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.

James Dodson, best-selling author of Final Rounds: A Father, a Son, the Golf Journey of a Lifetime, takes to the road once again in his delightful new book, Faithful Travelers. This time, he invites readers along on a fly-fishing pilgrimage with his precocious 7-year-old daughter Maggie and aging retriever Amos, a search for “big trout and big answers” in waters from Vermont to Michigan to Wyoming. From the start of this warm, witty, and insightful book, it is obvious that Faithful Travelers is much more than an entertaining travelogue. At heart, it is a meditation on fatherhood and family life today, set against the Snake, San Juan, and other well-known fly-fishing rivers.

Facing an imminent divorce from his wife of ten years, Dodson sets out to make sense of the changing landscape of his life “a Wild West of unexpected dangers and ambushing emotions” for both himself and Maggie. The book’s most moving moments come as father and daughter struggle to deal with the grief, anger, and confusion caused by the break-up. “You swore to me that you and Mommy would never get a divorce,” cries his anguished daughter in one heartbreaking scene. “Don’t you remember that?” Dodson writes with engaging candor, and readers will empathize with him as he wistfully watches his daughter examine his wedding ring, fields questions about whether he plans to marry again, and grapples with the emotional scars of promises broken.

For all that, there is plenty of humor here. Dodson clearly enjoys his daughter’s company, and his portrayal of her adventures is both amusing and endearing. The indomitable Maggie writes letters to both Pocahontas and the President, hangs out with Hell’s Angels, and manages to stay comfortably ahead of her father in the Beatle Challenge, their made-up game of Fab Four music trivia.

The pair encounter many colorful characters in their wanderings, and Dodson’s ear for dialogue and eye for detail help bring them alive. He also introduces us to interesting people from his own past, including Saint Cecil, a bullnecked, white-haired “lefty preacher” who taught him to fly-cast by reciting Frost’s “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Near the end of their journey, Dodson writes a long, heartfelt letter to his daughter containing the best wisdom he has to offer on life, love, and families. “Being with you like this has helped me laugh and figure out a few things,” Dodson writes. “That’s what families do, you know help each other laugh and figure out problems that sometimes seem to have no answer.” Readers will be glad that Dodson has allowed them to join his family on this remarkable trip.

Reviewed by Beth Duris.

A Trip to the Beach: Living on Island Time in the Caribbean audio) is a cheery first-person recounting of how two Vermonters, Melinda and Robert Blanchard, take up permanent residence on their favorite vacation spot, the island of Anguilla. The Blanchards, who had lost control of their previous food business when it went from cottage industry to corporation, decide to shake off the snow and the sour grapes by selling their New England home and becoming restaurateurs to the wealthy island tourists.

As a storyteller, Melinda (Mel for short) Blanchard has acquired her own sort of island rhythm, alternating between diary-detailed retellings of the day-by-day travails of building a restaurant long distance via Miami’s Home Depot (i.e., back in the "real world") and frequent mentions of the personal time-outs, beautiful sunsets, pick-up friendships that become business partnerships, and temporary passions for sailing that she and Robert fall into. (Although both are listed as authors, Mel writes in first person.) She also has a pleasant post-Heartburn habit of tossing in the odd recipe, and an obvious fondness for the people and passion for the flora of the region. She easily evokes that peculiar sense of administrative limbo produced in the islands by the paradoxical confluence of good-humored indifference to urgency (hence, the references to living on "island time") and the enormously time-consuming bureaucracy that requires all paperwork in triplicate. The long build-up to the restaurant’s opening night, which becomes a comedic near-disaster of too many customers and not enough dumplings and lobsters, has the ring of rueful truth cushioned by the comfort of ensuing success. It can be a little off-putting, or perhaps guilt-inducing, to read the references to extensive wine lists and expensive imported ingredients in a society where lean-tos are still fairly common, though the fact that Anguilla is a resort economy is a given for the whole setup. In fact, it gives a dramatic roundness to the story, because when Hurricane Luis ravishes the island, the resort, and the restaurant, it not only gives Mel a reason to pick up the pruning shears and get back to work, it also reminds us of the essential force of real island life: nature.

