For many travellers one of the sacred rituals before leaving on a long trip is the search for good books that can be taken on the road as companions on those long rides across vast landscapes or lonely nights in foreign grounds.
Pointed out to students that good travel books, a la Farley & Grann, have themes (quest, identity, history), beyond “my summer vacation.”
Posted on Twitter at 7:56 AM Jul 23rd from web
by Big World Magazine
I need recommendations for GOOD books that will keep me entertained during my 15 hours of travel to Berlin!
Posted on Twitter at 9:29 PM Jul 21st from TweetDeck by CharlestonVal
Help! Suggestions on good YA books that involve cross-country or cross-continent adventures? Bonus points for travel by train.
Posted on Twitter at 8:26 PM Jul 20th from TweetDeck by Whitney Miller
Lapham’s quarterly on Travel
I’m finding Lapham’s quarterly anthology on travel a top candidate: it compiles a great number of timeless short pieces written by travellers without necessarily being a travel guide. As I told a friend a while ago, any anthology that can bring McLuhan, De Botton, etc to talk about travel has my attention. Its format is travel-friendly: compact without being a [...]
The following is an adaptation of the post by the same title appeared in el-oso.net, with a few of my own conclusions. In the original post “oso” explores some of the common patterns in the evolution of cities.
Chapter 1: Make-shift Slums
As Kevin Kelly rightly points out, “every city begins as a slum … a seasonal camp with free-wheeling make-shift expediency.” Cities are founded on economic opportunity, spontaneous slums, and lawless saloons. Eventually gender ratios equal out, churches move in, government takes shape, and urban planning is institutionalized.
Chapter 2: Hegemony Rules
During the transition from slum to civic center some social group usually takes power and dictates policy. It tends to be the ethnic majority though in the case of colonized countries that was almost never the case. In most cities in the United States power lied among the WASP community. Ethnic minorities were pushed out to the edges while the elite built Victorian homes around the downtown business districts and plazas.
Chapter 3: Suburbanization or scalability of the dream
This is the chapter that takes on different manifestations depending on the ethnic and class make-up of a city, but the basic concept is still generally applicable. During WWII in the United [...]
A while ago I started to collect city rankings, but more than anything else I was creating the foundation for what would eventually be the greatest destination. If I’ve learned anything throughout this process is that no city can claim such honour. Depending on who you ask, each city will have a unique array of features and advantages that are hard to qualify, let alone compare. But more importantly, the city itself is such a large entity in our mostly urbanized world that trying to generalize any qualities may result in a gross generalization of certain attributes that would be better appreciated if we could localize them.
But since we’re hopelessly lost in this quest for our ideal place, I thought a great place to restart the quest is the latest attempt from Monocle magazine to design the perfect city block. As it seems now a tradition, along with their Quality of Life index, they also look closer and generalize what they’ve learned through the process of ranking cities to put together a theory of “smart urban living”. Without trying to discredit the effort (I really think they are onto [...]
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