Books
Reading is like traveling in itself. You open the pages and someone you’ve never met takes you far away. Actually, that makes it more like hitchhiking but anyway…
Here are some reviews of Road Junky’s favourite travel books and movies.
Or better yet – go and buy our travel handbook
Road Junky has 49 Books articles. Scroll down to view.
Foreign Babes in Beijing by Rachel DeWoskin
I just finished Foreign Babes in Beijing, the hilarious, insightful tragic-comic tale of an American girl who winds up acting in a Chinese TV series about love between East and ...
The Happy Islands of Oceania by Paul Theroux
The Happy Islands of Oceania or Paddling the Pacific is a masterpiece from Paul Theroux, perhaps even eclipsing Dark Star Safari. The tale begins with Theroux in London ending ...
Bruce Chatwin and Nomads
Bruce Chatwin aspired to write a book about the nomadic instinct but died before he ever managed to put all of his thoughts together. He left behind rambling essays that ...
The Marsh Arabs by Wilfred Thesiger
Having lost the untouched paradise of Arabian Sands to the merciless exploitation of the oil companies that corrupted the Bedouin culture that Wilfred Thesiger so dearly loved, he ...
Embracing the Infidel – Stories of Muslim Migrants on the Journey West by Behzad Yaghmaian
Embracing the Infidel is an enlightening and heart-wrenching read. Documenting the stories of the refugees and migrants coming out of places like Sudan, Iran, Kurdistan and Afghanistan, Yaghmaian allows ...
Eating the Flowers of Paradise – A Journey Through the Drug Fields of Ethiopia and Yemen by Kevin Rushby
Kevin Rushby is probably addicted to qat, a psychoactive leaf chewed throughout Yemen, Somalia and Ethiopia. But Rushby is at pains to point out that qat is not ...
Bozo and the Storyteller – How to Save the World
Bozo and the Storyteller is a novel for anyone who never really grew up. Our world is nothing more than a Story, it seems and the Storyteller himself is ...
Urban Iran – Art, Photography and Graffiti
Iran is one of the world’s most maligned countries by the mass media and so it’s always a pleasure to come across a book which shows the human side of ...
Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck
One of the answers he discovered is that Americans, young and old, have an unquenchable wanderlust. Steinbeck himself is no exception:
When I was very young and the urge to be ...
Arabic Tattoos - A Cultural and Photographic Journey
Arabic Tattoos is a book from Mark Batty Publisher that explores the genre of those who choose to push the cultural boundaries by having Arabic script printed on their ...
Roberto Saviano, Gomorra and the Camorra
Roberto Saviano is one of the bravest writers alive today. His book, Gomorra, a graphic expose of one of the largest criminal organizations in the world, the Camorra of Napoli, ...
One Life to Ride by Ajit Harisinghani - Travel Book Reviews
From the moment I saw the secondary title A Motorcycle Journey to the High Himalayas I had a feeling what I might be in for. Indian English is renowned for ...
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt – Travel Book Reviews
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is a portrait of Savannah, an isolated town in Georgia where John Berendt, a journalist from New York found himself by chance ...
The Seventh Gate by Peter Greave - Travel Book Reviews
The Seventh Gate is the autobiography of Peter Greave, born in Calcutta in the time of the Raj and he tells his tragic tale with wit and grace that make ...
The Names of Things by Susan Brind Morrow
The Names of Things belongs in a category all of its own. At times travel memoirs, at times etymological musings, the personal and the academic blend in a unique story ...
Black Earth City by Charlotte Hobson – Book Reviews
Black Earth City is one of the most delightful traveler tales you’re likely to come across. By turns funny, poignant and tragic, Charlotte Hobson records her year spent in
What is the What by Dave Eggers - Travel Book Reviews
The life of Valentino Achak Deng, a Dinka from southern Sudan, is one of constant motion in Dave Eggers’ What is the What. From the age of six, Valentino (who ...
Arabia by Jonathan Raban - Travel Book Reviews
When does a travelogue cease to be a work of journalism and become instead a historical record? Jonathan Raban wrote Arabia in 1979 when the first rich Arabs were coming ...
Budget Travel in India by David S. Kauffman
One of the very occasional perks of editing Road Junky is the odd parcel that arrives with someone’s book in it for us to review. A Road Junky book review ...
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi - Travel Book Review
Reading Lolita in Tehran is probably the best introduction to modern Iran to be found anywhere. By turns, lyrical and personal, Azar Nafisi offers us a portrait of her ...
Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux - Travel Book Review
Dark Star Safari is one of Paul Theroux’s best travel books to date. He sets out to journey from Cairo to Cape town shortly before his 60th birthday in a ...
101 Experimental Travel Ideas
The Lonely Planet have decided that they’ve squeezed all the fun out of travel with their homogenising guidebooks and have released the Experimental Travel Guide to inspire people to ...
Thumbs Up Australia, Hitchhiking Oz - Travel Book Reviews
Thumbs Up Australia by Tom Parry is a pleasant tale of a meek English journalist and his volatile French girlfriend hitching around Australia. Parry’s girlfriend, Katia, thinks he’s half-crazy but ...
