Anchors aweigh! Have you ever wanted to chuck out all bills, meetings, deadlines, traffic and try a more rewarding lifestyle? One California couple, Eva and Ron Stob, had the courage to do just that, and they’ve written a guidebook for other dreamers who want to follow in their wake. Honey, Let’s Get a Boat . . . explains how the Stobs managed to quit their jobs, put their house up for rent, buy a boat and take off on a year-long cruise through America’s Intracoastal Waterway. "Many people talk about following their dreams, and don’t," the Stobs write. "We were intent on putting our Nikes on and doing it." With almost no boating experience between them, the couple spent more than a year learning everything they would need to know to purchase and pilot a suitable boat. When they found a 40-foot trawler (which they christened Dream O’ Genie), they borrowed money, cashed in their savings accounts, sold their truck and were off on a great adventure. Their 6,300-mile route on the Great Loop took them from Florida to New York, Canada, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway and finally through the Gulf of Mexico back to Florida. The Stobs’ entertaining and honest account of this remarkable trip will leave you laughing, doubting, cheering and perhaps inspired to try such a journey yourself.

ust as every school child in America knows who Columbus was, anyone in China with an elementary education knows the name Hsuan Tsang. A monk, Hsuan Tsang set out for India in 629 to search for the truth, returning 17 years later with original texts that he studied and translated to help Buddhism become the dominant religion in the world’s most populous nation.

Ultimate Journey takes the reader on two trips 1,500 years apart over largely the same route: the perilous trek of the ancient monk and the unpredictable travel of the modern journalist. Along the way, author Richard Bernstein seamlessly combines the lifelines of Buddha, Hsuan Tsang and his own. In so doing, he skillfully synthesizes religion, travel, history, geography, archaeology and even modern politics.

The memory of Hsuan Tsang is celebrated today by Buddhists worldwide for his journey of almost 5,000 miles to India on foot, horse, camel and elephant to amass hundreds of original Indian scriptures that he felt were needed to authenticate Buddhism as it underwent different interpretations and developed competing schools in China. While not a Buddhist, Bernstein is awed by the religion started 2,500 years ago by Siddartha Gautama, an Indian prince who became the Buddha ( Enlightened One ) by preaching that life is suffering, suffering can be eliminated by renouncing desire, and the way to salvation is through eight principles of behavior, including the practice of right intent, right action and right concentration. Of course, there’s a lot more to Buddhism than that, and Bernstein’s discussion of the religion is as intelligible a treatment as non-adherents could hope to read.

Bernstein shares insights into the lives and minds of villagers along the route. At the time President Clinton was enmeshed in revelations of embarrassing Oval Office activities, Bernstein was in a remote village. When he told a curious group where he lived, a native finger-traced the word Amirica on the dusty fender of a jeep. Right away, someone added the words Monika and MikelJordan. A New York Times book critic, Bernstein cannot, as a matter of conflict of interest, review Ultimate Journey. If he could, he would be justified in giving it a high mark. Alan Prince, a former newspaper travel editor, lives in Deerfield Beach, Florida.

The (good and bad) luck o’ the Irish Many Irish women and men probably tire of the official version of themselves that is packaged for export nowadays. From the hammering heels of Lord of the Dance to the manic comedy of Waking Ned Devine, books, films and Broadway extravaganzas portray the children of the Emerald Isle (both natives and their descendants) as devout but hard-drinking, sentimental but hard-bitten and colorful to the point of gaudiness. Several new books alternately confirm and refute this national stereotype. Among the more comprehensive recent accounts is Patrick Bishop’s The Irish Empire: The Story of the Irish Abroad. The stories range through the Dromberg stone circle in Cork, New York politicians, the English invasion and oppression of Ireland, lyrical poetry, prison uprisings, shipboard squalor, urban exploitation, religion and political activism. The scope is surprising, for such a brief and comprehensible and well-illustrated book. It’s beautiful to look at, but also rich in anecdotes.

