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Afropean 8/6/2021
Reading time: 4 minutes
There is so much to love. And yet.
Coined by David Byrne of Talking Heads and Marie Daulne of Zap Mama, the term "Afropean," as we learn in Johny Pitts's book of the same name, is richly descr...
Red Dust 6/30/2021
Reading time: 4 minutes
The writing of certain types of intellectuals is elusive.
Scattered. Indefinite. A little odd.
Ma Jian is one such intellectual. Red Dust, a memoir of his travels through communist China in the...
Eat Pray Love 6/10/2021
Reading time: 4 minutes
I get it.
No more than ten pages into Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love (the title is written interchangeably with commas and without), I understood why the book was a bestseller in 2006, and t...
Voyage au Brésil 5/16/2021
Reading time: 4 minutes
This book has it all.
Pirates. Colonialism. Revenge. Religious chauvinism. Naked natives. Slavery. Face-eating lizards. Toe-biting bats. War. Cannibalism. Lawsuits. Starvation and death.
Backgrou...
Baedeker's United States 4/5/2021
Reading time: 4 minutes
I didn't know where to start.
The German bookseller Karl Baedeker wrote travel guides in the late 1820s, and started publishing his famous Baedeker Guides in the 1850s. The last was published in...
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About
Some basics
A brief biographical sketch
Travel
Pardon the saccharine and the obvious, but travel is everything
France
France deserves its own section
Reading
The bullshit of daily life? I'd rather read.
Music
Let me take you back
Television
I watch a lot more television than movies
Soccer
The only sport that matters
Food
As a travel writer, I have to talk about food
Dumb stuff
You will not feel smarter after reading this
Minimalism
Trying to live simply
Other Interests
I've only driven a Ferrari once
Get off my lawn
A few brief rants