Still, this shapeliness loses some of its appeal when you notice the acknowledgments page. "The sequence of events in this book took place over a span of ten years and two restaurants. We have taken the liberty of condensing the time frame into one year so as to capture the spirit of life in Anguilla." That’s some kind of island time.

Nevertheless, it’s an ingratiating read and an easy one; and while I’m not sure I’ll ever make Miguel’s Banana Cabanas (a smoothie of Coco Lopez, Bailey’s Irish Cream, bananas and white rum), or the cornbread with pineapple, creamed corn, and Monterey Jack, I might try the coconut-sesame jasmine rice for the grilled tuna. And I will hope to see that sunset over Anguilla.

Choosing a Chardonnay – On opening night, according to Mel, Bob Blanchard, who was moving from table to table, talking to guests and going over the wine list, "had difficulty cutting short a debate over the virtues of Napa versus Bordeaux, and could have talked for hours about why American vintners insist on making Chardonnay so oaky." I agree with his oak index, which I also find much too high as a rule; but on behalf of the millions of Americans who obviously enjoy an assertive oak element (and who may not know that "Napa" and "California" are not synonymous), I would point out that under the grandchildren of Ernest and Julio, the Gallo of Sonoma label has made significant advances in quality varietals (in the $12-$15 range) and, more notably, into single-vineyard varietals (in the mid-$20s) and even superpremium estate wines. It’s the Goldilocks story, with the Gallo of Sonoma Chardonnay as the "baby" and the Estate Chardonnay as Big Bear.

The lower-end Gallo of Sonoma Chardonnay wines, both the Russian River and the Sonoma County blend, are surprisingly big buys for the price, with almost as much perfume and tropical fruit as Miguel’s blender killers, and a lot fewer calories. The ’97 Estate Chardonnay is even more tropical and showy, and at $45, up against stiff competition.

But all in all, it’s the Mama Bears, the single vineyard chards, that seem just right for this book, either the $20 Stefani Vineyard from the Dry Creek Valley or the $22 Laguna Ranch Vineyard from the Russian River Valley (the tasted vintages were both ’97s).

Eve Zibart is a restaurant critic for the Washington Post.

Viva Las Vegas! Las Vegas. The name inspires a hybrid image, half Disneyland and half Sodom and Gomorrah. It is the fastest-growing city in the U.S., its population having boomed from 400,000 in 1980 to more than a million now. As four new books attest, Vegas is also a magnet for the imagination. Inevitably the authors focus on the four-mile stretch of casinos called the Strip, but along the way they address many other aspects of the Industry as Las Vegas residents refer to gambling including entertainment, prostitution, organized crime, and law enforcement.

Let’s move from the narrowest focus to the broadest. Pete Earley, the investigative reporter who wrote The Hot House about Leavenworth, and also published exposes about the Aldrich Ames and John Walker spy cases, has a new book, Super Casino: Inside the New Las Vegas (Bantam, $26.95, 0553095021). He explores everything from legendary Las Vegas promoters such as Bugsy Siegel and Howard Hughes to the astonishing success of recent family-oriented entertainment facilities.

Several of Earley’s stories demonstrate the hypnotic pull the city exerts on residents who try to escape. One security guard tells the story of his experiences during the tragic fire that raged through the MGM Grand Hotel in 1980. Afterward, traumatized, he and his wife moved to Florida to flee the memories, but finally they returned because they missed the twenty-four-hour excitement. Andres Martinez covers some of the same territory from a completely different point of view in 24/7: Living It Up and Doubling Down in the New Las Vegas (Villard, $25, 0375501819). Martinez gave himself a month to lose the $50,000 his publisher had given him to chronicle a gambling spree. Along the way he wrote a vivid, you-are-there account of his adventures, one day per chapter. Like Paul Theroux, Martinez seems part fascinated anthropologist and part happy-go-lucky adventurer. It’s an appealing combination, and makes for a personal take on an impersonal town. Unlike the other Vegas books described here, 24/7 is also extremely amusing.

