Roz Chast would like to introduce you to her most fascinating friend. But first, let her get you up to speed so you won’t embarrass yourself. The friend in question—New York City—may not seem so welcoming if you don’t know what those “West Side Story things” are (fire escapes) or that 25 West 43rd Street is an entirely different place than 25 East 43rd Street. So that you may be worthy of making acquaintance with her beloved hometown, veteran New Yorker cartoonist Chast offers a wry and entertaining guide that also conveys the actual information you need on your first visit to Manhattan.

Illustrated with Chast’s energetic, sketchy cartoons and occasional family photographs, Going into Town began as a tutorial for her suburb-raised daughter as she headed off to college with little idea of what a “block” was, let alone how to navigate the city’s subway system. Chast expanded it to include guidebook staples—how to find food, housing and entertainment—presented with a slightly twisted, New York sense of humor. Here you’ll learn practical things, like how the city’s grid of streets and avenues work, and gain insider knowledge, like why it’s wise to avoid boarding empty subway cars, no matter how invitingly spacious they seem. (Hint: That smell may be the least of your worries.)

Fans of Chast’s bestselling memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, will recognize and enjoy the unique blend of affection and sarcasm that Chast brings to her work while getting to know one of the world’s most famous cities.

This article was originally published in the October 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It takes a great deal of planning, support and courage to leave a life of comfort to travel around the world. But this is exactly what Kim Dinan and her husband, Brian, did. After saving their money, selling their belongings and quitting their jobs, they traveled to locales such as Ecuador, Peru, India, Nepal and Vietnam. The story of their transformative journey is chronicled beautifully in Dinan’s debut book, The Yellow Envelope: One Gift, Three Rules, and a Life-Changing Journey Around the World.

Before embarking on this powerful experience, Dinan was at a turning point. She wasn’t sure what she wanted; she just knew she wasn’t happy and wished to see the world. Happily, some generous friends give her and Brian a yellow envelope with $1,000 inside that they named the “Kim and Brian Yellow Envelope Fund.” They wanted the couple to help “make the world a better place” by giving the money away however they saw fit. As Dinan fondly describes, they “were asking us to be a conduit for their goodness.”

However, things don’t go exactly as Dinan had imagined in just about every way—from the places they visit to her relationship with Brian to the gifting of the Yellow Envelope money. Her brutal honesty is admirable, particularly when recounting her doubts, mistakes and mishaps in vivid detail. She doesn’t sugarcoat the situations they encounter that end up having life-changing ramifications for them both.

But there are many joys along with the missteps. These experiences help Dinan find inner peace and realize that she was already everything she needed to be. Having the Yellow Envelope made “ordinary interactions more meaningful,” teaching her how to give not just money, but of herself. The Yellow Envelope is an uplifting memoir of bravery and self-discovery.

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, December 2016

If you’re thinking about building a very big wall, why not start by reading Rory Stewart’s captivating new book, The Marches: A Borderland Journey between England and Scotland. In its first section, Stewart describes walking—occasionally accompanied by his then 89-year-old father—along Hadrian’s Wall, which the Romans built in Northern England to keep out the barbarians. A student of the wall’s history, Stewart knows that it was for centuries garrisoned by a remarkably diverse set of soldiers and their families, including “Tigris barge-men from Iraq.” What, then, does it really mean to be a Briton, a Scot or an Englishman?

At the time of Stewart’s first walk along the thousand-mile length of the border, Scotland was about to hold a referendum on whether to leave the United Kingdom. A vote to leave would mean that Stewart, recently elected to Parliament from a district in Northern England, and his father, Brian, a proud Scottish Highlander who has spent his career working for the British Empire, would live in different nations.

The meaning and history of borders and national identities is something he ponders during a longer walk recounted in the second section of the book. Stewart, who wrote about his 2002 walk across Afghanistan in the brilliant bestseller The Places in Between, has complicated, sometimes contradictory experiences, all framed by encounters with people who live in the Marches. He longs for the bucolic landscapes described by Wordsworth and is disillusioned by the wilder landscapes that environmentalists have succeeded in restoring. Which of these is the real English landscape? It seems to depend on when you start your timeline.

Time is one of the chief concerns of the third and final section of the book, because at 93 years of age, Stewart’s father is dying. Stewart writes movingly and honestly about his father, who was 50 when Rory was born but possessed a remarkable vigor and a keen interest in his son that readers will feel throughout the narrative. It’s a fitting end to this powerful exploration of personal and national lineages and landscapes.

This article was originally published in the December 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

For those who may find it hard to accomplish their goals in a day’s time—or, as in this case, a year—we can be grateful that, according to an ancient Hawaiian legend, Maui lassoed the sun and made it promise to slow down its trek across the sky, so that his mother could get her work done. Be glad, too, that Mark Woods won a year’s sabbatical from his newspaper job to visit 15 national parks, a journey he shares in Lassoing the Sun. It becomes a dazzling experience indeed, one that honors the memory of his own mother and her inspiring love of the parks.

From sunrise on January 1 atop Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park in Maine, to sunset on December 31 on a volcano rim in Haleakala National Park in Hawaii, Woods serves as guide and guru as the National Park Service celebrates its first 100 years. The anniversary comes laden with questions about the future of the parks. What’s the best way to manage wildlife? How can the parks be protected from potentially destructive private interests, like uranium mining near the Grand Canyon? Will light pollution rob parks of their starry skies? How many climbers on Yosemite’s Half Dome are too many? Will rising seas doom Dry Tortugas National Park? What if the parks become irrelevant?

Woods folds these big questions around his own midlife angst and grief over his mother’s dying days near her beloved Saguaro National Park. Remembering his family’s past trips to the parks, and bringing along his wife and daughter as he revisits them, Woods weaves a timeline that traverses generations, raising more challenges for the future every step of the way.
 

