When the temperatures rise in July, most of us get a yearning to travel, somewhere, anywhere. Families flock to beaches, wanderers take to the road and adventurers seek new thrills. For the booklovers among us, the first thing to go into the suitcase is our summer reading material. It’s time to stock up and catch up. Sit back, relax and enjoy some of our offerings from diversebooks.net about travel and destinations. If you can’t get away, you can read about travel and let your imagination transport you.
Diversebooks.net has 103 travel-related titles. Here are highlights of a few, all available at discount prices:
Richard Wright’s Travel Writings: New Reflections, by Virginia Whatley Smith, $22.50, List price: $25. University of Mississippi Press, June 2006, ISBN: 9781578069316, pp. 246.
Richard Wright, the famed black author of “Native Son,” lived as an expatriate in Paris and traveled widely. He did so not so much for pleasure as to observe the culture and politics of the places he visited, particularly post-colonial countries. As one of the few black authors of his time (1908-1960) to do travel writing extensively, he was a rarity, and his writing continues to interest scholars. This book is a collection of essays by a multi-national cast of writers that examines Wright’s work, and it includes several photographs taken by Wright.
A Place Called Mississippi: Collected Narratives, by Marion Barnwell, $19.80, List Price: $22. University of Mississippi Press, August 1997, ISBN: 9780878059645, pp. 384.
A collection of essays spanning 400 years that reflect Mississippi, beginning with a selection from “A Gentleman from Elvas,” written in 1541 and ending with a 1966 essay by Ellen Douglas. Among the essayists are such well-known names as Jefferson Davis, Ida B. Wells, Richard Wright, Craig Claiborne, William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, but lesser-known writers are represented as well.
Defining Travel: Diverse Visions, by Susan L. Roberson, $22.50, List Price: $25, University of Mississippi Press, June 2007, ISBN: 9781934110539, pp. 328.
In this anthology, contemporary scholars reflect on the reasons people travel, presenting analysis from a wide range of personal and theoretical perspectives. The essays represent myriad travel experiences and ways of writing about them. The collection includes essays on tourism, travel writing, globalization, immigration, migration and forced relocation.
Indonesia, by Nicola Frost and Tantyo Bangun, $8.96, List Price: $9.95, Oxfam Publishing, November 2002, ISBN: 9780855984816, pp. 92.
An illustrated travel guide from the Oxfam Country Profiles Series that shows the complexities of a country struggling against economic, political and environmental forces. It is a land of 17,000 islands spanning an area wider than the continental United States. It is the fourth most-populous country in the world and has the largest Muslim population of any country in the world.