Inevitably, the most varied of these volumes is an anthology, The Real Las Vegas: Life Beyond the Strip, edited by journalism professor David Littlejohn. Fourteen vivid chapters by as many writers explore such topics as gambling, organized crime, the real estate boom, and locals who decry their home town’s reputation. For example, the chapter Law and Disorder details the countless scam artists who trail the nouveau riche foolish enough to flaunt their wealth. Skin City follows a limo driver who caters to whorehouse clients and acts as surrogate uncle to the prostitutes themselves; then it explores the strip joints of the city.

Broader still in scope is David Thomson’s new book, In Nevada, which bears the ambitious subtitle The Land, the People, God, and Chance (Alfred A. Knopf, $27.50, 0679454861). You’ll recognize Thomson’s name from his several previous books, including Rosebud, his biography of Orson Welles, and Beneath Mulholland, a lively tour of Hollywood history. From early nuclear testing to recent theological battles, he prowls his self-assigned turf with scrupulous attention. He refutes those who consider Vegas hell on Earth: Hell is rebuke, torture, and eternal punishment for those who have sinned. Las Vegas may be founded on a paradox, or a trick, but the idea that you will play and strive and then lose is not hellish. For many of us, it’s a profound and absorbing metaphor for life. Thomson mentions that, because he normally writes about film, people couldn’t understand why he was writing about Nevada. If I sometimes seem to concentrate on film, why, really, it’s just a way into life, and words, and wondering what you can believe. For Thomson, as for the authors of these four books, that is precisely what Las Vegas is a way into many other things that seem to converge in the near-mythical city that rises from the desert like a neon mirage.

Michael Sims is the author of Darwin’s Orchestra (Henry Holt).

Dining as the Romans do Okay, so this is another in the seemingly endless expatriate paeans to foreign culture published in the post-Year in Provence era. And yes, Alan Epstein is tickled pink with himself at having pulled off living, even making a living, right in the heart of Rome; he finds it hard to get through a paragraph without tossing in a little vernacular Italian to remind us of his fluency. Even so, it’s hard not to like As the Romans Do: The Delights, Dramas, and Daily Diversions of Life in the Eternal City, not only because Epstein truly loves his adopted city but because unlike Peter Mayle and so many of his ilk, Epstein writes from within the cultural circle, not from without; and if you’ve grimaced at the clumsy ethnocentrism of some of those faux innocents abroad, you’ll be far more comfortable in the armchair of this transplanted Romantic.

More seriously, if you have ever visited Rome and fallen under the spell of its ageless and yet proudly ancient mysteries, you will be nostalgically moved at Epstein’s succumbing to the same seductions. There is still a bit of the gee-whiz in his descriptions of Roman food, social customs, architecture, etc. But he backs his passions with a wealth of detail, a touch of history, and a flourish of cinematic color. And his habit of tossing in hilarious asides with editorial abandon is itself entirely Italian. In fact, the most Italian thing about his writing is its reluctance to stop for a period.

For instance: Epstein sighs over the simple pleasures of everyday dining, “more satisfying on a day-to-day basis than the miscellaneous cooking that passes for the American variety at this point, or the vaunted, sauce French kind. (Mention French cuisine to a romana, and she will wave her hand and remind you that the French were still barbarians who ate with their fingers when Catherine de’ Medici arrived in 1535 to marry the king, introduce the Renaissance, and teach the francesi how to cook at the same time.) Just give me a plate of delicious risotto con zucca e piselli (rice with pureed pumpkin and peas), or spaghetti al pescatore at Luna Piena in Testaccio; or fettucine with tomatoes, basil and mozzarella at Gran Sasso on Via di Ripetta near the Piazza del Popolo, where Mom cooks in her blue apron and slippers in full view of the diners, and her two sons deliver the food . . . ” And on and on, page after page, until you are either starving or infuriated or captivated. Or, in equally Italian fashion, all of the above.

But after all this fervid extravagance, Epstein frequently makes a surprisingly succinct point: “Romans eat out to duplicate the experience of eating in, not to experience something new, exotic or foreign.” Why, yes, exactly.

