Globe Corner Blogs

There are not many occasions when following a guide book feels like taking advice from a native, but Fiona Caulfield accomplishes the impossible, creating a compendium of  ”better than a native” suggestions in the Love Guides for India. An Australian native, she has made India her home. Given our ongoing obsession with the Love Guides and my recent trip to India, we decided to pick Fiona Caulfield’s brain for even more tips than her books already provide. Fiona Caulfield is officially our newest author crush.

1. Do you prefer aisle or window? (Please explain.)

Aisle, specifically an aisle in a middle row. I need freedom.

2. The Love Guides are incredibly detailed. How long did you travel in India before you started making them to compile your bank of insider information?

I first travelled to India in 1992, then again in 2001. I became a resident in India late 2004 with the idea for the brand and then published the first book in February 2007. It now takes about a year to research the first edition of a book.

3. The guidebooks themselves and the maps and drawings they contain are so charming. What gives you the inspiration for their design?

The design brief was sensuality and the content brief intimacy. I wanted the content to feel like I had written a letter to a good friend and the drawings to be like a sketch I would include in a letter, if I could draw. Continue Reading »

The huge metropolis known as Delhi is overwhelming, chaotic, and bombarding – even for the most experienced traveller. But the Love Delhi guidebook by Fiona Caulfield seeks out the lovely, the hip, and the local places. It’s easy to get frustrated deciphering what’s worth seeing on a visit, but, delving into Delhi armed with the Love Guides, I seemed always to find myself in some beautiful and unknown territory.

Caulfield’s focus on the local and organic businesses of Delhi not only promotes sustainability, but also makes discovering the ever-coveted small, quaint spots easy to find. Destination attractions are listed and reviewed, but Caulfield recommends temples, restaurants, clubs, and bars that aren’t in other guidebooks. Following Caulfield’s directions, I skipped the temples I knew would be tourist ridden and headed to a temple a few minutes south of the city. At this point in the trip, after Kathmandu Valley in Nepal and Jaipur and surrounding Rajasthan, I had already visited countless temples, but these vivid colors are forever imprinted in my mind. This temple had checkered floors, towering pillars, colors that rivaled the street vendors in old Delhi, and a towering, fifty-plus foot statue of Hanuman, the monkey god. Encountering no other foreigners here, I wandered, marveled, and filled up my camera’s memory card. Continue Reading »

Told simply and beautifully, Laura Fraser’s memoir “All Over the Map” spans nearly ten years of her life and numerous trips around the globe.  Fraser experiences various forms of travel from leisurely food tasting trips in the Aeolian Islands to uncovering the lingering trauma of the Rwandan genocide.  Throughout it all, Fraser’s wanderlust guides her from one spectacular adventure to the next.  But when her post-divorce love tells her in Oaxaca that he intends to marry another, Fraser realizes that it may not be so easy to balance the thrills of travel with the need for companionship.

Single and over forty, she continues both exploring the world and searching for love.  When in Samoa, however, Fraser has a terrible experience that makes her fear one of her greatest passions in life: travel.  Only the comfort of family and friends and the passage of time helps rekindle Fraser’s desire to journey through foreign lands.  Gradually, she picks up where she left off, and soon her life is again full of exotic places and interesting encounters.

During the course of the book, Fraser is constantly learning more about herself, the world, and her own niche within it.  She adjusts her life accordingly, and at last finds the equilibrium she has sought all along.  It does not come from any external source or a new romance.  Instead, it comes from deep inside her, constructed out of the bits of wisdom Fraser has acquired over the years from people and places all over the map.

In reading this book it is possible to learn about fascinating cultures around the world and the universal experiences of the writer’s personal life.  Fraser does not attempt to be overly charming or amusing with funny travel tales and jokes.  Her tone is completely natural, and her story is real and thoughtfully rendered.  Recently, I have been reading a number of travel books by female authors, and so far this one is my favorite!

