Though Annie Dillard isn't exactly a travel writer in the traditional sense, I included a profile on her in Vagabonding because her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is such a subtle, quirky examination of spirituality and planet earth. Recently, en route from Bangkok to Paris, I picked up a copy of Dillard's newest work, For...

Part of the task of being a good writer is being a good reader, though at times one has to strike a balance between the two activities. Last week I tallied my recent readings, and I realized that I've read 20 books in the weeks since I've returned to Thailand. This is far above my...

Conventional wisdom has long insisted that there's nothing new left to discover on the surface of the earth. "The time for discoveries is past," wrote naturalist Louis Agassiz back in 1867. "No student of nature should go out now expecting to find a new world." The fact is, however, that Agassiz was proven wrong by...

A long-standing debate among travel-lit critics is the issue of perspective: Should travel authors involve themselves as active, changeable characters in their own narratives, or should they record their destinations at arm's length, avoiding mention of themselves whenever possible? Many critics (especially British ones, it seems) insist that dispassionate objectivity is the proper way to...

I just finished Tim Cahill's newest book Hold the Enlightenment , which is tough to evaluate thematically, since (as is always the case with Cahill's books) his stories bounce us all over the world: Montana, Turkey, the Congo, Argentina, South Africa, Mexico, Mali, and back to Montana again. As usual, Cahill shows his colors as...

As a satirical concept, Tony Hawks 's travel-humor book Playing the Moldovans at Tennis is brilliant. The premise, as Hawks describes it in the opening chapter, arises from an argument, while watching an England-Moldava soccer match, about the author's tennis-playing skills. Hawks asserts that he can beat any of the Moldovan soccer players on the...

I recently finished reading Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel -- a book I'd been meaning to read ever since I first heard about it. I'd been curious about the book because de Botton is a respected critic, but also because it sounded quite similar in spirit to what I was getting at in...

Rolf in Jeju, Korea, 1997. He has contracted cholera in Laos, spied on Leonardo DiCaprio in Thailand, partied with the world's wildest librarians in St. Petersburg, been drugged, robbed and beaten in Istanbul and run out of drinking water in the middle of the Sahara. And through it all, he has always managed to locate...

Apex of Mankind Always 40 Years Ago Book review by Rolf Potts Throughout history, we humans have always found egoistic preoccupation in the notion that the world is about to end. Unfortunately, human society sometimes lacks the proper locust plagues and evil empires necessary to fuel our doomsday obsessions. This is when the end of...