If Epstein does sometimes go overboard, as when he details the invariably perfect hair, makeup, clothing, and style of the Roman women (although, in fact, they are almost uniformly stunning and do carry themselves with more disarming confidence than anyone except perhaps the Parisians) well, chalk it up to one of his previous professions matchmaker and “relationship counselor.” He may be a sort of motivational speaker for following your dream, but he’s earned it. He and his wife Diane were engaged within a month of their first date, married seven months later, spent an extended honeymoon in Italy, and embarked on a three-year campaign to become permanent residents of Rome. And five years later, they’re still ecstatic.

Wine made easy Romans are anything but wine snobs: A typical trattoria meal is priced to include some sort of antipasti, pasta, meat, or seafood and a carafe of wine, red or white. Table wine, vino paisano, whatever except in the fanciest of (American-influenced) restaurants, wine is easy come, easy go down.

Among the most popular table whites is Orvietto, which is produced in the neighboring province of Umbria. A blend of four grapes, predominantly what’s called procanico (trebbiano), it’s most often drunk young, when its green notes are crisp and punctual, but it can be allowed to mellow for a couple of years to deepen its browner undertones.

Antinori’s 1999 Orvieto Classico has a broomstraw pallor and a short, very crisp frontal assault of grapefruit, kaffir lime, pineapple, and cedar; at $11 a bottle, it definitely suggests an end-of-summer cocktail party. If you’re curious about Umbrian Chardonnays, try Antinori’s 1999 Castello della Salla; at about $12 a bottle, it’s an easy house wine, good now and probably deepening for another couple of years (although it will never be a really chewy wine). Narrow but complex, it presents a crisp heirloom apple nose and a complimentary front, with hints of grapefruit and toasted almond; allowed to warm a bit, it develops an ephermeral smokiness, a bit of nougat, and ripe pear. The finish is short but refreshing.

Eve Zibart is a restaurant critic for the Washington Post. This column reflects her dual interests in travel and wine.

One Year Off is the charming narrative of a couple’s wild idea to sell their house and possessions, close their business, take their three small children out of school, and embark on a year of round-the-world travel. The reader is left with a combined adventure, memoir, history, and travel narrative, all wrapped into a tender account of a family meeting life head-on.

The author does not sugar-coat the trials of spending a year in cramped quarters with his entire family. Tales of finicky eaters and uncooperative toilets are interwoven with the wonders of the world and the adventure of a lifetime. Why does a man do this? In his own words, to gain a fresh perspective on life, to develop an equanimity, a balance. Is it surprising that thoughts formulating this trip began to surface close to the author’s 40th birthday? The book is presented as a series of lengthy emails from the far-flung outposts of the globe. Just how far-flung? Visa stamps accumulate from Costa Rica, Sardinia, Turkey, South Africa, India, Bangkok, and Cambodia. Cohen is the author and co-producer of the popular series of photographic essay coffee-table books of the 1980s known as the Day in the Life series. As he began to reach middle age, he felt the desire to purify [his] life and reclaim [his] old spirit. Cohen is blessed with an adventuresome wife already accustomed to world travel.

The Cohens barge through French wine country, sample cappuccino and pastries in Tuscany, roam the streets of Istanbul, tour wild game preserves in Zimbabwe, sleep with nomadic desert tribes in India, pick through the ruins at Angkor Wat, swim with dolphins in western Australia, float up the Mekong River into Laos, and watch the giant fireworks display during the British divestiture of Hong Kong. Throughout it all, regardless of discomfort or expense, the family thrives. The author paints a portrait of the beauty of travel and the excitement of the wide, wide world.

Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban is reminiscent of Bad Land, Raban’s 1996 treatise on the settlement of the Dakotas and the Montana territory. Like all good travel narratives, Passage to Juneau combines history, geography, natural science, memoir, and poetry. It is a moving depiction of the 1,000 mile-long Inside Passage from Puget Sound to Alaska. The Inside Passage is a waterway rich with dangerous reefs and whirlpools. But this did not deter its many travelers first Native Americans, and later explorers, fur traders, settlers, missionaries, anthropologists, fisherman, and finally tourists. Each had their own designs on this beautiful and haunted locale. The author is clearly at home in these waters, his yacht outfitted as both vessel and research library. Raban instructs the reader in many facets of sailing, as well as such esoteric topics as the formation of waves, the recognition of tide patterns, and the repeating ovoid patterns in Indian arts and crafts.

Raban shares with Barry Lopez and Paul Theroux the ability to make his reader feel part of a journey of exploration and discovery. His prose is compelling and his research thorough. Allowing an entire spring and summer for his voyage, Raban embarked from Seattle’s Fisherman’s Terminal to go fishing for reflections other people’s reflections, or so he thought at the time. He admits that he was unprepared for the catch he would eventually make.

Using the journals of Captain George Vancouver’s 1792-1794 voyages along the Pacific Northwest coast as the framework for his own travels, Raban plays cat-and-mouse with the 18th century and provides exhaustive detail about the history and sociology of the region. While descriptions of coastal settlements and protected harbors punctuate the narrative, Raban’s real subject is the sea itself, which he describes with such lyrical passages as, at the bottom of the whole animal hierarchy lay the ceaseless tumbling of the water in the basin, as it answered to the drag of the moon. Raban’s travels are interrupted by the declining health and eventual death of his father. Rather than ignore this event, the author seamlessly weaves it into this narrative, drawing comparisons between his own love of the sea and his father’s. By the end of the book, he comes to accept the words of Marcus Aurelius: Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight. Passage to Juneau is a stirring and informative tribute to the mystery of this breathtaking sea.

C. D. Sinclair is a writer and reviewer in Texas.

Geoffrey Moorhouse is the kind of writer who reminds you that "Travel Literature" not just "Travel Guides" used to be a prominent section in good bookstores.

Sydney: The Story of a City is beautifully written, casual, conversational, almost unobtrusively suffused with information, and wittily opinionated all at once. It adds to the picture-postcard view of Sydney an engrossing humanity and a sort of rude health that reminds us how young a city it is, founded notoriously as a penal colony only in 1770.

Moorhouse’s sentences have a rare and seductive rhythm, and his adjectives a particular aptness. Consider the polish, and the visual acuity, of a simple vignette of the harbor traffic: "Ships arrive with superstructures rising abruptly in umpteen storeys like an apartment block; ships with the bulbous bow that became fashionable again after being out of favor for the best part of a century; ships so top-heavy with containers that they resemble a railway marshaling yard, and you wonder why they haven’t turned turtle in the latest storms; ships that are nothing more than boxes on keels, so unspeakably ugly that whoever drew up the blueprints must have thought they were being asked to design a septic tank; ships that have become floating advertisements with their owner’s name flashed ostentatiously along the side an unthinkable vulgarity not so long ago." Not only that, but his masterful prose allows him to ramble from past to present, conveying astonishing amounts of fact and detail without ever seeming pedantic.

"It is still, but only just, possible to appreciate what terra australis looked like round here when the Aborigines had it all to themselves. To do so you need to go up the Parramatta River, where there are still small mangrove swamps in Home Bush Bay and near Rydalmere, where duck and pelican, cormorant and sandpiper flourish, just as they did when they were hunted to keep aboriginal hunger at bay; or you must go some distance north of the city, where the Hawkesbury River winds down to the sea at Broken Bay, through hundreds of square miles of national park and its blessedly unexploited bush. . . . [R]oots and fruits were abundant here, together with witchhetty grubs which could be found in rotting trees trunks and were regarded as a great delicacy when lightly grilled." Moorhouse is no respecter of church or state, unless either earns it; he takes shrewd and unshakable aim at the selfish, the aggrandizing and the prejudiced of town and gown and chalice. But he is also unstinting in his admiration of the generous and far-sighted, and unusually imaginative in his portraits of some of the complex and contradictory figures in Australian history. He peeks in at the Parliament, with its very English habit of exquisitely insulting circumlocutions.

