Mark Twain and the Swiss Family Robinson

May’s theme for the classics was “Adventure”, as I paired Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain with The Swiss Family Robinson.     Twain’s former is  a collection more than a monograph, as he presents together his recollections of growing up on the Mississippi as a pilot in training,  parts of Huckleberry Finn, and a telling of a late re-visit to the river when he was an accomplished author.  It’s certainly educational, especially when read in conjunction with a tool like GoogleMaps.    Commenting on the mercurial nature of the river, Twain explains how often the river shifts its course, and points out that one town (“Delta”) which used to be a harbor town now sits inland.    Delta is now a ghost town, but a nearby oxbow lake  shows where the river once ran. (Just for curiosity, I traced the Mississippi all the way from the gulf to its headwaters in search of similar cases. I had to stop counting the oxbow lakes after a while.)    The demands placed upon pilots to memorize the river, its daily variances, its every crossing – are almost too much to believe, but Twain insists that it was so. By the time he visits as an adult, the pilot’s job has been made much easier through bouys and signals and the like. The second part is more forgettable.

On to The Swiss Family Robinson. Believe it or not, I have never seen any movies based on this, or read the book; beyond a family crashing on a remote island and building a treehouse, I knew nothing of the subject.    The book was penned in response to the popularity of Robinson Caruso,  hence the name; it follows a family  of survivors rather than a solitary outcast.  Although the family will spend over ten years on the island  before a ship encounters them, they’re extraordinarily lucky.  Not only were they able to salvage the holdings of a colony ship for their own use, but the “island” they land has such a staggering abundance of improbable life  (fauna from other hemispheres, even) that after a while one must conclude it was the private game reserve of some distant millionaire.    This south seas island does not merely have the usual suspects like colorful birds, monkeys, and turtles.  It has pretty much everything but a moose, and those in the mood for venison can just go after some of the buffalo.  The island is similarly well set for fauna and other resources, between the salt caves, the India rubber trees, and the potato fields. Even more lucky for the family, their father is a walking encyclopedia on animals and engineering, so not when  he's not building bridges, winches and the like, he’s  telling the children all about the wildlife.    It’s very informative, and would be enormously fun to read as a kid, I think,  but the amount  of creatures running around defies belief. 

Tip of the Iceberg

Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier
© 2018 Mark Adams
336 pages

In 1899, railroad tycoon Edward Harriman organized a multidisciplinary expedition to Alaska, bringing with him some of the best scientists and artists in America. They sailed -- or rather, steamed -- their way around the coast of Alaska, pushing as far north as possible.  Over a century later, Mark decided to repeat their journey,   to discover for himself the stirring beauty of America's 'last frontier', and to compare his experience with those of Harriman's. The result is a winsome mix of history, nature writing, and travel that concludes with Adams' urgent message to readers: if you want to see Alaska,   go now, because  it's a land continually re-created, and even now many of its places are melting away, are being reclaimed by the sea, or likewise stand on the brink of transformation.

The Alaska witnessed by Mark Adams here is, in every respect, an utterly beautiful place -- and a strange one, where people are often more dependent on the ocean and bush pilots for transportation, where a given town's entire population fishes for their own food. In its remoteness, self-sufficiency,  and  scorn for Outside oversight, Alaska fully lives up to its motto of the Frontier state.  I could not help but think of the American west when reading this, or of the eastern frontier even earlier in American history.  There is danger in that isolation; bears are a common menace, and Alaskans actually experience the majority of earthquakes within the United States.  They're more at risk from tusnamis, too; while Hawaaians may have several hours warning of a tsunami, Alaskans may only have minutes to prepare.  To the beauty of the landscape -- the mountains, glaciers, and wilderness expanses --  Adams adds historical interest not only by retelling the story of the Harriman expedition, but pointing to its effects. The conservation movement was born around this same period, urged on not only by near-mystics like John Muir, but by would-be hunters in the form of Harriman and Theodore Roosevelt.  (Roosevelt wanted to go to Alaska, but that bum McKinley got himself shot, so TR had to be president, instead.)

Although I've never previously been interested in Alaska, Tip of the Iceberg has made it a far more compelling place, both for its natural grandeur and its culture.

Talking to the Ground

Talking to the Ground: One Family's Journey on Horseback Across the Sacred Land of the Navajo
© 1995 Douglas Preston
284 pages

"How does the trail look?" Christine asked.
"Ask me at the bottom,"  I said, feeling a certain queasiness in my stomach. There was no turning back; we had to get to the water, and the water was down there, at the base of Hoskinninni Mesa. There was a short silence.
"You want to rest longer?" Frank asked.
Christine jerked her lead rope knot-free and pulled her horse around.
"Hell no," she said, "Let's get this over with."
I thought, I'm marrying a woman who has far more courage than I do.

p. 75

Last year I read Douglas Preston's excellent Cities of Gold, his re-tracing the steps of Spanish explorers of North America, complete with horses and occasional disasters. While staying in Flagstaff in April this year, I discovered a sequel to that work, Talking to the Ground. Here, Preston, his fiance, and his soon-to-be- stepdaughter travel across Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico as they follow a journey from Navajo legend, riding in the shadow of four sacred mountains.  If Cities of Gold mixed  horse travel and history, Talking to the Ground does the same for travel and mythology. All of the locales Preston and his family ride to are introduced in the creation myth of the Navajo, in which a being called Monster Slayer had to rid the world of horrific monsters born of a prolonged war between the sexes; the  geologic formations are considered the remains of the monsters, and of the monster slayer and his sibling.

Although Preston, his wife, and their daughter Selene do not encounter nearly as much peril and problems as Preston did on his previous trip,  this is no easy lope. As before, Preston and his fellow riders carry everything necessary with them, and plan their trip  with a strict eye as to where they can find water.   There were no telephones,  no ranger stations, no safety net:  if horses fell attempting to navigate down a hillside, or the family was caught by surprise by hail or dust storms,  they were on their own.  Perhaps because Preston still carried his experience from the previous trip, the family encounters few troubles beyond days in which water is far too scarce for their and their horses's liking; they often journey in rain, but  not a horse escapes (a constant problem in Cities of Gold) or is injured.     The meat of this book is less travel misadventures than Preston's retelling of stories from Navajo mythology and history, offered both as what he knows, and as he receives it while visiting with people -- Navajo families and individuals eking out a living for themselves  still -- along the way. Everyone is surprised to encounter this family traveling along  horseback, as most tourists arrive by car and roar off as quickly as they arrive.

