to help reinforce concepts. But all in all, the book taught me a good deal. Now I need to invest in a pick set.
Ragnar Benson’s Survival Retreat: A Total Plan for Retreat Defense is a whacky little book. It focuses on suggestions for locating, building, and stocking fallout shelters for surviving anything from economic collapse to nuclear war. Published in 1983, the book contains a lot of that Cold War paranoia. It does have a number of good tips, though the author has some mental issues he should probably work on.