He makes palpable the idiosyncratic pleasures (and shadows) of national holidays, from the we’re-all-green over-indulgences of St. Patrick’s Day to the solemnity of Anzac Day, a veterans’ day salute to the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps forces slaughtered at Gallipoli in 1915.

And he conveys the sense of physical energy that pervades the city. The host city for the Olympic Games in September, Sydney is famously sports mad: cricket, horse racing (there are 11 tracks), greyhound racing, American and Australian rules football, rugby league and rugby union, golf and bowling, basketball, soccer and, swimming, and surfing (despite the many hazards of freak tides, deadly sea snakes, sharks, and Portuguese man Ôo war jellyfish). Moorhouse manages to explain how the adherents of these often internecine sporting traditions squabble, coexist, battle for attention and scramble for media coverage. Altogether, this is a book of chewy pleasures, witty, sympathetic, finely descriptive and thoroughly accessible and it demands a suitable wine. The nearest wine region to Sydney is the Hunter Valley, and from that area Rosemount produces unpushy but broadly aromatic Semillons, with a softness to the texture often likened to lanolin but more like mango juice. Although the ordinary Semillons are good, and bargain-priced, the vintage wines, such as the 1996 Show Reserve (about $17) begin with a clearwater stoniness, turn a neat ankle of white peach and honey cream and ring down the curtain with a lingering, palate-cleansing almond. A showstopper.

P.S. If you are going to the Olympics, you might get a kick out of the DK Eyewitness Travel Guide Deluxe Gift Edition: Sydney (Dorling Kindersley, $40, ISBN 0789456443). In addition to DK’s usual lush, full-color format and intriguing historical tidbits (and hotel and restaurant info, of course), the special version has a plastic case, wallet-sized info cards and a take-along map.

Eve Zibart is a restaurant critic for the Washington Post. This column reflects her dual interests in travel and wine.

Ex-rocker finds rhythm in Spain Just when you thought the wave of Year in Provence/Under the Tuscan Sun-style memoirs of psychically unfettered urbanites retreating to soul-satisfying rusticity had peaked, comes an even weirder sub-trend: Recovering rock’n’rollers-turned-journalists who head off to even more rustic backwaters to get in touch with their roots or their rugby muscles. Let us reassure you: After these two columns last month’s review of sometime Lloyd Cole sideman/London Times staffer Lawrence Donegan’s brief Irish sojourn and this month’s gloss of onetime Genesis drummer-cum-travel writer Chris Stewart’s hopefully more permanent move to southern Spain we will abjure the genre forever. Unless Eric Clapton takes up the laptop and removes to Hokkaido.

The reason for such a precautionary rant is that Stewart’s book, Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Andalucia suffers from an excruciating self-consciousness that grates through the entire first third of the story. One cannot help but suspect some trend-jumping agent or editor persuaded Stewart to back into his story with an uncharacteristically clumsy preface.

Covering his discovery of the picturesque El Valero, a mountain farm in the heart of Andalucian sheep country, and more extensively his relationship with the farm’s former owner, the manipulative Pedro, it’s probably meant to be self-deprecatingly humorous: The narrator rube, taken advantage of by the wily peasant, learns humility and is accepted into the village scheme. Unfortunately, both the pattern and the posturing are so obvious that the reader longs for Pedro’s quick dispatch.

Fortunately, once Stewart’s long-suffering wife Ana takes possession and Pedro retreats, Stewart’s writing style relaxes, becomes descriptive rather than theatrical, and the countryside, and the village, start to come alive. In spring the blossoming of the orange trees takes you unawares. At first only a pale haze becomes apparent across the dark green of the leaves. . . . Then all of a sudden the buds are transformed into exquisite white five-petalled stars, radiating from cream-yellow pistils and stamens. The scent is delicate and heady, and when each tree becomes a mass of white flowers an almost tangible mist of orange blossom hangs in the air. The book is primarily anecdotal, without much of the history or culture of Tuscan Sun, but it’s a quick and pleasant read. Improbably, Stewart, who only spent a year with Genesis back in the late ’60s, has over the years made a side living as a sheepshearer for hire, a trade that ultimately brings him into the social fold. Some of the most effective and affectionate chapters deal with his acquisition and training by, rather than of his own sheep. As Stewart’s story unfolds, the almost serendipitous restoration of the two-hut farm, the creation of running water, the enduring of seasonal extremes, the plantings and preservings and mistakes and successes become increasingly endearing.