A common theme of the conversations is how strongly the Navajo feel themselves connected to their land -- sustained by it, not just from the food it produces with their care but by its very existence. They explain its importance to Preston as like the Bible or the Constitution: the land is the bedrock of te Navajo experience. Without it, they have no life, no identity. The horrifying misery of the Long Walk is recounted here, an episode of early foreign policy blundering as the American government decided to solve the problem of New Mexican-Navajo inter-raiding by clearing out the Navajo and forcing them to march across the land and make a new life for themselves in a barren place with only marginal supplies, creating an effective concentration camp in the wilderness  with conditions so gruesome that the government did the unthinkable and admitted the mistake. Over and over again the Navajo muse that the mysterious collapse of another people -- the Anasazi -- may about to repeat itself as heedless development and consumption play havoc with natural cycles and hasten collapse.

While this  horse journey across the Southwest didn't have nearly the same appeal for me as Cities of Gold, it was nontheless enjoyable, and complements House of Rain, another tour in pursuit of the Anasazi, very well.

The Bicycle Diaries

The Bicycle Diaries: My 21,000 Mile Ride for the Climate
© 2014 David Kroodsma
428 pages

The Bicycle Diaries combines travel and climate-change advocacy, both literally as a trip and throughout the book. As Kroodsma makes his way through Mexico, Central America, and the mountainous roads of South America,  he talks to locals, from retired presidents to impoverished farmers, about the ways their landscape is changing and discusses with them the ways climate change will further alter their homes, health, and livelihood.   The book is thus a tour of these regions by bike and a survey of the various ways climate will affect the future, as seemingly every place he visits is imperiled either by development or by climactic alteration.

 Although Peruvian villagers aren’t exactly a primary source of problematic emissions,  developing countries and their poor are the most at risk to future changes,  and Kroodsma wanted to increase awareness on all fronts – communicating what he knew to people young and old as he cycled, learning from his discussions with people about their experiences.  This a tale with great appeal, from the travel descriptions of varied landscapes (the beautiful Andes, salt flats the size of New Jersey, stupefyingly rich forests,  to the candid interactions with people from the poor and marginalized to the wealthy and powerful.   Kroodsma is continually amazed by the hospitality of strangers over the course of the year, and challenged by the fact that many people seem happy with their lives despite having so little.  The spread of the internet into very remote places was also a pleasing surprise, as it meant more opportunities at less expense.   The virtue of bicycles comes up quite often, as you might imagine -- from their travel merits (making it easier for Kroodsma to interact with people),  to their environmental impact, to their role in making cities more livable places.

Mirrors of the Unseen

Mirrors of the Unseen:  Journeys in Iran

© 2006 Jason Elliot

432 pages

Readers uninterested in the origins and history of Islamic art, metaphysics, or pigeons, should skip to the next chapter, here.

In the late nineties, before Afghanistan was rendered more chaotic and dangerous than usual, Jason Elliot visited the country and was moved by it. Building on the success of that trip,  he looked over the border to Iran, a nation derided by the Afganis as full of sandwich-eating women, and decided to travel throughout it, as well. Mirrors of the Unseen collects the experiences of several trips made by Elliot throughout Iran, visiting it again and again as the seasons changed. What did not change was the ready willingness of Iranians to receive him  -- and ply him a surprising amount of spirits.    Elliot's interest in Iran is more cultural and historical than political, and as time passes he transforms from interviewing tourist to a man on pilgrimage, one with Iran's architectural wonders as its goal, working in historical recaps along the way, telling of the rise and fall of empires as he gazes at their ruins and proud reminders. He is particularly struck by the  predominant role of gardens in Persian culture and art, one that predates views of Heaven as a paradisaical garden. (Not by accident is the German title of this book Persia: God's Forgotten Garden.)   Elliot is sensitive about architecture in that it seems to affect him deeply, taking over his mind. Discussions with friends and discourses on Sassanian history fade into the background when Elliot takes in the fullness of a bazaar or mosque and begins to wax lyrical about plazas and windows.  He is self-conscious about some of his obsessions -- several chapters see him poring over historic maps and making measurements to figure out why a particular building isn't lined up the way symmetry  suggests it should -- to the point that he includes at least one disclaimer.    Of more general interest are Elliot's many conversations with Iranians of various ethnic groups; he never fails to find a friendly host wherever he travels, and those who do not have concealed stocks of ardent spirits have opium pipes.  (Similarly,  no one Elliot meets observes the laws against foreign television stations, but it's possible that the people most eager to host an Englishman were the most dubious about the currently-reigning politics.)   The Iranians featured here range from poor cab drivers to horse ranchers,   and unless they're selling something  they're extremely generous with their time and resources. 

Although the aesthetic tangents might throw some readers off, I personally enjoyed this curious mix of travel memoir, history, and architectural commentary. 

Short rounds: things that are not Star Trek, like North Koreans and Aeneas

Believe it or not, I have been reading books without a Star Trek label appended to them this week. Just recently I finished off Don't Go There, a short collection of travel pieces that interested me with its mention of visits to Turkey,  Chernobyl, and North Korea.    The actual collection contains these along with trips to Israel, Ghana,  China, and a few other places deemed 'interesting'. The first piece, a visit to Istanbul that threw the writer and his girlfriend unwittingly into street protests and clouds of tear gas, sets the stage:  the narrator has no idea what he's doing or why, and seems to stumble into catastrophes just to get a good story to write about.   None  of Fletcher's trips had any reason or planning to them, most developed miserable complications, and when his girlfriend threatens to leave him, the reader must be sympathetic.  If one endures his laughable ignorance in visiting places like Jerusalem (he is annoyed by religious people and religious references, which would be akin to going to DC when one hates politics), and similar episodes, eventually he ends up in North Korea. It's about what you'd expect, but he comes away believing the hostages of Kim are not as brainwashed as is commonly held, and that they would be more expressive if they could get away with it.