Voyageur by Robert Twigger - Travel Book Reviews
What put off most modern canoeists was that the journey went over a mountain range. And to climb that range meant paddling over a thousand miles against the current, largely ...
A Death in Brazil by Peter Robb – Travel Book Reviews
A Death in Brazil is a book that demonstrates a great writing talent with lush, florid passages that sweep the reader onto the stage of a slum in Rio ...
Down and Out in Paris and London By George Orwell
Down and Out in Paris and London was one of the most remarkable travel books of its time and inspired generations of writers to transcend their comfortable backgrounds and discover ...
The Places In Between - A Travel Book Review
The Places in Between
by Rory Stewart
There are three types of travel writers. First there are the ones who know important people worth including in their books, authors like Paul ...
Papillon by Henri Charriere
Book Review, “Papillon” by Henry Charriere
Review by Tom Thumb
In 1970 “Papillon” was published and set the world on fire. It is the slightly inventive autobiography of Henri Charriere, a ...
Arabian Sands Book Review
Wilfred Thesiger never imagined he would write about his experiences out in the sands of Arabia. When he was later asked to do so by his friends he initially refused ...
Amitav Ghosh - "In An Antique Land"
In An Antique Land is written by the anthropologist, Amitav Ghosh and the publishers marketed it as ‘..a subversive history in the guise of a traveler’s tale… a magical, intimate ...
Adrift by Steven Callahan
Have you ever just wanted to just get away from it all and spend some time traveling on your own terms? Well, if this urge has ever compelled you to ...
"Further Up The Road" - Hitching from San Fran to Argentina - Travel Books
Further Up the Road is the tale of a young freak hitchhiking from San Francisco to Argentina and halfway back with barely a coin in his pocket. Set in the ...
Deccan Tamasha – South India on a Motorcycle - Travel Books
Deccan Tamasha by Robin Brown is the definitive book on touring India by motorbike, written by one of the original freaks to have survived the overland journey to India ...
Holidays in Hell by P.J O'Rourke - Travel Books
The basic premise of Holidays in Hell is that P.J O’Rourke, self-declared ex-liberal and now fanatical right wing zealot, travels the world to all of the war zones, police states ...
Round Ireland With A Fridge by Tony Hawks - Travel Books
Round Ireland with a Fridge is the slightly surreal tale of Tony Hawks, a stand up comedian who, for a bet, resolves to hitchhike around the circumference of Ireland with ...
Touch the Dragon by Karen Connolly - Thai Travel Book
Touch the Dragon by Karen Connolly is one of the most beautiful travel books you’re ever likely to read. With a poetic voice and a maturity rare to be found ...
Richard Burton - Harar Travel Book
In 1854, ever ready to appropriate, exploit and plunder the resources of the world, the British Empire desired to know what treasures the ancient city of Harar, in East Africa, ...
Hashish - A Smuggler's Tale by Henry de Monfreid - Book Review
Hashish is a classic tale of adventure in daring by one of the greatest adventurers of the early 20th century. The premise of the book is a classic example of ...
California Dreaming by Lawrence Donegan Book Review
California Dreaming is the tale of Lawrence Donegan, an ex bass player turned journalist, living out a grim life in Glasgow. He’s always dreamed of going to live in
Blaine Harden - Africa, Dispatches from a Fragile Continent
If you want to understand anything at all about the state of modern Africa then Blaine Harden is the man to read. A reporter for the Washington Post, his ...
J.W Schultz - My Life As An Indian
Published over a hundred years ago in 1907, J.W Schultz was too early to know that future generations would have preferred him to title his memoirs ‘My Life as a ...
Pete McCarthy - McCarthy's Bar, Ireland Travelogue
Pete McCarthy is a man who thinks he’s English but would kind of like to be Irish and so, in McCarthy’s Bar, he sets off to see if he might ...
Dispatches, Vietnam Michael Herr
‘We have all spent ten years trying to explain what happened to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived – but Michael Herr’s Dispatches puts all ...
Eric Newby Traveler's Tales
Eric Newby is one of the established English travel writers, making his mark with classics like A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Self-deprecating and light-hearted, he now shows himself ...
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness is largely inspired by Conrad’s travels in the Congo, deep in the heart of Africa, then known as the Dark Continent. He saw the colonial machine ...
Marco Polo's Travels
Marco Polo doesn’t exactly qualify as a travel writer – in the age he lived the only books in circulation were the Bible, some religious and philosophical works and the ...
The Pillars of Hercules by Paul Theroux - Travel Book Review
A great travel writer will not always write a great travel book but with Paul Theroux you can always be sure of a laugh along the way. Laconic, irritable and ...
Paddle to the Amazon by Don Starkell Book Review
We’ve all heard of the father who wants to live out his dreams through his sons, but Don Starkell took it a step further by dragging his sons along with ...
Travel Book Review: Dust On My Shoes
Dust on my Shoes by Peter Pinney is quintessential travel before the whole deal became commoditized. Before waves of backpackers, hippy types in vans, and throngs of adventuring ecotourists the ...