The episodic nature of the book is enhanced by the chapter headings real snapshots from the Stewarts’ scrapbooks and the birth of their daughter Chloe is the book’s dramatic high point. They are there still, amid the ibex, the foxes, the snakes, stoats, weasels, martens, wild cats, rats, their lambs, their friends, the guests who stay in their now-habitable outbuildings, and so on. One can only say that the self-exiled drummer seems to have found his true rhythm. Although there is very good Spanish wine to be had, somehow the setting of Stewart’s reveries, the mix of ancient and primitive and not-quite-modern, seems more evocative of a Chilean wine. While the latest wave of Chilean prestige labels can be pricey (the Mondavi-Vina Errazuriz Cabernet called Sena goes for $50, as does the Concha y Torres-Mouton-Rothschild collaboration Almaviva), most Chilean wines are far more inexpensive, and impressive. Consistently among the best are the wines of Casa Lapostolle, from the (Grand) Marigny-Lapostolle family. (Say la post hole, not ‘sto-lay.) The non-vintage wines are bright, clear and self-assured, making them great table wines; but the Cuvee Alexandre vintages put similarly priced wines to shame. Look especially for the ’96 wines, either the Cabernet Sauvignon or the Merlot, both of which can be had for about $16, and get at least a case.

Richly colored, moderately fruity and with notes of fragrant wood, bay, anis, and something like smoldering sage, the cab can be drunk as a dinner wine now or put down for a truly embracing wine in three or four years. The Merlot is already jammy, with black cherry, currant, even a sort of wild-rose mystery a seductive swirl with a layered and plushy finish.

Eve Zibart is a restaurant critic for the Washington Post. This column reflects her dual interests in travel and wine.

Readers familiar with William Least Heat-Moon’s sojourns will welcome this latest addition to his works. Heat-Moon drove a van across America’s back roads in Blue Highways, then walked around and through a part of Kansas in PrairyErth. Like the two books that precede it, River Horse is the story of a journey, this one across America by boat. As he did in its predecessors, Heat-Moon intersperses his narrative with bits from other books here, Lewis and Clark’s writings join those of Washington Irving, among others. These excerpts constantly remind readers that travel writings tell not only the story of a trip, but also explain its ramifications and context. River Horse the English translation of the Osage name of Heat-Moon’s boat, Nikawa begins in New Jersey, as its skipper heads northward with his mate, Pilotis. Pilotis is a compilation of several different people who joined Nikawa’s travels. Heat-Moon avoids any gender-specific pronouns when referring to Pilotis, so readers come to view his mate as a near-mythical friend and helper. River Horse is as much concerned with the people as with the waters. As Heat-Moon writes, As if an old tar, Pilotis sang pieces of song, some of them one chorus more than necessary, but I knew the river was at last full upon my friend. The towns through which Nikawa travels also play a large role in its voyage. Heat-Moon and Pilotis help one Missouri town through a flood, eat in diners, and tell successions of disbelieving strangers their planned route from Atlantic to Pacific. Like Blue Highways and PrairyErth, River Horse depends upon the events and places within. Heat-Moon spins tales of Pittsburgh, Wheeling, West Virginia, and smaller towns such as Vevay, Indiana, and Mobridge, South Dakota. Each place holds a different story as Nikawa motors along.

As in his other work, Heat-Moon’s lyrical descriptions illuminate the landscape. He writes of birds the Nikawa passed: It was a cool morning of hovering ospreys dropping to trawl their claws across the river, of magpies descending from the sage hills, mergansers taking off in their distinct tippy-toe, killdeer running along the few dry shoals . . . It was a winged morning. Throughout River Horse, Heat-Moon treats the reader to such poetic views, from sea to sea.