After a Kafka-esque divorce followed by a passionate relationship gone afoul, Elizabeth Gilbert decides to dedicate a whole year to herself: exploring pleasure in Italy; discovering spirituality in an Indian ashram; and finally, balancing the two on the Indonesian island Bali. Having spent nearly her entire adult life in and out of love with boyfriends and her husband, Gilbert realizes in her early thirties, in the midst of an emotional crisis, that it is high time to delve into her own depths. Her memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, chronicles her journey. Continue Reading »

Three women, all in their late twenties, struggle to balance careers and relationships. Work deadlines, happy hours, caffeinated beverages, and workouts at the gym fill their fast-paced, over-scheduled New York City lives. That is, until they up and decide to take a year-long, round-the-world trip. Starting in South America, they travel to Africa, then to Asia, ending with Australia and New Zealand. Then, they turned their experiences into a book – The Lost Girls: Three Friends. Four Continents. One Unconventional Detour Around the World, by Jennifer Baggett, Holly C. Corbett, and Amanda Pressner.

The story is filled with romance and adventure. Together, Holly, Jen, and Amanda hike the Inca Trail, try medicine from an Amazonian shaman, party at a Brazilian favela, write a play in Kenya, visit a Laotian spa, go surfing in Australia, and bungee jump 440 feet into a river valley in New Zealand. Continue Reading »

On Sept 10th, the White House announced that Army Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta (one of the soldiers profiled in Sebastian Junger‘s most recent book War) will become the first American soldier since the Vietnam War to receive the Medal of Honor non-posthumously, the nation’s highest award for valor in combat. Giunta was honored for his courage in pulling two wounded soldiers to safety while under enemy fire, and then single-handedly rescuing a third critically wounded squad-mate who was being dragged away from the battle by Taliban fighters. He is just one of the many soldiers of Battle Company whom the reader meets in Junger’s gripping and immersive account of his year embedded with a paratroop company in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.  The section of War that describes the firefight for which then-specialist Giunta received the Medal of Honor occurs mid-way through the book and showcases Junger’s in-depth prose style. Continue Reading »

A cane toad nestled in the sand. A freshly hatched, emerald and turquoise moth moving away from its empty cocoon. Then, the intent face of a swimming monkey. A flashy arrangement of Macaws on a wall of a sandy shore. A sloth in its seemingly infinite crawl toward water. These are a few of the images that make up Amazonia, a book of photography compiled over five years by Sam Abell and Torben Ulrik Nissen for Oakwood Foundation.

The Amazon is a fascinating region not only because it is unique, but also because it is a remote, dangerous, and hard to reach place. Few people have witnessed its inner life precisely because of the challenges that a journey there presents. When we think about the Amazon, we imagine nothing less than a dramatic, larger-than-life place teeming with endangered species, but we rarely see the real picture. Knowing this, the authors of Amazonia stuck to a strict dogma of not using any kind of digital manipulation in the production of the images. Continue Reading »

Edited by Dennis Lehane, a native of Dorchester, Massachusetts and author of eight novels including Mystic River and Shutter Island, Boston Noir is a compilation of eleven short stories, snapshotting the lives of seemingly ordinary Bostonians who are all suffering in one way or another. Whether derived from loneliness, failure, suppressed anger, a hunger for power, love gone afoul, or haunting childhood memories, a sense of desperation torments the characters of these fast-paced thrillers.

Each story takes place in a different part of Boston, from Cambridge and North Quincy to Watertown and Boston Harbor. It may be the year 1745 or 2010. The reader gets a taste of the pressures and discrimination of the financial district hierarchy, the sexual crimes of a priest in Southie, and the mental breakdown of a former pop star residing in Beacon Hill. Together these stories create a fascinating mosaic of Boston society, past and present. Continue Reading »

For an author to be properly crushable, he must possess not only a pretty face, but impressive talent. Handsome hacks are not welcome on the Author Crush List. That said, Tom Rachman is pretty damn crushable.

Behind those dreamy eyes is a mind I’d love to get into. I’d like to know, for instance, how Rachman manages to slip so skillfully into the lives of eleven very different people. How does he know eleven different kinds of aspiration? Eleven different kinds of desperation? Eleven different kinds of loneliness? And how does he whip these stories into the portrait of a modern-day newsroom while also delivering the history of the paper from inception to present day? How does he write The Imperfectionists so perfectly?

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Lonely Planet recently held a contest to publicize the release of its new Discover series of guidebooks. Booksellers picked five books about a place of their choosing and briefly described why travelers should read their recommendations. And we’re pleased to announce (and brag!) that our very own staffer and blog favorite, Lisa, has won!

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