Books: Road Scholars

Travel writers used to know what they were doing. Hemingway was the model: bluff and swaggering, machete for a pen, wouldn't be caught dead in a fanny pack. But since Papa's time, travel writers have become either less macho or more honest or both. Now they're our fellow road worriers: jet-lagged, air enraged, lost their laptops three changes back, their dignity sometime before that.

In a way, it's a relief. Hemingway made you feel like a lazy chump for missing out on the running of the bulls in Pamplona, but the new breed of travel books gives you the oxymoronic pleasure of being both over there and back here at the same time. As Alain de Botton puts it in The Art of Travel (Pantheon; 272 pages), "We may best be able to inhabit a place when we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there." As travel books go, The Art of Travel is on the unconventional side. It isn't about traveling anywhere in particular; it's an extended philosophical riff on the act of traveling itself. De Botton's specialty is the metaphysics of everyday life--he is the thinking lad's Nick Hornby--and in The Art of Travel he takes on the how, the why and the what-it-all-means of wanderlust. Mining his own sometimes hapless experiences (watch for a fight of Nietzschean proportions with his girlfriend in a Barbados cafe), De Botton encourages us to savor the small pleasures of traveling: the funny spelling on a Dutch sign, a cypress tree in Provence that's straight out of a Van Gogh painting, or a stranger's kitchen glimpsed from a speeding train.

Tom Stone's The Summer of My Greek Taverna (Simon & Schuster; 250 pages) is concerned with pleasures of an earthier kind: food, drink, sun and sand. When a friend offers Stone a chance to run a restaurant on the tiny Greek island of Patmos, he jumps at it. He obviously hasn't heard the one about Greeks and gifts, and he soon discovers that his new job is less like Zorba the Greek and more like Kitchen Confidential with ouzo. Stone has to deal with tourists who party till dawn, fishermen who want their coffee at 7 a.m., gossipy locals who are afraid of the evil eye, and a partner who goes by the nickname O Lados (the Oily One). In the end, O Lados gets his just desserts, and so do we, in the form of a generous appendix of Stone's favorite Greek recipes.

And why leave home at all, when you can take it with you? Trailer Travel: A Visual History of Mobile America (Gibbs Smith; 157 pages), by Bryan Burkhart, Phil Noyes and Allison Arieff, is a celebration of the American fascination with mobile homes. Most of the photos here are promotional shots, but that simply cranks up the kitsch an extra notch: '50s-era nuclear children and busty, bouffant models--often in full evening wear--grin manically from the plush interiors of futuristic, tear-drop-shaped Kozy Coaches and Karriall Kampers, many of which look as if they were designed by Buck Rogers on acid. The authors admire their subject with very little irony, but you should feel free to bring your own. Trailer Travel is a glimpse of a moment in time, unimaginable now, when mobile homes were almost cool.