Voyage en Orient (1849-1851)

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Caroline Alexander

The author's travel account of her exploration in equatorial Africa, retracing the journey made in 1895 by Mary Kingsley.

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William Broyles, Jr

Broyles, former Newsweek editor, spent four weeks in Vietnam in 1984 visiting sites familiar from his days as a combat Marine, talking with people and asking probing and provocative questions. He interviewed mountain tribesmen, fishermen, Amerasian children, Communist Party officials, academics, and former members of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army. In his own reminiscences from the war, Broyles conveys the moral ambiguities in a fresh and moving way, and in his narrative of the 1984 visit he conveys the pathetic state of postwar Vietnam. Although he felt "a certain satisfying irony at my old enemy being hoist with its own petard," he left Vietnam "with a sympathy for my old enemies I had not had before." Few books capture the essence of the Vietnam War and its aftermath so vividly as this one.

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Sean Condon

Sean Condon is young, urban and a connoisseur of hair wax. He can't drive, and he doesn't travel well.So when Sean and his friend David set out to explore Australia in a duck-egg blue 1966 Ford Falcon, the result is a decidely offbeat look at life on the road. Over 14,000 death-defying kilometres later, our heroes check out the re-runs on tv, get fabulously drunk, listen to Neil Young and wonder why they ever left home.Sean & David's Long Drive mixes sharp insights with deadpan humour and outright lies. Crank it up and read it out loud.

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Colin Thubron

Having learned Mandarin, and travelling alone by foot, bicycle and train, Colin Thubron set off on a 10,000 mile journey from Beijing to the borders of Burma. He travelled through the wind-swept wastes of the Gobi desert and finished at the far end of the Great Wall.