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

You may not have heard of Geoff Dyer, but this novelist, critic and essayist has been called "one of our most original writers," and indeed his writing is unique, with titles ranging from Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It and Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush. Born in Great Britain and currently living and teaching in Los Angeles, Dyer takes readers on a tour of both the world and his intriguing mind in White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World.

In nine essays interspersed with short vignettes, Dyer recounts journeys like his trip to Gauguin's Tahiti, where he "soon came to see that the real art of the Marquesas, and of Polynesia, generally, was tattooing." During a tour of Beijing's Forbidden City, he develops a crush on a young woman named Li, whom he assumes is a guide. She isn't―but she does her best to act as one. Similarly, Dyer's observations are by no means full of the usual travel guide stuff; instead, they tend to be full of unexpected details, diversions, and detours.

Dyer sums up his mission like this: "trying to work out what a certain place―a certain way of marking the landscape―means; what it's trying to tell us; what we go to it for."

"Northern Dark" tells of Dyer's trip to see the Norway's Northern Lights with his wife Jessica, which doesn't go well, and includes the line, "Why have we come to this hellhole?" "White Sands" begins with a brief discussion of his visit to the New Mexico monument, but morphs into a riveting account of picking up a hitchhiker and then passing a sign that says, "NOTICE/DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS/DETENTION FACILITIES IN AREA."

The book's last essay is a bit of a departure, but a fitting conclusion to a book that's so much about inner reactions to the outside world. Dyer describes his experience of having a mild stroke and its aftermath, prompting him to conclude: "Life is so interesting I'd like to stick around forever, just to see what happens, how it all turns out."

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, January 2016

In The Road to Little Dribbling, as in all of Bill Bryson’s travel books, you can be assured of two constants: first, that your guide is a sensualist who immerses himself (and thus, the reader) in all the sights, sounds, smells and tastes he encounters on his wanderings; and second, that along the way he will spot surprises, incongruities and contradictions that he obligingly transmutes into laughter. On this pilgrimage, he invites us to join him as he zigzags the length of Britain, from Bognor Regis in the south to Cape Wrath in the north. (There is, by the way, no Little Dribbling.)

This is not a walking tour, although Bryson is often afoot. At other times he resorts to rail or car. Whatever his vehicle, he takes us to dozens of visit-worthy places we might otherwise never have heard of. Among these are the ancient, man-made Silbury Hill, a 10-story earthen mound near Avebury, and the equally puzzling prehistoric stone towers (or “brochs”) in Glenelg, Scotland, whose purpose has yet to be fathomed.

“There isn’t anywhere in the world with more to look at in a smaller space,” Bryson asserts, noting that Britain has 26 World Heritage Sites and 600,000 known archaeological sites. No detail seems too tiny to escape his eye. In Wales, he notices that the main story on the front page of the local newspaper that reported Dylan Thomas’ death was not about the young bard’s passing but rather about the “mysterious disappearance of a farm couple.”

Bryson’s wry wit abounds. He describes a particularly slow train as “rigor mortis with scenery” and observes that a town in which he finds no charm was “bombed heavily during the Second World War, though perhaps not quite heavily enough.” The history of the Scottish highlands, he reflects, is “five hundred years of cruelty and bloodshed followed by two hundred years of way too much bagpipe music.” Could one hope for a better traveling companion?

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Call it the male answer to Eat, Pray, Love. 

Alex Sheshunoff was running a not-particularly-successful Internet startup in the late 1990s when he decided to walk away from it all: his Manhattan apartment, his girlfriend, his world. A health scare had landed him in the emergency room, where he vowed to turn his life upside down if he survived.

“I’d been screwing up my life, I thought, pissing away years on this failing company, this failing relationship, this . . . materialistic city and its dead-end ideas of success, this hope that enough hours at work could make me rich, my parents proud, and democracy stronger,” Sheshunoff writes.

His plan, as much as he had one, was to find paradise and move there. To give this journey a little more heft, he would read 100 great books while traveling. He started where any 20-something probably would: He googled “nice Pacific island” and eventually found a message on a travel site pointing him to an island called Yap. 

Sheshunoff traveled to Yap, which was interesting in that the island’s residents used enormous round stones as currency and the women all went topless. But it was not quite paradise. He meandered on to other hot, tiny islands with names like Pig and Tinian, making some quirky friends along the way. It was on the island of Koror, in the Republic of Palau, that he met Sarah. They hiked, they kayaked, they swam with jellyfish, and bit by bit, they fell in love. 

A Beginner’s Guide to Paradise is extraordinarily entertaining, one part guidebook to two parts love story. This heartfelt account reveals what can happen when you leave everything behind—and find more than you ever hoped for.

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

There was no major emergency that motivated John Marshall to uproot his family for six months of global volunteer work. It was lots of little things: declining intimacy with his wife of 20 years; the desire for quality time with their teenagers; and a general sense of boredom at work. Their travels do change their lives, in ways both expected and highly surprising.

In Wide-Open World, Marshall describes their quest with self-​effacing humor. He’s the first to admit the family did poorly at their first stop, a wildlife sanctuary in Costa Rica, and he has the multiple monkey bites to prove it. Time spent in New Zealand seems dreamlike in its beauty, and the family’s work in a small orphanage in India creates bonds that prove unbreakable even after the story ends.

It’s inspiring to see how Marshall’s kids gain confidence and a new perspective on the world, as well as appreciation for a day’s honest labor. He breaks down the journey’s specific expenses and confesses to starting his research by googling “volunteer” plus the name of a country, to make it clear that if this idea appeals to you, it’s well within reach.

Wide-Open World is an adventure made up of countless small moments of human connection. It’s an armchair travelogue that may well inspire you to do good off the beaten path.

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.