Bishop tells, for example, the fascinating Bonnie-and-Clyde epic of Ned Kelly, an Irishman in Australia. Kelly imbibed stories of oppression and outrage at his mother’s knee and grew up contemptuous of authority and particularly scornful of Irish policemen, whom he considered traitors. Inevitably he clashed with the abusive, nationalist, class-obsessed rulers. Next, turn to two books that address the American experience. A good place to start is Greatest Irish Americans of the 20th Century, edited by Patricia Harty. At one point the Irish made up 10 percent of all immigrants into the United States. In these 200 oversized pages, you find out some of the consequences of that influx. Included are labor and religious leaders, actors, writers, politicians, gangsters. Everyone is here: Michael Flatley and Grace Kelly, Margaret Bourke-White and Georgia O’Keeffe, John McEnroe and Mark McGwire. No other designation besides "fellow Irish" would corral both Dorothy Day and Andrew Greeley in the same subset.

On the same theme is Maureen Dezell’s Irish America: Coming Into Clover, with the second subtitle "The Evolution of a People and a Culture." A staff writer for the Boston Globe, Dezell writes entertainingly and provides rather more historical perspective than Harty does in her browser book. She also goes further back than the recently departed century. Dezell gets into some surprising and fascinating topics. These even include an analysis of the ways the Irish rib each other about everything, comparing the habit to certain aspects of humor among African Americans. She also looks at how female purity and passivity were drilled into the new young Irish Americans after the Famine, and how stereotypes became scapegoats in all sorts of situations. She even thoughtfully critiques anti-Irish attitudes in E. L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime. Not surprisingly, Ireland has produced an array of wonderful writers. You can find the ultimate sampler of them in a new book edited by Susan Cahill, For the Love of Ireland: A Literary Companion for Readers and Travelers. In a nice original touch, these poems, essays, stories and excerpts from novels are grouped by county and province. Naturally, you will find Sean O’Faolain and James Joyce, William Butler Yeats and Samuel Beckett. But you may be surprised to run across Lorrie Moore, Edna Buchanan and Joyce Cary. There are fine later poets such as Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland, too, providing an almost musical accompaniment to the beautiful, textured prose around them. For the Love of Ireland has the virtue of following each author’s contribution with a note entitled "For the Literary Traveler." These detailed asides get you out to the sites described, warn you about ways in which they have changed and provide lovely cultural footnotes to the main entries. By now, of course, you will have called your travel agent. Before you go to Ireland yourself, however, read Pete McCarthy’s first book, McCarthy’s Bar: A Journey of Discovery in the West of Ireland. Then take it with you. McCarthy is a journalist and performer well known on radio and TV in Britain. His book is along the lines of Bill Bryson’s Notes From a Small Island. To discover the roots and test the validity of his fascination with his mother’s homeland, McCarthy travels throughout Ireland. One of his travel rules is Never Pass a Bar That Has Your Name on It. This is a smart and funny book, and not just because McCarthy learns that there are a great many pubs in Ireland named McCarthy’s Bar. He has to plan elaborate strategems to escape the convivial habitues. Along the way he encounters, and recreates for us, some hilarious conversations. Consider this response to his desire to eat an actual meal rather than continue to subsist on fermented liquids: "You’re on holiday. You can eat when you’re at home. Have a bag of nuts, why don’t ya?" And now for the dark side of this famously hospitable land. Ireland’s critically acclaimed and popular novelist Patrick McCabe is back with a scary new book, Emerald Germs of Ireland. No quaint, cheerful volume, this although McCabe is certainly darkly humorous, in a Hitchcockian way. The author of The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto tells the story of Pat McNab, who definitely murders his mother and who possibly, just possibly, becomes a serial killer. This particular Irish outing is unlikely to become a dance anytime soon, although it would make a good movie. Although this book is in helpfully distancing third-person, its dark psychology may remind you of the twisted narrators of McCabe’s fellow Irishman John Banville. If, after this survey course, you’d like to get in touch with your own Irishness, you can turn to a helpful book by Dwight A. Radford and Kyle J. Betit, A Genealogist’s Guide to Discovering Your Irish Ancestors. While not exactly sparkling with scintillating prose, it supplies advice, methods and highly specific references, including a number of fruitful research avenues you would never think of on your own. Replete with case studies and bibliographies, this book seems like the last word on its topic.

Like most history books, these new volumes remind us of the quirks of fate that shape the daily lives of future generations. As a historian once pointed out, if not for the potato famine of the 1800s, John F. Kennedy would have been born an Irishman, not an American.

Michael Sims is fond of Irish coffee and greatly admires redheads.