My other read during the last few weeks has been a volume called From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics.    Markos opens the book with a remonstrance against the Protestant attitude that anything that predated Christ, or anything outside the Bible, is value-less.  Although a Protestant himself, he regards the Catholic church favorably for its integration of the classic western tradition into its own tradition, in effect building upon and continuing the queries of Aristotle and Plato into the nature of the cosmos, ethics, beauty, etc.  Markos' conviction is the same of CS Lewis'  as expressed in The Abolition of Man, namely that while Christianity is the ultimate truth,  basic truths are also available in other traditions.  The aim of Markos in this volume is to see the truths which the Greco-Roman myths express about the nature of man and meaning. He then guides the reader through the works of Homer, selected works by Greek playwrights and historians, and ends with the Aeneid.    As someone who has been removed from Western Literature I and II for far too long,  I was interested in this chiefly as an accessible  look at Greek literature, a reminder of its stories and writers.  Markos reflects on the themes present in literature, like the struggle between familial duties and loyalty to the polis.  Because the Greek dramatic tradition is in fact a tradition, Markos notes how  differently the same myths might be use by different authors, and examines how the Aeneid is a deliberate Roman tribute to the Illiad and Odyessey,  using its structure, locales, and  elements.  It was not a Latinized copy of the Greek epic, however, but one written with Rome's own history in mind -- and not ancient, but recent, as Aeneas' story can be read as a tribute to Augustus' victory over  Marc Anthony and Cleopatra.  Markos also connects the classical heritage to Christianity when he can, argue at times that the Greeks are foreshadowing the advent of Christ.  This is similar to Luc Ferry's approach in Wisdom from the Myths, in which he argues that the Greek myths and plays constitute a coherent worldview -- a Stoic one.   Markos isn't as insistent as Ferry, however, and the core of the book is merely in seeing what truths the old stories still tell us about ourselves and our relationships to our own polis and the cosmos.

House of Rain

House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest
© 2007 Craig Childs
482 pages

Throughout the southwest United States and northern Mexico there are ruins from a people long gone, people remembered as the Anasazi. The name is not theirs; it was applied by the Apache later on, and has a mocking connotation - -the old ones, the rotten ones, the defunct ones. The ruins of cliffside dwellings, abandoned signal towers, and brightly colored ceramics reveal a technically accomplished people, one whose lore contained information gleaned from hundreds of years of close observations: their sites often incorporate features which mark astronomical events, events that no doubt played a part in their mythos. Who were these people, and why did they leave?

Well, they didn’t, says Craig Childs. Or at least, it’s inaccurate to say they planted their flag in New Mexico and Arizona and such places, and then for some reason decided to abandon their ancestral homes. In search of answers, Craig Child hiked and drove throughout the Southwest, venturing far off the beaten track by himself or with archaeology students, to study the land, the light, and these spaces which remain to absorb what understanding can be had. Many of the people he walked with were specialists in the region -- archaeoastronomers, say, or those who can identify the region that preserved wood or pottery came from by their chemistry,

Findings from archaeological digs indicate that this was a fluid population, one that frequently moved in response to environmental stresses. The rivers of this region are fickle, alternatively flooding and vanishing The transient ancients were following the water, and an interior nether-world of gods – a place beneath the soil where water was plentiful but released slowly in mountain streams or sudden springs -- appears to have been on their mind. Ritual appears to have had a role in their leaving, as well: some sites are thought to have been torched deliberately, by the inhabitants, rather than destroyed in war. Some of their locations appear to have been settled communities, while others were mere migrant camps that could not have supported a large population, but were used as a short-term residence. Eventually these people dispersed in their travels to become the various pueblo peoples, like the Hopi.

House of Rain is neither a travel guide nor a comprehensive history, but rather an attempt to make sense of one through the other. The full story will never be known, though parts can be garnered by studying what was left behind and other pieces are locked away in the lore of native peoples who (for good reasons) do not wish to share their oral histories with outsiders – even outsiders as serious and respectful as Childs. Childs is a native son of the southwest who traveled extensively within it before writing this book, and the amount of contacts he nursed before engaging in this project reveals his sincere interest in the subject. House of Rain isn’t a novelty travel guide – “Ghost Towns of the Ancient West!” – but the chronicle of one man pursuing his passion, to learn as much as he could about those who lived in and loved the same landscape he did. Those who find the mountains and vistas of the Four Corners enchanting will appreciate this tour of a civilization that was.

Country Driving

Country Driving: A Journey through China from Farm to Factory
© 2010 Peter Hessler
448 pages

First things first: that statue on the cover intrigued me enough that I bought both books that used photographs of it.  Emperor Far Away made nary a mention, but Hessler comes through in the first third, referencing the statue as part of a scarecrow police system in one of China's western rural areas, erected along freeways and at roundabouts to discourage reckless driving. Mounted automobile ruins and signs that keep a running count of how many people have perished on the highway are also part of the safety campaign.    Such measures are needed because China is a nation on the move: its villages are emptying out as people move en masse from villages throughout the country towards the southern and south-eastern coasts. There,  China is being remade month by month as factories and people move, chasing opportunities at a frantic pace. In Country Driving,  Hessler drives China's highways, lives in one of its villages, and explores its burgeoning factory districts.   Country Driving is a China memoir that first seems like a collection of miscellany:  Hessler opens the book like a travel memoir, but halfway through, he's relating village politics and writing about one of the neighbor boys  turning into a couch potato.  Not until the book's end in the factories does the subtitle make sense.

Country Driving's largely appeals on a human-interest basis. The people of China are experiencing the industrial revolution seemingly overnight:  most of the factory managers Hessler spoke with had been farmers as children, and all of them acquired their expertise on the job, often by shoving themselves through the door. Hustling and social connections are more important were more important than degrees.  Lying about one's age to get a job was nothing offensive:  bosses saw it as a sign that that people wanted to work.   The amount of energy in China's development zones is attractive read about: these cities are like New York and Chicago in the late 19th century,  growing voraciously and teeming with newcomers who are creating a new society on the fly.  Like those examples,  these boomtowns aren't necessarily pretty: factory workers often live in dormitories on-site,  and the state-controlled 'union' exists more to provide free movies to workers.  Those who want a better deal have to effect it themselves,  arguing with management or simply leaving without notice.

