The Best American Travel Writing
Edited by Tim Cahill, HoughtonMifflin Company, 2006

      Readers of my annual review of The Best American Travel Writing will know that I can be something of a broken record in my criticism of the collection. In general, I complain over and over again about the fact that most of the selections in each volume – which is supposed to represent the very best travel writing of the previous year in hundreds of diverse American publications – are chosen from a few, usually about five, big-name glossy magazines. That’s not exactly a broad survey of American travel writing, I argue, and I’ve argued it every year I’ve reviewed the collection. I’m not going to argue it this year, not necessarily because this year’s collection is significantly more inclusive, but rather because I’ve decided that no matter how much I complain the volumes’ editors aren’t going to listen.

      The truth is, though, that The Best American Travel Writing's 2006 edition is significantly more inclusive than collections in the series over the past few years. Editor Tim Cahill, a founding editor of Outside Magazine and himself one of the most noteworthy travel writers in America, has gathered a group of travel pieces that at least gives a nod to publishing venues beyond the megaglossies. Yes, this volume is made up primarily of pieces originally published in Outside, The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly (as well as other over-bankrolled magazines like GQ and Travel+Leisure), but it also contains pieces from FarFlungMagazine.com, WorldHum.com, PerceptiveTravel.com and The Georgia Review. For this, Cahill deserves some gratitude, and his big-tent style of editorship makes more convincing the claim that he makes in his disjointed but warm introduction, claiming that the most important aspect of travel writing for him is the strength of the piece’s story rather than its flash or craft.

      All that said, I’ll admit that I’m not in love with all of Cahill’s choices. Ironically enough, some of the pieces are markedly and unusually devoid of story. Paul Bennett’s “How to Sail Across the Atlantic” is a cutesy numbered list of anecdotes about attempting to sail a small boat around the world; an anemic infomercial about the wealthy-middle-aged-couple hobby of “cruising.” The piece doesn’t have a narrative arc to speak of and is consequently quite boring. Tom Bissel and Morgan Meis contribute a tour of Vietnam in “After the Fall,” another entry in the “Guys with Issues Tackle Southeast Asia” genre. Postmodern wondergirl Heidi Julavits makes an empty-headed visit to a clothing-optional hot spring in “Naked Ambition,” and Sean Flynn rambles in an issue-journalism piece about prostitution in Costa Rica.

      When it comes to old-fashioned adventure journalism, this volume does have some good work inside. The always-dependable tough guy Mark Jenkins goes to Afghanistan, Michael Behar looks for savages in Indonesia, and Kevin Fedarko profiles a grizzled Grand Canyon river-running veteran. These pieces are solid as stone (if only slightly more exciting), and they all come from Outside, which, glossy or not, is inarguably the source of some of the best travel writing in America.

      Cahill, perhaps not surprisingly given his own penchant for tongue-in-cheek writing, has chosen a fair amount of humor for the volume, and most of it is very funny indeed. The humor writers included are some of the best in the business, and they’re actually writing about travel, unlike some of the funny guys thrown into past collections. P.J. O’Rourke takes a look around the vast factory in France where Airbus assembles the double-decker superjumbo A380 airliner and finds the whole thing kinda ridiculous. The barbs in the piece seem even sharper now that the A380 seems destined to become a superjumbo version of the Edsel.

      Calvin Trillin views a small town in Ecuador through the eyes of an obsessive foodie and David Sedaris endures a flight to Raleigh via hell with his usual acidic wit.

      The best pieces in the volume are those in which writers find the exoticism of good travel writing in places that are unexpectedly close to home. Sally Shivnan writes a beautifully sincere ode to flying that is a perfect counterpoint to O’Rourke and Sedaris, whose cynical observations are hilarious but dangerously clichéd. The fantastic Ian Frazier writes another excellent piece about his immediate surroundings in “Out of Ohio.” Wisconsin writer Michael Perry does this sort of thing better, but Frazier has no problem arguing that there really is no place like home.

      The collection’s centerpiece, in my opinion, is Alain De Botton’s “The Discreet Charm of the Zurich Bourgeoisie.” Equal parts travelogue, cultural commentary and art historical treatise, the piece defends the honor of comfort, familiarity and peace in the face of attacks from adventure, change and uniqueness. His hometown of Zurich may be boring, he argues, but it’s a nice place to live. “We keep forgetting that buttering bread for a child and making the bed have their wondrous dimensions,” he writes.

      “I wanted someone interesting enough inside not to ask of a city that it also be ‘interesting,’” De Botton says of an old girlfriend who hated Zurich, “someone sufficiently acquainted with the darker, tragic sides of the human soul to appreciate the stillness of a Zurich weekend.” If only every travel writer were such a someone, every volume of The Best American Travel Writing would be filled with truly good stuff.

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