The (good and bad) luck o’ the Irish Many Irish women and men probably tire of the official version of themselves that is packaged for export nowadays. From the hammering heels of Lord of the Dance to the manic comedy of Waking Ned Devine, books, films and Broadway extravaganzas portray the children of the Emerald Isle (both natives and their descendants) as devout but hard-drinking, sentimental but hard-bitten and colorful to the point of gaudiness. Several new books alternately confirm and refute this national stereotype. Among the more comprehensive recent accounts is Patrick Bishop’s The Irish Empire: The Story of the Irish Abroad. The stories range through the Dromberg stone circle in Cork, New York politicians, the English invasion and oppression of Ireland, lyrical poetry, prison uprisings, shipboard squalor, urban exploitation, religion and political activism. The scope is surprising, for such a brief and comprehensible and well-illustrated book. It’s beautiful to look at, but also rich in anecdotes.

Bishop tells, for example, the fascinating Bonnie-and-Clyde epic of Ned Kelly, an Irishman in Australia. Kelly imbibed stories of oppression and outrage at his mother’s knee and grew up contemptuous of authority and particularly scornful of Irish policemen, whom he considered traitors. Inevitably he clashed with the abusive, nationalist, class-obsessed rulers. Next, turn to two books that address the American experience. A good place to start is Greatest Irish Americans of the 20th Century, edited by Patricia Harty. At one point the Irish made up 10 percent of all immigrants into the United States. In these 200 oversized pages, you find out some of the consequences of that influx. Included are labor and religious leaders, actors, writers, politicians, gangsters. Everyone is here: Michael Flatley and Grace Kelly, Margaret Bourke-White and Georgia O’Keeffe, John McEnroe and Mark McGwire. No other designation besides “fellow Irish” would corral both Dorothy Day and Andrew Greeley in the same subset.

On the same theme is Maureen Dezell’s Irish America: Coming Into Clover, with the second subtitle “The Evolution of a People and a Culture.” A staff writer for the Boston Globe, Dezell writes entertainingly and provides rather more historical perspective than Harty does in her browser book. She also goes further back than the recently departed century. Dezell gets into some surprising and fascinating topics. These even include an analysis of the ways the Irish rib each other about everything, comparing the habit to certain aspects of humor among African Americans. She also looks at how female purity and passivity were drilled into the new young Irish Americans after the Famine, and how stereotypes became scapegoats in all sorts of situations. She even thoughtfully critiques anti-Irish attitudes in E. L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime. Not surprisingly, Ireland has produced an array of wonderful writers. You can find the ultimate sampler of them in a new book edited by Susan Cahill, For the Love of Ireland: A Literary Companion for Readers and Travelers. In a nice original touch, these poems, essays, stories and excerpts from novels are grouped by county and province. Naturally, you will find Sean O’Faolain and James Joyce, William Butler Yeats and Samuel Beckett. But you may be surprised to run across Lorrie Moore, Edna Buchanan and Joyce Cary. There are fine later poets such as Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland, too, providing an almost musical accompaniment to the beautiful, textured prose around them. For the Love of Ireland has the virtue of following each author’s contribution with a note entitled “For the Literary Traveler.” These detailed asides get you out to the sites described, warn you about ways in which they have changed and provide lovely cultural footnotes to the main entries. By now, of course, you will have called your travel agent. Before you go to Ireland yourself, however, read Pete McCarthy’s first book, McCarthy’s Bar: A Journey of Discovery in the West of Ireland. Then take it with you. McCarthy is a journalist and performer well known on radio and TV in Britain. His book is along the lines of Bill Bryson’s Notes From a Small Island. To discover the roots and test the validity of his fascination with his mother’s homeland, McCarthy travels throughout Ireland. One of his travel rules is Never Pass a Bar That Has Your Name on It. This is a smart and funny book, and not just because McCarthy learns that there are a great many pubs in Ireland named McCarthy’s Bar. He has to plan elaborate strategems to escape the convivial habituŽs. Along the way he encounters, and recreates for us, some hilarious conversations. Consider this response to his desire to eat an actual meal rather than continue to subsist on fermented liquids: “You’re on holiday. You can eat when you’re at home. Have a bag of nuts, why don’t ya?” And now for the dark side of this famously hospitable land. Ireland’s critically acclaimed and popular novelist Patrick McCabe is back with a scary new book, Emerald Germs of Ireland. No quaint, cheerful volume, this although McCabe is certainly darkly humorous, in a Hitchcockian way. The author of The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto tells the story of Pat McNab, who definitely murders his mother and who possibly, just possibly, becomes a serial killer. This particular Irish outing is unlikely to become a dance anytime soon, although it would make a good movie. Although this book is in helpfully distancing third-person, its dark psychology may remind you of the twisted narrators of McCabe’s fellow Irishman John Banville. If, after this survey course, you’d like to get in touch with your own Irishness, you can turn to a helpful book by Dwight A. Radford and Kyle J. Betit, A Genealogist’s Guide to Discovering Your Irish Ancestors. While not exactly sparkling with scintillating prose, it supplies advice, methods and highly specific references, including a number of fruitful research avenues you would never think of on your own. Replete with case studies and bibliographies, this book seems like the last word on its topic.