Hessler refers to the rural-urban move in China as the largest migration in human history, and in his early chapters driving beside the Great Wall, he finds deserted village after deserted village:  the young have left for city work, leaving only the old behind. Rural China, it seems, is literally dying. In his rural travels,  the only young people Hessler encounters are those who are hitching rides to visit their families, typically bearing gifts of food.  Country Driving illustrates the concept of liquid modernity fairly well:  things are changing so fast that no one really seems to know what they're doing. Driving, for instance, is a relatively new skills,  but millions of Chinese are taking to the road: the number of registered drivers doubled in the time that Hessler was living in-country. Driving instructors teach people to use standard-transmission cars in ways that would make a mechanic grimace, and for seemingly arbitrary reasons.  The standard practice is to begin all maneuvers from second gear because it's more difficult, and more difficult means it's worth doing -- even if no driver will ever need to get their tire onto a single plank of wood, it's still part of the exam on the merits of difficulty alone.   What is missing, apparently, is any notion of orderly driving beyond "the bigger the car, the more right of way it has".    Cars jostle against one another the way people rub shoulders in Times Square, and in some cities, no rental agency expects its cars to come back without new dents. Like bugs on the windshield, they are to be expected.

Those who are interested in what life in China is like will find much of interest here, but the organization almost makes it seem unfocused at times. This is the third in a trilogy of China memoirs, however, and might make more sense when combined with the other two -- just as the third section here made the first two more connected.

The Emperor Far Away

The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China
© 2014 David Eimer
336 pages

The Emperor Far Away takes readers on a journey along China’s outer rim, beginning in the western steppes where the ‘Chinese’ are a minority,  and following it south to the Tibetan plateau, the jungles of the Golden Triangle, up to the Korean border,  and ending in the far north,  where the snow only melts for three months of the year.   Eimer’s  travels would be fascinating in themselves, given the variety of landscapes and people encountered, but also shed light on the Chinese state’s interactions with its neighbors and internal ‘others’.

The people’s republic of China, like the supposedly vanished empire whose borders it revived,  counts a multitude of peoples as its subjects.  The Chinese state recognizes at least 56 ‘minorities’ within its borders.  The Uighur people of Xinjiang, a larger group,  are more Turkic than ‘Asian’, and hold fast to their own traditions -- particularly Islam. This annoys the Party to no end,  and not only because it disdains religion.  The unity of the Chinese state and its people -- unity controlled by the party -- is a fundamental doctrine of the government.  Separatism is heresy, and since religion’s importance in creating cultural identities is rivaled only by language it remains anathema. Despite this, even its own people drift into religion:  in the section on Tibet, we meet Chinese tourists who are searching for something in the Buddhist temples,  and those near the Korean border are embracing exuberant evangelical sects like Pentecostalism.

The golden triangle is another area of interest. for here there exists narco-states that ignore national boundaries and impose their own authority on their subjects.   These are not necessarily dangerous places, provided one is vouched for. The streets are patrolled by fifteen year olds with Kalushnikovs, and the economy largely consists of growing, processing, and shipping opioids -- including little red pills that are not swallowed, but exposed to flames and the smoke inhaled.  China’s southern border encompasses both ‘model minorities’ and unyielding nomads,  the latter of whom are most common in Tibet, where they have traded camels for motorbikes.  Unlike Xinjiang and Tibet, the people in the golden triangle region are free from the fear that their culture will one day vanish: the Han are not settling en masse here as they are elsewhere.

Further north, near the border with Korea, readers encounter the ‘third’ Korea. The Yanbian prefecture of of China sits along the North Korean border, and nearly half of its population is ethnically Korean. Some are refugees from North Korea, others have drifted there more naturally -- and like American immigrants, many straddle two identities and refer to themselves as Chinese Koreans.   The region is strongly influenced by South Korean culture, and particularly its abundance of churches. Because of the fusion of North Korean refugees and South Korean culture, Eimer believes Yanbian is an image of what a unified Korea might look like. Even further north Chinese culture mixes with Russian, instead, resulting in blonde-haired blue-eyed people with Chinese names. 

If Emperor Far Away is anything, it is varied. Eimer takes us across steppes, up mountains, down rivers, into the jungle, and finally into areas so cold that the snow is only absent in the high summer.   Eimer’s interest in meeting people off the beaten track makes for interesting reading as he uses his Mandarin, a few contacts, and the curiosity of people to make travel arrangements on the fly.  Sometimes this meant breaking down in the middle of nowhere,  bypassing border checkpoints, and hitching rides on cargo ships.  Those interested in China’s  place on the world stage will no doubt be interested in sections like the one on North Korea, where it is revealed the Chinese government treats North Korea like one of its autonomous prefectures:  it doesn’t respect the Kims as leaders of a neighboring nation so much as it regards them as a necessarily evil.  Better to manage the Kims and keep their economy from dying completely than to see the place collapse and all those starving  Kim captives flood China.  The chapter on the Chinese-Russian border is a reminder of how the Chinese are haunted by the Soviet Union’s sudden collapse,   one of the reasons the Party is so ruthless about political dissent.

Emperor Far Away will easily rank as one of my more memorable and helpful reads this year.

A Thousand Miles from Nowhere

A Thousand Miles from Nowhere
© 1995 Graham Coster
275 pages

Great literature has been produced from travelers' tales, from those who walked or rode trains or even drove -- but none from a truck, says Graham Coster. In the hopes of filling in a niche, he hitched rides with British and American truckers transversing North American and Europe, to learn about life behind the wheel of a big rig. The memoir is based on three trips undertaken in 1993, but as Coster was not himself a driver, there are only three things he writes about: the drivers, the landscape, and country music. (Also: candy bars. One wonders if Mars, Inc underwrote his trip!) The landscape is almost absent, mentioned only as the background scenery. In Arizona, Coster ruefully notes that his time spent with truckers has altered his perspective: he has visited the state before, noted its beauty, but once embedded in the work routines of a cab it's nothing more than a low hill with a series of truck stops behind it. The places, unless they are extraordinarily abominable (New York City, the bane of truckers) are all ironed out by the constant transience of driving life. The drivers themselves all make for fun company, swapping stories about experiences on the road and ruminating over friends they've lost. In the United States, Coster is more out of his element -- praising presidents who truckers loathe, making jokes about people they admire. Ruminations on music, and especially country music, rival the conversations with drivers for page-space. Coaster is intrigued that the drivers he meets in England and Germany both like American country music, and in the US, they seem to listen to nothing else. It's not an accident that the book takes its title from a Dwight Yoakam piece. Coster likes it well enough himself, though he prefers the country-pop party anthems to the emotional croonings of Hank Williams.

Although this is a topic that greatly interests me, I was completely underwhelmed by this title, in part because I've read other memoirs and encountered nothing new. Even if I were reading it for the first time, however, there's little real information about the trucking industry here: it's just driving and waiting. For information on Eurasia's transcontinental routes, Danger: Heavy Goods, a memoir about the England-Saudi Arabia route, is much better...and written by an actual driver.

