Bestsellers of 2008
Top Travel Narrative & Armchair Travel Books of 2008
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1. Chinglish: Found in Translation
by Oliver Lutz Radtke
Chinglish offers a humorous and insightful look at misuses of the English language in Chinese street signs, products, and advertising. A long-standing favorite of English speaking tourists and visitors, Chinglish is now quickly becoming a culture relic.
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2. Smile When You’re Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer
by Chuck Thompson
From Bangkok to Bogota, a hilarious behind-the-brochures tour of picture-perfect locales, dangerous destinations, and overrated hellholes from a guy who knows the truth about travel. Travel writer, editor, and photographer Chuck Thompson has spent more than a decade traipsing through thirty-five (and counting) countries across the globe, and he’s had enough.
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3. Transit Maps of the World
written by Mark Ovenden, edited by Mike Ashworth
Transit Maps of the World is the first and only comprehensive collection of historic and current maps of every rapid-transit system on earth. Using glorious, colorful graphics, Mark Ovenden traces the history of mass transit – including rare and historic maps, diagrams, and photographs, some available for the first time since their original publication.
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4. The Widow Clicquot
by Tilar J. Mazzeo
In The Widow Clicquot, Tilar J. Mazzeo brings to life – for the first time – the fascinating woman behind the iconic yellow label: Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin. She was a daring and determined entrepreneur, a bold risk taker, and an audacious and intelligent woman who took control of her own destiny when fate left her on the brink of financial ruin.
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5. Three Cups of Tea
by Greg Mortenson
One man’s mission to promote peace…one school at a time. The astonishing, uplifting story of a real-life Indiana Jones and his humanitarian campaign to use education to combat terrorism in the Taliban’s backyard.
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6. The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the English
by Sarah Lyall
Sarah Lyall, a reporter for The New York Times, moved to London in the mid-1990s. She came to terms with its eccentric inhabitants (the English husband who never turned on the lights, the legislators who behaved like drunken frat boys, the hedgehog lovers, the people who extracted their own teeth), and found she had a ringside seat at a singular transitional era in British life.
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7. The Flaneur: A Stroll Through The Paradoxes of Paris
by Edmund White
A flaneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through a city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search of adventure, esthetic, or erotic. Edmund White, who lived in Paris for sixteen years, wanders through the streets and avenues and along the quays, taking us into parts of Paris virtually unknown to visitors and indeed to many Parisians.
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8. My Life in France
by Julia Child, with Alex Prud’homme
This delightful memoir of Julia’s years in Paris, Marseille, and Provence opens with Paul and Julia – a tall, wide-eyed girl from Pasadena who can’t cook and doesn’t speak a word of French – disembarking in Le Havre, and ends with the launching of the two Mastering cookbooks and with Julia winning the heart of America as “The French Chef.”
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9. Out Stealing Horses
by Per Petterson
Set in the easternmost region of Norway, Out Stealing Horses begins with an ending. Sixty-seven-year-old Trond has settled into a rustic cabin in an isolated area to live the rest of his life with a quiet deliberation. A meeting with his only neighbor, however, forces him to reflect on one fateful summer.
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10. Landmark Herodotus: The Histories
written by Herodotus, edited by Robert B. Strassler
Ten years in the making, The Landmark Herodotus gives us a new translation by Andrea L. Purvis that makes this remarkable work of literature more accessible than ever before. Illustrated, annotated, and filled with maps, this edition also includes twenty-one appendices written by scholars at the top of their fields.
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11. God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre
by Richard Grant
Part gonzo misadventure, part cultural history, God’s Middle Finger explores a fascinating land–the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico–where few outsiders are foolish enough to venture.
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12. The Conde Nast Traveler Book of Unforgettable Journeys: Great Writers on Great Places
Travel writing maintains its seemingly endless popularity, and this volume offers a particularly transporting body of work, pairing exotic locales with writers of the highest caliber.