Like most history books, these new volumes remind us of the quirks of fate that shape the daily lives of future generations. As a historian once pointed out, if not for the potato famine of the 1800s, John F. Kennedy would have been born an Irishman, not an American.

Michael Sims is fond of Irish coffee and greatly admires redheads.

Gift books for every destination The river, the rails and the road: three R’s that symbolize the American inclination to roam. If a real-life journey isn’t part of your plan for spring, take a ride with three dazzling gift books that celebrate the pleasures of travel. In Live Steam: Paddlewheel Steamboats on the Mississippi System, photographer Jon Kral pays tribute to the behemoth boats that cruised the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in the days before airplanes and automobiles changed the way Americans travel. Beautiful but impractical, these dinosaurs, now relegated to the tourist trade, are many-tiered, nearly gaudy, their names Delta Queen, Julia Belle Swain as prissy and genteel as the wrought-iron finery that lines their decks. Only six of the boats continue to operate on the Mississippi River system, and Kral has captured them all in stunning sepia duotone. Accompanied by text that blends steamboat history with salty, first-person accounts from the likes of musician and former riverboat captain John Hartford and Captain Clark C. “Doc” Hawley, a National Rivers Hall of Fame member, Kral’s book is the first to go below decks for an inside look at the workings of these romantic vessels. More than 100 elegant photographs convey a sense of “boat life” the ornate dining areas, the infernal heat of the engine room, the fury of river water cut by the big wheel. We meet the people behind the boats porters and deckhands who live in dorm-sized quarters. From grand staircases to steam whistle stacks, Kral delivers the fancy flourishes, the details that comprise the whole of these elaborate crafts. This isn’t travel for speed or expedience; it’s travel for the sake of experience, lazy, picturesque and pleasing. With Live Steam, Kral reminds us that the journey itself is just as important as the destination.

They have names like California Zephyr and Coast Starlight, Hawkeye and Sunset. They cut through the night touching lonely lives with the sound of their wistful whistles. Possibly the most mythologized method of travel, the train is celebrated in Starlight on the Rails, a collection of duotone photographs taken by a skilled group of artists over the course of five decades. The focus here is on railroads at night, a visual paradigm that has produced startling combinations of darkness and light photographs that look like film noir stills, marked by sparks, stars and smoke. All the mystique of the locomotive is captured here: the great, greasy wheels and spumes of steam, the engines slick and sleek.

From freight yard to roundhouse, depot to mainline, Starlight takes in all the stops made on a typical 12-hour night of railroading. The book’s broad route spans the country, taking a detour to Japan, where steam locomotion peaked in popularity in 1949. Evoking the smell of diesel, the rhythm of wheel on rail, the pictures deliver the barely bridled momentum of these brute machines. The text, written by photographer Jeff Brouws, provides fascinating information on the singular challenges and rewards of night photography, while delivering background on the trains themselves. Icons of Americana, locomotives never fail to awaken wanderlust in the hearts of humans. Starlight shows us why.