Cities of Gold

Cities of Gold: A Journey Across the American Southwest in Pursuit of Coronado
© 1992 Douglas Preston (Walter Nelson, Photographs)
480 pages

Sometimes, history has got to be pursued from the back of a horse.  Douglas Preston wasn't sure what took him to New Mexico -- he had a nice life in Manhattan before he abruptly decided to move to Santa Fe, to see the adobes washed in red sunlight --  but it took him further still, to the border of Arizona and Mexico.  There, along with a friend and a hired horse wrangler, he purposed to re-create the journey of Francisco  Vázquez de Coronado, the first Spainard to explore the Southwest.   They would discover the Four Corners as the Spanish did, on horseback -- carrying their own supplies,  following the water. Their mission -- to search what it might have been like to enter into these enormous spaces for the first time, and travel through them to the seven cities of Cibola.  Preston and company were warned against the pursuit; there was a very real chance such a journey would kill them. The desert is kind to no one, and Preston proposed to navigate through sheer wilderness, during the summer, amid a drought.  But fate is kind to fools, drunks, and Americans, and Preston's royal-flush team prospered through their wits, the kindness of strangers, and a mix of luck and grit.   The product is for me the best piece of travel writing I've yet read.

Along for the ride with Preston were a cantankerous neighbor of his, Walter, and a hired woodcutter who professed to be a horse wrangler.  Eusebius's only virtue for the reader proves to be his comic rage that reveals itself with every mesquite tree, barbed-wire fence, and thrown horse-shoe; the man is as experienced with horses as you or I. (His virtues for the party are practically nil, although his incompetence forced Walter and Doug to become jacks of all trades, which probably saved their lives after the fake-wrangler quit.)  The country they proposed to cross was desperately hostile. The voyage opened in a thick swath of mesquite trees, for instance, which turned a proposed one-day journey into four days of hacking, cussing, and chasing horses.   They crossed mountains so far off  the beaten track that the closest thing to a path was a cut made by the riders of the Pony Express.  Their journey takes them through the detritus of ruined civilizations and communities, the residents and their hopes long-dead -- both mysterious Anasazi remains, and the less mysterious array of abandoned silver boomtowns.   They encountered an array of interesting people: rattle-snaker trappers,  ranchers and cowboys, echoes of the dying Old West.  They also spent considerable time visiting with native Americans as they pass through  Zuni and Acoma reservations, learning some of their stories.  While the travelers were sometimes greeted with a shotgun, Doug and Walter certainly didn't look like tourists after the first few hundred miles of hard riding, and after explaining their mission, virtually everyone offered them hospitality with open arms and admiring eyes -- even from old ranchers who lived over a hundred miles from everybody else and did everything around their homesteads themselves.  (The only exception was a man who assured them that nobody named Coronado  came this way because the road hadn't been built until last year, and anyway that would have been trespassing.)

Cities of Gold expertly mixes adventure, history, photographs, and encounters with interesting people. As Doug and Walter pass through the landscape, so we learn the story of Coronado's exploration of the Southwest, and the story of the West in general: the trials of the Hopi, Apache, Zuni, and other people through the last two centuries, the triumphs and tribulations of traders, trappers, and gold-strikers;  the rise and fall of the cowboy. But there's more to the memoir than history, for both the Zuni and the cowboys have something to say about stewardship, of the husbandry of the land. They argue that the land has been much abused by outsiders who came in with great confidence and little knowledge, from the first ranches to the present Forestry Sevice.  Numerous citizens condemn the heavy-handedness of the Forestry Service's no-burn rule: the attempt to keep so much of the country in stasis is smothering it to death. The antelope herds that once flourished by eating young-growth forests, for instance, have dwindled as the old-growth cedars continue to expand, unchecked by fire.  As this journey was taken in 1989, I don't know if matters have improved. (What has not improved is Albuquerque traffic, which these two took horses through!)

While my prolonged fascination with the Southwest greased the skids here,  Cities of Gold  is most impressive.  The entire premise is awe-inspiring: this is a journey of a thousand miles on horseback, through thickets and quicksand, over mountains, across barren stretches of salt lakes and desert, through valleys and up mesas.  The people, as mentioned, are fascinating into themselves, both the living and the dead. I did not recognize the name Coronado before I began reading this book, and I learned enormous amounts about him, the native cultures, and the history of the West in general as I followed Doug and Walter through these magnificent, storied landscapes.

The Lost Continent

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America
© 1989 Bill Bryson

When I read The Road to Little Dribbling, full of Bryson complaining and thinking murderously about people who so much as annoyed him, I returned it disappointed. "Bryson's turned into a real crank," I thought. The Lost Continent makes me think he's always been that way, he just hides it better in some books than others.

This book chronicles Bryson's attempt to apparently re-live his childhood road trips, often following the very routes his father chose to get lost on in those bygone summers. That can only be a beginning, however, because by the end of the book he has visited (or at least zoomed through) all but eight of the 48 states, Hawaii and Alaska being frauds. Although billed as a tour of small-town America, he zooms through several larger cities as well. (One, Los Angeles, is pointedly avoided.) The book consists of Bryson chattering along as he drives, recounting stories of his family's travel misadventures, complaining about the view (or rarely, admiring it), or venturing into completely irrelevant terrain. When he is not being an utter pill -- heaping scorn on any development that is not a 18th century mansion, or raging against locals for being ignorant, too friendly, too suspicious, etc, Bryson can be funny. To an extent he's funny when attacking people, but it grows obnoxious after a while.

Related:
I'm a Stranger Here, Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years, Bill Bryson

Baghdad without a Map

Baghdad without a Map and Other Adventures in Arabia
© 1992 Tony Horowitz
285 pages

So your wife is on extended assignment in Cairo, and you’re a freelance journalist without a regular gig. What do you do? Why not wander around northern Africa, the Arab world, and Iran whenever an opportunity presents itself – chasing stories, even when they led you into dark mountains where grenades and AKs are cheaper than a week’s worth of the local narcotic? Baghdad without a Map presents anecdotes from Tony Horwitz’s time spent in Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Jordan, Yemen, and Iran, mixing comedy and tragedy.

