[Note: Each Saturday this month, Vagablogging will feature self-published travel books reviewed by self-published travel authors. We start with Robert Downes's review of Two Laps Around the World .] Review by Robert Downes A book of ideas as well as adventure, Two Laps Around the World by Bob Riel offers the sort of insights that...

Growing up, Eliot Stein wanted to be a cowboy, Michael Jordan and a shepherd (in that order). One year, his father gave his brother and him a journal and told them their summer homework was to write a page a day until school began. Soon, Eliot wanted to combine the journal-style writing he had grown...

With factories belching and spewing pollution, benzene plants exploding and contaminating rivers, J. Maarten Troost presents a vivid description of the environmental peril in modern day China in Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation . Of course, Troost (author of The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in...

In Tone Deaf in Bangkok , Janet Brown does a remarkable job of capturing daily life in Bangkok and chronicling her transformation from her early days exploring the city as a farang to settling into the rhythms of the city to her eventual journey back to the United States. Nana Chen's photography accompanies Janet Brown's...

This poem, called "I Go Back To The House For A Book," reminds me of all the times I've imagined going somewhere, doing something, seeing someplace ELSE, while I was busy going, doing, and being somewhere already. Life is full of so many threads, and sometimes lots of them seem interesting but you have to...

A reader named Christina recently emailed me about jobs in travel writing and television. "I am absolutely fascinated by your work and your bio," she wrote. "I recently graduated from college and after a year of being in TV news reporting I would love to write and travel for a magazine such as National Geographic...

This month at the RolfPotts.com Travel Writers page, I interview Eric Weiner , author of The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World . Weiner has reported from more than 30 countries for National Public Radio, and his commentary has appeared in the Los Angeles Times , Slate and...

The venerable travel site, World Hum, is celebrating its 8th birthday this week and has been dusting off some of its older gems for your travel reading pleasure. So far there's been a round up of Eight Great Stories of the Shrinking Planet , Eight Great Travel Stories About Food and Eight Great Road Trip...

Nearly five years ago my old mentor Don George approached me with some interview questions for a book on travel writing he was putting together for Lonely Planet. My Q&A appeared on pp. 35-38 of Travel Writing , which hit bookstores worldwide in early 2005. With Travel Writing going into a second edition this year,...

Christine Gilbert, writer of the travel blog Almost Fearless , is rounding up aspiring travel writers all over the country for National Travel Writing Month (NaTraWriMo). The challenge starts on April 1, 2009, and will last until the 30th of the same month. As for the challenge itself, here's what the founder has to say...

In his the outstanding, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon , David Grann tells the story of Percy Fawcett -- "the last of the great Victorian explorers who ventured into uncharted realms with little more than a machete, a compass and an almost divine sense of purpose." Grann...

"Travel is a form of digression, a digression from daily life. We travel for difference, and so we concentrate on those things — the buildings, the food, the people — that distinguish this place from that, and not on what they have in common. On the one hand that lets us see what the inhabitants...

"As a host community adapts to tourism, its facilitation to tourists' needs, attitude, and values, the host community must become more like the tourists' culture. That is what tourists in search of the exotic and 'natural' vacation setting mean when they say a place has been 'spoiled' by tourism, i.e., those who got there before...

Island Press' new edition of Ecotourism and Sustainable Development: Who Owns Paradise? by Martha Honey is an interesting read for anyone interested in the burgeoning ecotourism industry. This book attempts to answer the question of whether or not ecotourism fulfills its mission of reducing a traveler's impact to the places he or she visits, in...

Sam Carpenter once worked 100 hours a week, struggling to support his family with his telephone answering service business. At one point, his two teenage children lived with him in the office because the family could not afford another place to live. Now, he's living well and working only a few hours a week through...

It's official: The Lost Girls have a book deal! The Girls ( Amanda Pressner , Jennifer Baggett and Holly Corbett ) are currently hunkered down in New York City writing and perfecting their tome for the masses. In 2006, the Girls left their jobs, families, boyfriends, and worldly possessions behind to travel the globe on...

Kelsey Timmerman , of Where Am I Wearing? fame has been featured on Vagablogging a time or two before. Now, he has a new book scheduled to be published on December 1 (available for pre-order on Amazon ), a new wife, and a baby on the way. Despite his busy schedule, Vagablogging was able to...

Gary Buslik once accidentally urinated on the infamous “Butcher of Uganda” Idi Amin in the Caribbean. Thankfully, he survived the encounter and can now enthrall us with his exploits in his new book A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean: A Grump in Paradise Discovers that Anyplace it's Legal to Carry a Machete is Comedy Just...

In Napoleon's Privates: 2500 Years of History Unzipped , author Tony Perrottet notes that the Marquis de Sade, who is famous mainly for his sadistic pornographic writings, was at heart a travel writer: The Marquis de Sade had always fancied himself a man of letters, and the first manuscript he intended for publication was his...

It took me a year of traveling and living abroad to buy this fantastic book. When I first read Vagabonding , it gave me the push I needed to quit my job. Now I've read 4-Hour Work Week , just at the time when I'm debating next steps: stay on the road or get a...