Along Route 66 by Quinta Scott is an intriguing testament to this country’s sense of restlessness. Known as “the main street of America,” Route 66 has provided the backdrop for a television show, been the subject of a song, and served as an emblem of the American experience for writers like John Steinbeck. Scott adds to the allure of the road with a book of black and white photographs documenting the architectural styles that sprang up along the route from the 1920s through the 1950s. There are roadhouses, tourist courts and diners, some of which have a touch of kitsch. A story lies behind every building. We learn about Frank Redford, the man who built the wonderfully whimsical Wigwam Motel, an eye-catching assemblage of tipis erected in Holbrook, Arizona. There are stops at the Regal Reptile Ranch in Alanreed, Texas, and the Cotton Boll Motel in Canute, Oklahoma (the motel’s marquee tempted travelers: Come Sleep All Day Tub ∧ Shower.) The purpose of all this ingenuity on the part of proprietors was to make some fast cash by stopping tourists in their tracks, a gimmick that worked for a while. With Along Route 66, professional photographer Quinta Scott has compiled a fun and unforgettable collection of images that immortalizes the great American odyssey.

The river, the rails and the road: three R’s that symbolize the American inclination to roam. If a real-life journey isn’t part of your plan for spring, take a ride with three dazzling gift books that celebrate the pleasures of travel. In Live Steam: Paddlewheel Steamboats on the Mississippi System, photographer Jon Kral pays tribute to the behemoth boats that cruised the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in the days before airplanes and automobiles changed the way Americans travel. Beautiful but impractical, these dinosaurs, now relegated to the tourist trade, are many-tiered, nearly gaudy, their names Delta Queen, Julia Belle Swain as prissy and genteel as the wrought-iron finery that lines their decks. Only six of the boats continue to operate on the Mississippi River system, and Kral has captured them all in stunning sepia duotone. Accompanied by text that blends steamboat history with salty, first-person accounts from the likes of musician and former riverboat captain John Hartford and Captain Clark C. "Doc" Hawley, a National Rivers Hall of Fame member, Kral’s book is the first to go below decks for an inside look at the workings of these romantic vessels. More than 100 elegant photographs convey a sense of "boat life" the ornate dining areas, the infernal heat of the engine room, the fury of river water cut by the big wheel. We meet the people behind the boats porters and deckhands who live in dorm-sized quarters. From grand staircases to steam whistle stacks, Kral delivers the fancy flourishes, the details that comprise the whole of these elaborate crafts. This isn’t travel for speed or expedience; it’s travel for the sake of experience, lazy, picturesque and pleasing. With Live Steam, Kral reminds us that the journey itself is just as important as the destination.

They have names like California Zephyr and Coast Starlight, Hawkeye and Sunset. They cut through the night touching lonely lives with the sound of their wistful whistles. Possibly the most mythologized method of travel, the train is celebrated in Starlight on the Rails, a collection of duotone photographs taken by a skilled group of artists over the course of five decades. The focus here is on railroads at night, a visual paradigm that has produced startling combinations of darkness and light photographs that look like film noir stills, marked by sparks, stars and smoke. All the mystique of the locomotive is captured here: the great, greasy wheels and spumes of steam, the engines slick and sleek.

From freight yard to roundhouse, depot to mainline, Starlight takes in all the stops made on a typical 12-hour night of railroading. The book’s broad route spans the country, taking a detour to Japan, where steam locomotion peaked in popularity in 1949. Evoking the smell of diesel, the rhythm of wheel on rail, the pictures deliver the barely bridled momentum of these brute machines. The text, written by photographer Jeff Brouws, provides fascinating information on the singular challenges and rewards of night photography, while delivering background on the trains themselves. Icons of Americana, locomotives never fail to awaken wanderlust in the hearts of humans. Starlight shows us why.

Along Route 66 by Quinta Scott is an intriguing testament to this country’s sense of restlessness. Known as "the main street of America," Route 66 has provided the backdrop for a television show, been the subject of a song, and served as an emblem of the American experience for writers like John Steinbeck. Scott adds to the allure of the road with a book of black and white photographs documenting the architectural styles that sprang up along the route from the 1920s through the 1950s. There are roadhouses, tourist courts and diners, some of which have a touch of kitsch. A story lies behind every building. We learn about Frank Redford, the man who built the wonderfully whimsical Wigwam Motel, an eye-catching assemblage of tipis erected in Holbrook, Arizona. There are stops at the Regal Reptile Ranch in Alanreed, Texas, and the Cotton Boll Motel in Canute, Oklahoma (the motel’s marquee tempted travelers: Come Sleep All Day Tub ∧ Shower.) The purpose of all this ingenuity on the part of proprietors was to make some fast cash by stopping tourists in their tracks, a gimmick that worked for a while. With Along Route 66, professional photographer Quinta Scott has compiled a fun and unforgettable collection of images that immortalizes the great American odyssey.