Because Horwitz is chasing stories -- a refugee crisis in Sudan, for instance, or the still-simmering conflict between Iraq and Iran on the border -- he is often exposed to misery and danger. He still finds humor in the chaos of Cairo's streets, the chanciness of Egyptian-Sudanese air travel, or the loopiness of Yemense men after a goodly amount of qat-chewing. Horowitz attempts to learn about local cultures and politics as he can on the ground, conversing with people in his rough Arabic, chewing qat, or playing soccer. Although much of the middle east has changed drastically since the 1980s – the invasion of Iraq and the Arab spring just in the last ten years, these snapshots of life in the middle east are worth taking a look at for readers with any human interest in the region.

Neither East nor West

Neither East Nor West: One Woman's Journey Through the Islamic Republic of Iran
© 2001 Christiane Bird
396 pages

Christiane Bird didn't have an ordinary childhood. Her father was a doctor attached to a Presbyterian mission a world away, in Iran.  They focused more on healing bodies than converting souls, but the Iranian revolution still forced them to return to the west.  Despite all the negative news about Iran in the decades that passed, however, Bird remembered her time in Tabriz fondly and wondered (as an adult) which parts were true, which parts were merely disguised in the haze of childhood nostalgia, and which parts had disappeared or endured. So, contacting  one of her father's former colleagues in Iran,  Bird requested a visa and set about touring the country,  living in the homes of Iranians and talking to them in her rough Persian about their lives. Neither East nor West is a travelogue through Iran, but Bird's previous experience and emotional ties to Iran produce an memoir that isn't just another wide-eyed tour through an 'exotic land',  Combining her travels with reflections on Iranian history and culture,  she has produced a balanced look at Iran much needed in the west.

Bird's journalist visa gave her more freedom of movement than an ordinary tourists's, but she remained under the watchful eyes of the tourist-management of the Iranian government, and was required to find local guides. As time wore on Bird suspected this was done out of genuine concern for her protection, as Bird encountered several potentially volatile situations. (She also actively courted them, as she visited a  shrine in Mashdad that strictly prohibits non-Muslims) Bird toured Iran throughout 1998, when a bombing in Saudi Arabia had cast a darker-than-usual pall over DC-Iranian relations,  and  President Clinton was answering charges that he had lied under oath regarding his kennedian antics in the Oval Office.   Bird's interviews with Iranians -- from liberal Tehranis to orthodox Qom clerics --  involved both give and take. Bird's various guides encouraged her to live with them and their families during her stay, and she often did,  bonding with their daughters and friends.  Bird queried her new friends about their life before and after the Iranian revolution,  probing for its effects on their lives. They in turn asked her about America:  was it really so violent? Were the women really all so skinny?  And why did it hate Iran?

Most of the people Bird spoke with had cautious praise for the Iranian revolution, which ousted the Shah and led to its present mixed-state, theocracy and democracy intermingled.  While she encountered many young students in Tehran who scoffed at the 'morals police', outside the capital other people took Iran's status as an Islamic republic more seriously; these included women who believed in the hijab and were frustrated that Americans seemed to view the entire middle east as if it were Saudi Arabia. Iranian women run and vote for office and own businesses, for instance, and many would wear the hijab even if it weren't legally required.  She often found wariness about the pervasive moralism of the new Iranian state, a belief that the country had gone too far in the reverse of the Shah.   Bird was similarly conflicted by Iranian traditionalism; she delighted in the lack of consumerism and the closeness of Iranian family life, in the fact Iranian men regarded their family and not their jobs as their first priority -- but didn't like how old women on the street would regard any young woman and man talking together on the street as evidence of decadence that needed to be checked.

The Iranian people's relationship with their republic has undoubtedly changed in the last twenty years; during the reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Tehran's young people did more than scoff at authority, they challenged it.  Many aspects of Iranian culture that Bird encounters here are still present, however:  for instance, the overwhelming hospitality she encountered was likewise commented on by Niall Doherty when he found himself in Iran with nothing but $10 to his name.  (Another common aspect is the double lives that urban Iranians live; circumspect behavior out in public, and relaxed rules behind the familiar walls of home.)    Because it combines travel with history so smartly -- reflecting on Iran's Shi'ism during a visit to a shrine, or on the durability of Persian while visiting the home of a legendary poet -- and shares a land that western news presents only as a villain, Neither East nor West could serve well as an introduction to a fascinatingly rich culture that has endured for millennia.

China Road

China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power
© 2007 Rob Gifford
352 pages

National Road 312 spans the breadth of China, connecting its sparsely settled and scarcely developed rural interior with the port city of Shanghai,  the largest in the world and the proud symbol of Chinese modernity.   Before ending his decades-long period studying and working in China, Rob Gifford decided to take a farewell trip across the country following this Asian ‘Route 66’,   absorbing the stories of China’s tumultuous 20th century through the personal lives of men and women he interviews along the way.  Some interviews were planned in advance, others spontaneous and candid – but all are unique, and indicate to Gifford that now more than ever,  individuals are going to drive the story of China, not Confucian tradition or Communist orthodoxy.  While a travel book, China Road is also a collective memoir of the rough road that Chinese civilization has traveled as it continues trying to find its way.

China endured hell in the 20th century; beginning it in civil war and at the mercy of both Western colonialists and Japanese imperialists, some measure of peace was not to be had until 1949.  The triumphant Communists, however,  were not done waging war, and in the Cultural Revolution they let loose the furies to kill and burn everything not modern and Maoist.  At long last another generation came to power and begin creating some measure of stability, and even liberalization and subsequent economic growth.   China’s constant struggle to find itself is not told through one author’s narrative, but rather through the lives of an array of Chinese citizens:  truck drivers, businessmen, rural villagers,  young urban Party members in search of their next set of high heels; political dissidents in hiding, teenagers on the cusp of going to college,  weary elders who have seen China destroyed several times in their lives;  Tibetans,  Muslim Uighurs, and still more.    Through their lives Gifford reflects on various aspects of China in mid-transformation:     the withdrawal of the Communist party from everything but political power,  the  government’s awe-inspiring attempts to build not just a country, but an entire continent;  the on-going problem with corruption that he attributes to a lack of checks and balances that was present in the Confucian-imperial state as well;  the economic growth that is allowing the majority of Chinese citizens to live better lives, and so on.