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13. Eat Memory: Great Writers at the Table, A Collection of Essays from the New York Times
edited by Amanda Hesser
New York Times Magazine food editor Amanda Hesser has showcased the food-inspired recollections of some of America’s leading writers in the magazine. Eat, Memory collects the twenty-six best stories and recipes to accompany them.
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14. Travelers’ Tales the Best Women’s Travel Writing 2008
edited by Lucy McCauley
This title presents stimulating, inspiring, and just plain wild adventures from women who have traveled to the ends of the earth to discover new places, peoples, and facets of themselves. The common threads connecting these stories are a woman’s perspective; fresh, lively storytelling; and compelling narrative that makes the reader laugh, weep, wish she was there, or be glad she wasn’t.
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15. Shadow of the Silk Road
by Colin Thubron
Making his way by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart and camel, the author travels from the tomb of the Yellow Emperor, the mythic progenitor of the Chinese people, to the ancient port of Antioch– in perhaps the most difficult and ambitious journey he has undertaken in forty years of travel.
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16. Islamic Design: A Genius for Geometry
by David Sutton
Focusing on Islamic geometric patterns, simple and complex, man-made and in nature, this book offers unique insight into Islamic culture. Harmony is central.
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17. Unaccustomed Earth
by Jhumpa Lahiri
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lahiri delivers eight dazzling stories that take readers from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life.
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18. The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World
by Eric Weiner
The author takes readers on a whirlwind tour of countries that are quietly pursuing the most American of obsessions – the pursuit of happiness – or, in the crabby author’s case, moments of “un-unhappiness.” Weiner doesn’t profess to know what happiness is, but with a mixture of psychological insight, scientific research, geopolitical analysis and wry humor, he successfully shows us where happiness is.
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19. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun
by Peter Godwin
Award winning author and journalist Peter Godwin writes with pathos and intimacy about Zimbabwe’s spiral into chaos and, along with it, his family’s steady collapse.
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20. The 10 Best of Everything: An Ultimate Guide for Travelers
by National Geographic
Scores of experts name the 10 best islands, poshest pubs and polo clubs, best things to do on Sundays afternoons in the world’s best cities, and a treasure trove of musts for the high-end traveler or anyone who aspires to be.
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21. Walking the Gobi
by Helen Thayer
At the age of 63, Helen Thayer fulfilled her lifelong dream of crossing Mongolia’s Gobi Desert. Walking the Gobi takes readers on a trip through a little-known landscape and introduces them to the culture of the nomadic people whose ancestors have eked out an existence in the Gobi for thousands of years.
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22. The Last Polar Bear: Facing the Truth of a Warming World
by Steven Kazlowski
Over the course of the last six years, wildlife photographer Steven Kazlowski has photographed the polar bear in its wild habitat, from Hershel Island in Canada to Point Hope in Alaska. The Last Polar Bear pairs his intimate images with anecdotes about his Arctic adventures, as well as authoritative essays about the polar bear in the context of climate change.
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23. What Is the What
by Dave Eggers
What Is the What is a novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng who, along with thousands of other children–the so-called Lost Boys–was forced to leave his village in Sudan at the age of seven and trek hundreds of miles by foot, pursued by militias, government bombers, and wild animals, crossing the deserts of three countries to find freedom.
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24. Metro Stop Paris
by Gregor Dallas
Metro Stop Paris recounts the extraordinary and colorful history of the City of Light, by way of twelve Metro stops–-a voyage across both space and time. At each stop a Parisian building, or street, or tomb, or landmark sparks a story that holds particular significance for that area of the city.
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25. Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar
by Paul Theroux
Thirty years after his classic work The Great Railway Bazaar, one of the world’s most acclaimed travel writers recreates his 25,000-mile journey through eastern Europe, central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, China, Japan, and Siberia. In the three decades since Theroux made this trip, the world he recorded in that book has undergone phenomenal change.