An amusing stroll through Paris Edmund White, author of A Boy’s Own Story and a landmark biography of Jean Genet, has wandered Paris for 16 years, and seen it as only artists, and voyeurs, can. His The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris is a langorous intellectual indulgence. If you are willing to succumb, White writes, "You can find not one but several places to go ballroom dancing at five in the afternoon on a Tuesday, say. . . . A slightly nutty friend of mine in his twenties claimed that he used to go to the the dansant every afternoon at a major restaurant on the Boulevard Montparnasse where elderly ladies sent drinks to young gigolos, who then asked them to dance. During a spin across the basement floor, some interesting arrangements were worked out; my friend went home with one dowager and cleaned her apartment wearing nothing but a starched apron and earned a thousand francs." Such offhand entertainments bits of historical curiosity, ruminations, deliberate queerness and quintessential self-exposure are White’s way of wandering through the Paris of his dreams. Part reality, part relativity, his Paris is ancient and ageless, cruel and coquettish. And so is he. He explains l’air du temps trends that are so pervasive that they overwhelm personal taste and good style and proceeds to flout it quietly but with conviction. He wanders St. Germain and the Palais Royale, which brings Colette to mind; he digresses into a character sketch, both acute and accommodating, about that contradictory icon. He takes us from from Josephine Baker to James Baldwin, dinner parties to Dreyfus, anti-Semitism to AIDS, royal crypts to restaurants.

In fact, if this intensely informed and wide-ranging conversational style seems like one huge digression, that is the precisely the point. A flaneur is a voyeur, a wanderer, an observer, a loiterer; his artistry is in observing life and making it his own. Baudelaire says the flaneur’s "passion and creed is to wed the crowd . . . to take up residence in multiplicity, in whatever is seething, moving, evanescent and infinite: You’re not at home, but you feel at home everywhere; you see everyone, you’re at the center of everything yet you remain hidden from everybody." White is walking, wandering, observing, analyzing, selecting and seducing. The only shame is that The Flaneur is such a small book. Happily, this volume is only the first of a series from Bloomsbury called The Writer and the City. At one time, the vins du Paris were all from Champagne; but White is, despite his French literary awards, an American, and so, to honor him and his great Gothic city, I propose Iron Horse, a fine and appropriately iconoclastic California sparkling with a clean, stony undercurrent like that of water running over granite. Although all its sparklings are good, the blanc de blancs is a particular and reliable favorite one of the few ways I will drink California chardonnay anymore and generally available for under $20.

Eve Zibart is a restaurant critic for the Washington Post.

No man is an island, goes the prose; but with this charming, subtly premonitory and often disarming book, we are un-Donne. According to Thurston Clarke, author of Searching for Crusoe: A Journey Among the Last Real Islands, there are those among us who have an innate affinity for islands as refuges from personal or material intrusions, as Gaugin-like paradises of sex and simplicity, or as boundary-free spiritual kingdoms.

Clarke calls it "islomania," and his own interest in the phenomenon, one that he has sympathized with since his childhood, is both objective and subjective. He wants "to account for a passion for islands that transcends cultures and centuries . . . why Chinese mythology places heaven on an archipelago of rocky islands, Green and Roman heroes inhabit the Islands of the Blessed, Christians built some of the holiest churches and monasteries on islands, and the reed islets of Lake Titicaca were sacred to the Incas." But he also feels a growing urgency to understand the phenomenon because "islands, like tropical rain forests, are an endangered geographical feature," threatened as much by the Global Village of mass culture as by global warming. "The longer I waited to discover why islands are so intoxicating, the greater the chance that their undefined and mysterious charms might vanish." He has plenty of cases in point: Key West, where Clarke spent three summers in the ’70s when it was "North America’s answer to the Foreign Legion" and which is now a Hooters headquarters; Anguilla, where the best hotel "resemble[s] a Moroccan village and offered California cuisine"; Majuro in the Marshall Islands, which Robert Louis Stevenson once called "the Pearl of the Pacific," but which 40 years of American trusteeship has turned into a "Pacific Appalachia of rusty pickups, plywood shacks and outhouses"; and Bainbridge Island, which Snow Falling on Cedars author David Guterson says has become "a neurotic place like anywhere else in the world." So Clarke finally settles on visiting three groups of islands: those that fulfill certain roles (a holy place, a prison, a utopia, etc.), those that have personal resonance (Campobello, the Scots Isle of Jura), and famous islands, including Bali-ha’i (or at least, the one believed to have inspired Michener’s special island), Atlantis (for which he travels to the Maldives, thought by scientists to be in imminent danger of drowning in the rising oceans), and Isla Robinson Crusoe, 400 miles off the coast of Chile.