Gifford introduces early on a concept he returns to several times: as much as they are controlled politically,  at a deeper level,  China’s people now drift loose. The old moral order was destroyed wholesale by the Communists, who attempted to recreate a new socialist civil culture.  Virtually all of that has been quietly retired, however, aside from admonishments on billboards to keep the poor in mind. So long as people don’t interfere with the party’s political supremacy, they are in turn left alone.  They are left to wrestle with questions of purpose and identity: what does it mean to be Chinese,  when  so much was earlier condemned to the fires, but what replaced it has retreated?  In one of the first chapters set in Shanghai, Gifford encounters two young Party members out shopping,  and both of them confirm that there’s little guidance to them as to what sort of life they should be looking forward to. One exults in the material freedom, but the other seems struck by some malaise of modernity,    directionless and unsatisfied. Later on, a young woman engaged in a self-destructive career struggles to articulate what exactly she's desiring, and can only conclude -- "It's..difficult being human, isn't it?"

Although China Road is ten years dated, its human stories  make it engaging reading, and provide  easy exposure to China's history and future.

The Cargo Ship Diaries

The Cargo Ship Diaries: 44 months, 37 countries, 0 flights 
© 2014 Niall Doherty
133 pages

A few years ago while looking for information on minimalism, I encountered the YouTube presence of one Niall Doherty, an Irishman traveling the world, living and working out of a backpack. Doherty left a comfortable but unfulfilling life in the nine-to-five world to live an adventure, instead. His throwing of himself into the world wasn't merely physical, as he also used new environments to experiment with his life, to impose new challenges on himself.  This is where I encountered him, as every week he seemed to be in a different place, invariably a cafe or club surrounded by laughing people (often women), and posing serious questions to the viewer, like "What would it take for you to change your most fundamental beliefs?"   As it turns out, he was in the middle of a purposeful quest: to travel the world without flying.   In The Cargo Ship Diaries, aboard a commercial freighter traveling from Yokohama to Peru, he shares both his experiences aboard the ship, and reminiscences on his Eurasian journey.  The book ends with his arrival in the Americas, though an epilogue shares diary entries about his time in South America, New Orleans, and later the return to Ireland.

Although his first book, Disrupting the Rabblement, captured his philosophy of life much better, some of it still comes through in this travel diary. As mentioned, it's a two-part book;  the framing narrative tells about life aboard the cargo ship, where for a month he explored, danced, wrote, and studied.   The 'writing' bit is this actual book, recounting his time in Eurasia. Landing in Amsterdam, he bused, biked, and ferried his way across the continent. He was not a 'tourist', and preferred to spend most of his time trying to interact with locals.  Much of that, he admits, was 'chasing tail'; in Amsterdam he challenged himself to flirt with 100 girls in a week, and the book is filled with one-night liaisons and brief relationships. Only when he found a friend to join him did he go on touristy adventures like visiting the Taj Mahal.  (His adventures tended to not be the usual kind: once, for instance, he climbed an abandoned skyscraper. Although reading about his sex life grew tiresome quickly,  I am always astonished at the amount of human goodwill global travelers run into. Doherty entered Iran despite being warned his bank cards wouldn't work, and found himself with the local equivalent of $10 to his name. Yet, through goodwill, local connections, and the internet, he was able to make his way through and out of the country, departing it with fond memories for the Iranian people -- who, he says, live double lives, defying the outside authoritarianism within the privacy of their homes.

Although I was sorely tempted to skim through the many dating episodes, I find Doherty's willingness to throw himself into the unknown admirable -- and of course, as someone who has read books on commercial shipping, this account of life aboard a cargo ship had a distinct attraction for me.

Doherty maintained a web presence throughout his travels, and produced a video about life aboard the ship below.

The Voyage of the Beagle

The Voyage of the Beagle
© 1839 Charles Darwin
448 pages*

As a young man, Charles Darwin lacked sharp direction. His father wanted him to become a doctor, but he hated the sight of blood.  His passion was natural philosophy, the observation and study of the natural world,  and he briefly considered becoming a country parson so that he would have the time to pursue that passion. A chance opportunity to join the crew of the HMS Beagle, assigned to survey the extreme southern end of South America,  gave him more occasion to practice natural observation than he might have ever expected. It was on that journey that he collected the data that would produce his first book,  a monograph on coral reef formation, and stir his imagination about life's abundant variety.

Voyage consists of a log by Darwin, divided into sections of interest, and follows him and the Beagle  from England to South America, then across the Pacific back to England again. Darwin's real purpose on the ship was to keep the captain company,  a man who would have otherwise had to have made conversation with common sailors.   Virtually all of his commentary is given over to descriptions of Darwin's time spent on land, aside from brief mentions of dolphins frolicking.   Young Darwin explores the surrounding area every time the ship puts into port, but he is often dropped off for several days on end, trekking into the interior. Voyage is a work of scientific journalism, describing the flora and fauna of South America's rims and outlying islands. Darwin's commentary reveals an already practiced scientific mind, especially in the area of geology.  The author is most famous, of course, for his insights into biology, particularly the way natural selection forces living populations to change over time.    His  chapter on the Galapagos island and its famed finches drops a hint of the patterns Darwin was beginning to detect:

"Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends."

In addition to detailing the behavior of pumas and the native economy of this-or-that group of Patagonians, Darwin has a few extraordinary experiences. At least once he is marooned in-country during a revolution, and as the Beagle is sailing up the coast of Chile, there is a volcanic eruption and several earthquakes.  Darwin does not limit his commentary to the plants and animals he collects; he also has much to say about the peoples they meet, and here he comes off rather nicely. He views Spanish and English civilization being created in these distant lands an improvement on say, human sacrifice, but recognizes that the age of 'discovery' has also been one of violent ruin for many.   He takes in the many strange customs he sees not with condescension, but with wonder -- with the exception of commenting on stagnant rural economies.  Upon departing the eastern coast of South America on the return trip, he sighs with relief that he will never again witness a slave-country; in Australia, he exhibits a strong sympathy for the aboriginal peoples, who have lost their land to both Polynesians and the English.

For the reader with a scientific appetite and the willingness to chew on pages of description, Voyage is appealing.  This is not some layman's travel guide to South America, obviously, but a book intended for those who wish to learn about the land's geography and life. In 2016, of course, there is added historical appeal; not only in exploring a continent not yet hit by industrialism, but in seeing a giant of English scientific achievement in his youth, still gathering material awaiting the imaginative spark.

*I read from an online version from Literature.org, so pagecount is taken from an Amazon edition. 

