Five More of the Best Travel Books Ever
Brave New Traveler, Outside Magazine (and Others) List Favorites
Sep 1, 2008
Travel publications have made it their business from time to time to rally editors and readers to name-drop their best-of-the-best travel books.
Conde Nast Traveler, WorldHum.com, National Geographic Traveler, BraveNewTraveler.com and Outside Magazine have all created such lists in recent years, tallying from 25 to nearly 100 titles of must-reads in each lineup.
In an earlier article titled 10 Greatest Travel Books of All Time, Suite101.com compared those travel publications’ lists to figure out the 10 books that popped-up most often.
What follows is a continuation of that cross-referencing idea, using the same five magazines’ and Web zines’ lists. The result here is the five next greatest travel books of all time, in no particular order:
Road Fever, by Tim Cahill (1991). Classic Cahill – and that’s a good thing. Here are National Geographic Traveler’s comments on Road Fever: “Tierra del Fuego, Chile, to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska (15,000 miles [24,140 kilometers]), by truck in 23.5 days? Better pack the No-Doz. Better yet, read Cahill's killer diary of his Guinness Book of World Records-making road trip and be glad you're at home. This book ups the ante on driving ‘vacations.’”
Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer (1996). Outside Magazine’s view: “Into the Wild, which follows the final days and nights of a young idealist named Chris McCandless, speaks to anyone who has ever yearned for something pure, to be free of the affluenza of American life, to be self-reliant.”
Blue Highways, by William Least Heat-Moon (1983). National Geographic Traveler offers these thoughts on Heat-Moon’s 13,000-mile journey through the lesser-known backspaces of American land and life: “The characters he meets make the journey come alive. As Robert Penn Warren said of Least Heat-Moon: ‘He has a genius for finding people who have not even found themselves.’”
The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen (1978). WorldHum.com says: Matthiessen’s masterpiece is as much a classic of nature and spiritual literature as it is of travel writing. Documenting a 1973 journey into remote Nepal, Matthiessen officially sets out to study Himalayan blue sheep. Matthiessen uses the scientific journey as metaphor, reflecting on matters of life, death and existence itself.
Great Plains, by Ian Frazier (1989). Another story that pulses with middle-America wanderlust. Outside Magazine compliments Frazier’s road tripping ode: “Great Plains both delivers a song of the open road and defibrillates the heartland like no book we know.”
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