The Crusoe Island, actually Mas a Tierra, is where a Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk was marooned from 1704 to 1709; it is generally accepted that Defoe read the resulting stories about Selkirk and used them in the creation of his book. It is home to only about 200 residents, and Selkirk’s cave is a major tourist attraction (the natives usually call him "Crusoe" the fiction has overtaken the fact.) It’s a good introduction to Clarke’s search for the paradox of islands. Here he finds residents who consider its harsh outcroppings and wild birds beautiful, who value its "safety" from the wicked world and love the fact that they can only see water all around. And there are also the ones who come seeking perfect isolation and then find it awful and disturbing.

One of the most peculiar episodes retells Clarke’s sojourn on Banda Neira in the Spice Islands, those once golden isles that lured traders and navies from around the globe. Here he surrenders to the considerable charms of the ebullient Des Alwi, a sometime freedom fighter and political operative turned filmmaker, developer, philanthropist and cultural messiah. Des Alwi’s peculiar movie-idol hold over his countrymen is played against the memory of a 17th century Dutch massacre of thousands of Bandanese. Clarke’s portrait of one of the last Dutch plantation owners, a virtual Miss Havesham dependent on Des Alwi’s handouts, seems a cheap form of revenge. Still, the avaricious consumption of small countries by larger interests is a real and vital thread in the history and the mystery of islands.

Chilean connection Although Isla Robinson Crusoe is 400 miles west of Chile’s wine region, it’s impossible not to think of that country’s muscular and increasingly accomplished vintages when considering the myth of the marooned man. Miguel Torres’ 1997 Manso de Velasco cab ($24) is just like an old copy of Crusoe brought down from the attic: leather and must and a hint of fading and browning as you ease it open, but then layers of fruit and tobacco and wild berry resins come pouring out, defiant and then smoothed and with a final flourish of roasted coffee. Don’t wait for Friday.

Eve Zibart, who is the restaurant critic of the Weekend section of the Washington Post, has her own special island off the coast of South Carolina.

am Greene once pointed out that Africa is shaped like the human heart an appropriate image for a land that entices so many people. Writer Ann Jones’ romance with this most mysterious of continents is recounted in her enthralling travelogue Looking for Lovedu, an account of her journey to Africa in search of the Lovedu people. As African tribes go, this one is an anomaly, a group ruled by “feminine” qualities such as tolerance, cooperation and compromise hence, Jones’ attraction to them. She is especially anxious to have an audience with the Lovedu queen, a legendary rainmaker and magician.

Almost whimsically, Jones undertakes the journey in the company of Kevin Muggleton, an iron-willed photographer and journalist from England who leads her across the continent at a breakneck pace. The rugged Muggleton turns their trek into an endurance test, insisting they cross the Sahara without the aid of maps and picking a particularly difficult route across Zaire. The pair drives until their jeep falls to pieces. The duo’s interaction with each other, and with the African landscape, makes for fascinating reading. But after a battle with malaria and an encounter with some dangerous Mobutu men among other obstacles Jones and Muggleton decide to part ways. Jones continues her quest in the company of two women, one of whom is Kenyan. Needless to say, this leg of the odyssey is more relaxed, and Jones is able to truly experience and absorb the continent for the first time.

Early on, Jones denies that she has any intention of “growing” through this experience, but she does grow exponentially. When she finally arrives at the southern part of the continent where the Lovedu reside, the reader savors her victory. After a wild ride, the grail is at last within her grasp.

An acclaimed adventure writer and skillful storyteller, Jones is the author of five previous books. Audiences may or may not fall head-over-heels for Africa after reading her vivid, engrossing new narrative, but it will be difficult for them not to love Looking for Lovedu.

Maude McDaniel writes from Maryland.