The Road to Little Dribbling

The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain
© 2015 Bill Bryson
380 pages

"When people asked me where I was bound, I could gaze toward the northern horizon with a set expression and say 'Cape Wrath, God willing'. I imagined my listeners giving a low whistle of admiration and reply 'Gosh, that's a long way.' I would nod in grim acknowledgment. 'Not even sure if there's a tearoom,' I would add."

p. 14

Bill Bryson is turning into a cranky old man, evidenced by his ramblings on The Road to Little Dribbling.  Bryson's mark is funny travelogues, a recording of the people and places he visits as he wanders through Australia or the Appalachian trail, supported by errant reminiscences that such sights inspire.  At the outset of Road to Little Dribbling, Bryson is about to take the British citizenship test after having lived in England for several decades. (He encountered a stray English rose, and married her.)  Rendered nostalgic by the prospect of finally making his relationship with Britain formal, Bryson decides to take a tour of the isle, traveling from Bognor Regis to Cape Wrath, the longest NS axis he could figure.  While he earnestly does not want to repeat his journey in  Notes from a Small Island, in which he repeated the journey he made the first time he ever traveled to Britain (Bill is evidently short for Bilbo) --  the title of it comes up a lot, like the expression "Back in my day" in the mouth of a marooned resident of a nursing home.

The book is taken up with him riding trains, suffering car rentals, and going on long walks, musing and having interactions with people that typically end in him thinking nasty things about them.  Herein lies the big splotch on this book: either I never picked up on it before, or Bryson is growing increasingly nasty with age, because he's constantly contemplating the murder  or convenient death of people. They don't even have to be people who are failing to deliver customer service; they can be politicians he's heard wicked things about on the telly.   What he finds is is that while there are many signs of things going downhill -- old women stiffing on tips, train routes being neglected, American-style sprawl, buildings literally falling into the sea because of coastal erosion that is surely the government's fault, somehow --    Britain has mostly remained a charming place. (Except for Scotland, which has gotten too weirdly nationalistic for his culinary taste.)

 The Road to Little Dribbling is riven with cranky potholes, more crabby than funny. I've read quite a few of Bryson's travel tales, and this will rank last among them.

An Economist Gets Lunch

An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies
© 2012 Tyler Cowen
293 pages

Imagine going out to eat with someone who really likes to talk about food, and imagine that this person is also an economist. That's An Economist Gets Lunch, three hundred pages of very excited chatter about food culture and markets across the world.  There's no argument to be had, just sheer enthusiasm for the subject at hand, one that I had to be wary about reading because it kept giving me the munchies.   Cowan's concoction is a weird mix of  culinary discussion, economics, world travel, and history.  He doesn't produce a set of rules: there's a principle guideline, followed by many little bits of advice. The key principle is this:  food is a product of supply and demand, so look for options where the supplies are fresh, suppliers are creative, and the customers are demanding. The implications of this are broader than "avoid fast food".   Cheap doesn't necessarily mean bad;  most of Cowan's favorite culinary experiences happen while traveling in less-industrialized areas of Mexico,  Nicaragua, Sicily, Thailand (he's very well traveled, this fellow) and other places. Because food markets are predominately local there, supplies tend to be fresh and the creators specialists in their region's offerings. The price is dirt cheap, compared to the cities.  A high price tag doesn't indicate that the food is exquisite, either: often it carries with it the money sunk into creating a luxurious restaurant environment, complete with superfluous staff like valets, or the high rents.Cowan especially disdains the city centers of touristy areas like Paris and Rome. You want good Italian food, hop on a train and head for the back country, he urges. And French? Try Japan.   

Cowan makes for an interesting dinner companion, going from this to that topic. He starts off with a discussion of why American fine dining is largely inferior to Europe's, blaming it on Prohibition, television, and parents who cater to their kids' bland palates.  Later on he devotes an entire chapter to the majestic enterprise that is barbeque, and defends agribusiness. Don't blame agribusiness networks because they produces crappy fast food, says Cowan, any more than you would blame the printing press for producing pulp fiction.  Curiously for someone who is generally aware of the impact politics have on markets, he assumes the entire reason people rally against GMOs is because they're scary. It's not a question of the products being proven safe, but of power and corruption: the companies producing these things are the ones with commanding market shares and accompanying political influence, supposedly regulated by their former coworkers. No sooner has he written on this, however, has he returned to an apparently favorite topic: the ins and outs of good Chinese food. 

This is a book of interest, but it goes back and forth so much I have no idea who the target audience is. There's definitely more information about food than economics, for what it's worth. 

Related:

• EconTalk interview with Cowen on the book. You can scroll down for a transcript of the conversation and get a lengthier feel for the author's many food interests.

A Year of Living Prayerfully

A Year of Living Prayerfully
© 2015 Jared Brock
352 pages

Emotionally weary from his fight against human trafficking, Jared Brock and his wife sought refreshment in prayer. A yearlong traveling retreat would immerse them in the prayer traditions of Orthodox Judaism, Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Protestant sects. Although a passionate Christian for most of his life, Brock's status as a thoroughly modern evangelical allows him to discover these traditions for the first time, and take lessons from them even as he retains his own convictions. Alternately reverent and cheeky, Brock is a comic but earnest guide to man's intense desire to touch the divine.  For the devout Christian, his thoughtful analysis of what he gleans from this yearlong study will no doubt be fruitful;  for instance, the importance of "kingdom-minded prayer" in which the seeker prays not for God to simply rescue him or do something for him, but attempts to surrender himself before the will of God in his own life, to abide in the presence of God and act not for reasons of self-will, but out of genuine love for one another. There are some dodgy moments, though -- Brock's wife jumping into a cold pond au naturale after saying various Jewish prayers, because they wanted to experience the ritual baptism and surprisingly no Orthodox Jews were open to having some evangelical woman "playing temple".  Brock purposely seeks out the bizarre -- the Westboro cult, Christian nudists, people walks on coals --  and these are included more for entertainment value than anything else. The early parts of the book, however, in  which Brock visits Israel and walks a pilgrimage route in Spain, even meeting Pope Francis, offer far more substance, like Brock's thoughtful dismay at the crass commercialization of Jerusalem.  The bizaare aspects make the work somewhat attractive to secular audiences, however.

Related:
And then There Were Nuns, Jane Christmas. One woman's exploration of the contemplative life.
A Year of Living Biblically, A.J. Jacobs, of which this is a fairly transparent imitation