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I've been traveling a lot lately -- without leaving home.
Two books have taken me across the USA by car and to the remotest part of Papua New Guinea.
*Cross Country by Robert Sullivan warns readers where they're headed with the summer's longest subtitle: Fifteen Years and 90,000 Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America With Lewis and Clark, a Lot of Bad Motels, a Moving Van, Emily Post, Jack Kerouac, My Wife, My Mother-in-Law, Two Kids, and Enough Coffee to Kill an Elephant.
With one set of grandparents in Oregon and another in New York, Sullivan and family have driven cross-country 27 times. He writes, "We are gasoline-powered footnotes in the travel- and adventure-related annals of a nation that has as its greatest public works project an ever-expanding system of roads, a crisscross and circling of roads that keeps it from ever sitting still."
Sullivan never sits still. He's full of stories about the politics of the interstate, the history of the gas pump and the coffee cup lid, and Kerouac's failure as a parking lot attendant. Sullivan's enthusiasm is both contagious and exhausting.
He's the kind of dad who asks his kids in the back seat, "Hey, who wants to read from the Lewis and Clark journals this time?" The response is silence, "except for the car stereo, which is cranked."
He's also the kind of husband who notes what Clark wrote to Lewis: "My friend I do assure you that no man lives whith whome I would prefur to undertake Such a Trip." With modern spelling, Sullivan adds, "That's pretty much how I feel about my wife."
His book is part self-deprecating memoir, part social history in the digressive style of Ian Frazier's Great Plains. Sullivan tracks down a copy of a 1915 memoir, By Motor to the Golden Gate, by Emily Post, the etiquette queen. She took her son out of college, telling his professors he'd learn more driving cross-country than he would at Harvard.
Sullivan is sensitive, witty and well-read, which is why it's so much fun to have him along for the ride.
*The Naked Tourist: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall by Lawrence Osborne offers a world-weary view of international travel in an era where "the entire world is a tourist installation." The modern traveler, he laments, "has nowhere left to go."
Osborne, a British writer who lives in New York, complains that tourism has become the world's largest industry and that from 1950 to 2002, the number of international travelers rose from 2.5 million to 700 million a year.
He doesn't say whether he wishes most of those people just stayed home, but that's the implication. What's great for the tourist industry may not be great for adventuresome travelers. He warns, "One day the whole world could easily be a giant interconnected resort called Wherever."
Before that happens, Osborne embarks on a six-month trip to "the most godforsaken place on earth" in Papua New Guinea. For contrast, he goes by way of gaudy, $1,000-a-day Dubai and the loosely regulated cosmetic-surgery facilities and spas of Bangkok.
Jaded as he is, Osborne declares at the end, "One has to keep on traveling." He resolves to go to Madagascar "because I had never been to Madagascar, not even once, and everyone these days went to Madagascar."
Cross Country
By Robert Sullivan
Bloomsbury, 389 pp., $24.95
The Naked Tourist
By Lawrence Osborne
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 278 pp., $24
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