Ghost Riders: In Search of the American Wanderer by Richard Grant
'Why would you want to live in the same damn box all your life, or maybe a bigger box if you work hard enough and kiss enough ass,' queries a truck-driving acquaintance of the author, as he argues the case for the American nomad.
Richard Grant, who has spent over a decade leading a peripatetic existence in the Midwest and southwest of the US, asks oilfield roughnecks, cowboys, migrant workers, travelling salesmen, truck drivers, troubadours and tramps to explain what drives a man to a life in motion. The wandering spirit seems to affect a disproportionately large number of people in America, partly because it is so big, partly because of the 'get rich quick' attitude and partly as a result of the history of its inhabitants.
Grant opens up a part of America too often left in the shadows. As he patrols this area, he intertwines the narratives of the wanderers he encounters with vignettes from modern America's formative history. From the brave Apache chief Geronimo to the drug-addled hobo of today, Grant asks if wanderlust is natural or a disease of the soul. There are many books about the 'where', 'what' and 'how' of travel, but this does the harder job of bringing us closer to the 'why'. TT
Then Again by Irma Kurtz
An 18-year-old Jewish girl leaves New Jersey in 1954 for a summer in Europe with a party of young Americans eager to sample a more sophisticated culture. She keeps a journal, which she rediscovers and realises that it records a seminal phase in her development. That European trip convinced her to leave America and live over here, to the displeasure of her East European immigrant parents. Why did she want to go back to the continent their families had so recently left in despair, especially so soon after the Holocaust?
The young woman becomes a successful journalist and Cosmo agony aunt in London - and the rediscovery of the journal stimulates her to retrace the European coach and train experiences of her adolescent self. She cross-cuts her account of this recent journey with extracts from her innocently enthusiastic journal, using the contrasts as a catalyst to reflect on both the changes to the cities she visits and her own journey from youth to the edge of old age. (LR)
Hearing Birds Fly: A Year in a Mongolian Village by Louisa Waugh
Life in Mongolia is an endless struggle against the elements in a place where women age before their time and life is a daily grind of fetching water, getting fuel for the fire, and a never-ending round of tea drinking. The monotony seems to be broken only by vodka-laden evenings when it is rude not to drink and the local women put on a smattering of lipstick to go to the local 'klub'. Even changing the standard diet of mutton and more mutton comes with risks attached - people in one village got bubonic plague after eating marmot.
The place where Louisa Waugh chose to stay is called Tsengel, which means 'delight'. Even she agrees it is a bizarre name for the 'windswept village where death and life were so raw, crude and compelling'. Having happened on Mongolia by chance rather than design, and after two years in Ulan Bator, the author moved to this bleak village to teach English to the villagers and nomads. As well as the hardships of life, she learnt about the underlying tensions between the Tuvans, Mongols and Kazhaks who live side by side. Her account is easy to read but it's hard to call it compelling when daily life is so full of drudgery. Before you book that ticket to 'romantic' Mongolia, read this book - it might make you think twice. JK
Running with Reindeer: Encounters in Russian Lapland by Roger Took
Art historian Roger Took visits Russian Lapland, a region of tundra and taiga closed off to inquisitive eyes for decades by the Soviets, in a quest to find out what remains of the indigenous people's way of life, which elsewhere in what we call Lapland has managed to survive alongside more enlightened Scandinavian neighbours.
The book starts brightly, as we speed through the forest by reindeer sledge on a trip with Saami herders, but no sooner is the reader entranced than the writer takes a step back and embarks on the first of many long trawls through history, Soviet industrial expansion, Cold War military secrecy and geographical detail. This is a shame because the strongest parts of Took's account are his interactions with the herders and descendants of settlers today, the people he meets on his journeys. But judging by one encounter near the end with a posh British holiday party - complete with helicopters - out for peerless salmon fishing, it is a land we may yet get to know much better. PS
