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Amazon
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Paddle to the Amazon, by Don Starkell. He has apparently written another one since called Paddle The Top of the World or something close to that. The Amazon book is now out of print so a second hand book store will be your best bet. It was the most awesome true life adventure (by choice) that I have ever read. (This book was recommended by EricandJoan reader, Patricia).
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Borneo
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Stranger in the Forest, Eric Hansen, (Penguin Books, 1988). This is a great read about Eric Hansen's 1982 walk across Borneo in a pair of Nike tennis shoes. His adventure starts in 1976, when he made a brief visit to Borneo, and got invited to a wild longhouse party where the merriment included smacking people across the face with a live rooster. Hansen goes back six years later but can't find the same place. Instead, he pays some native guides one shotgun shell a day to lead him on a walk across the forest. Hansen pays bribes, hunts pigs, pounds sago flour, and helps portage a longboat up a 30-degree slope over a mountain pass (an amazing feat, as you know, if you've ever portaged a canoe even 20 feet over flat land). In the middle of the forest, Hansen meets a Bornean carrying a Singer sewing machine on his back--a gift for his wife obtained during a long voyage away from home. Best of all: Hansen has to flee a village where people think he is "bali saleng," a ghost hired by large corporations to collect human blood in order to appease the gods. The only bad thing I can say about the book is Hansen goes on for way too long in the beginning about WHY he undertook his great walk.
BOOKS
editor's note: if anyone out there can recommend the best biography of Mao/Gang of Four, please do.
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Wild Swans, by Jung Chang, (DoubleDay's Anchor Books, 1991). This book blew me away. It is the true story of the author, her mother and her grandmother, and their lives in China. It starts in the feudal days with author's grandmother, who was the concubine of a military general; then comes the mother, who lived through the Japanese and Russian occupations, and then became a fervent Communist revolutionary, only to be arrested several times later on, during various Maoist purges and the Cultural Revolution. The daughter and author, Jung Chang, then tells her own story, of growing up in Maoist China, including a stint in the Red Guards, another stint as a "barefoot" or uneducated doctor, the decades-long separation of her family, and finally, her escape on scholarship to Britain. Lots of great pictures..
A Mother's Ordeal, by Steven W. Mosher (Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1993). Another fantastic read. Here is the first-person story (as told to China expert Mosher) of Yang Chi An, a nursing student who came of age during the Cultural Revolution. At first she likes it. By joining the Red Guard and showing great zeal-- including punching one of her teachers in the face during a criticism meeting at her school--she is able to improve her social status and get a good job. Soon she finds herself implementing the Communist Party's one-child policy by performing forced sterilizations and abortions, and even hunting down one of her pregnant friends who is on the lam. Chi An and her colleagues wonder out loud about how many 'tiny little hands' will claw at them in the after-life. Later, while in the U.S., she becomes pregnant with her second child. Then the tables are turned. From across the world, the Communist Party pressures her to abort. This is the story of how she and her husband became the first couple to win asylum based on defiance of China's one-child policy. Don't read it while you're pregnant. (And don't miss the fun chapter about how Chi An plots with her mother to find the perfect husband)..
Daughter of China, by Meihong Xu and Larry Engelmann, (John Wiley & Sons Inc., 1999.) Here is an amazing story about spies, love, patriotism and interrogation. What more could you want? Meihong Xu, born in 1963, was one of 12 teen-agers from across China to be accepted as the first female cadets in China's intelligence service. She tells of how she grew from a young farm girl who chanted Communist slogans at community meetings -- but only if she was rewarded with peanuts -- into an ultra-patriotic super-agent schooled in martial arts, weaponry, counter-intelligence, and the ways of America, right down to ballroom dancing (As she notes, the Chinese intelligence service was a little behind the times on modern American culture). Soon after graduating from her military academy, she meets a general who is clandestinely working to reform China's military. Meihong pledges her allegiance to him, and is soon caught among a wave of political infighting among the highest circles of China's Communist Party. The book opens with her being interrogated for allegedly giving military secrets to an American professor with whom she had fallen in love. Through the course of her interrogation and subsequent attempts to escape from China in the midst of the Tiananmen Square unrest, we learn about love and betrayal under the watchful eye and guiding hand of the Communist Party..
Red Sorrow, by Nanchu (Arcade Publishing, 2001). Here is yet another take on the Cultural Revolution, by yet another Red Guard. You'd think I'd get tired of reading these, but they are all amazing in different ways. Nanchu's story starts with the invasion of her home by Red Guards: first her father, and then her mother, are found suspect. After nearly dying in the famine that resulted from the Great Leap Forward, Nanchu tries to leave her family's blotted past behind by joining the Red Guard and working at Heilongjiang Military Farms, which turns out to be more like a penal colony than anything else. There, she fends of the sexual advances of her leaders, works 16 hours a day hauling rocks and manure, and becomes a national hero by darting into a burning building and nearly killing herself. Later, she makes it to university, where zealous Red Guard members who get bad grades avenge themselves by criticizing their teachers of using English (or whatever the subject was) to 'persecute' them. After a few heartbreaks, Nanchu finds a practical choice of a husband, and eventually escapes to the U.S. on a student visa..
Trouble Maker, by Harry Wu with George Vecsey (Times Books/ Random House, 1996). Harry Wu really is a trouble maker, and proud of it. In this book, his third, he describes his efforts to document China's laogai, or forced labor camps. The story starts in June 1995 in Kazakhstan, where Wu and an assistant try to enter China, hoping that the remote border post won't recognize Wu for who he is: a guy who served 19 years in the laogai and who has had repeated brushes with Chinese authorities because he keeps secretly returning with news crews to document the camps. Unfortunately, this time, the border guards do recognize him. This is the story of his 66-day detention, interlaced with Wu's findings on how China makes money off of forced labor -- and by selling the body parts of executed prisoners for transplants. Wu comes across as a bit off-balance but that is the kind of person it takes to carry on a crusade..
Life and Death in Shanghai, by Nien Cheng (Penguin Books, 1986). This is a totally different look at the Cultural Revolution, through the eyes of a wealthy woman. Cheng's husband, and later Cheng herself, worked for Shell, and lived a very comfortable lifestyle, even after Mao came to power in 1949. This book begins in 1966, when the Red Guards invade her home, and later force her to go to her first denunciation meeting, to which she carries snacks of chocolate and bottled water. The book goes on to chronicle how the Communists tortured Cheng for years, as she refused to admit she was an enemy of the state. An amazing read..
The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang (BasicBooks/ Perseus Books LLC, 1997). Here is a very gory history of Japan's occupation and Rape of Nanking. In a few short weeks in December of 1937, the Japanese army massacred an estimated 350,000 Chinese. Chang digs out some of the on-the-ground details from survivors, diaries and old court documents. She makes a case that John Rabe, a Nazi living in Shanghai, saved hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives, much as Oskar Schindler saved Jews from the Nazis. Definitely not a dry read. Complete with pictures of beheadings, raped women, etc. The end of the book turns into a harangue against the Japanese and educators in general for barely mentioning the Rape in textbooks (or in the case of many Japanese, denying that the Rape ever took place)..
Blood Red Sunset, by Ma Bo, (Penguin Books 1995). Yet another look at Maoist China, this time through the eyes of a once-idealistic student who ran away from home to Inner Mongolia, joined the Red Guards, and for a brief while, terrorized local peasants with the complete blessings of the Communist Party. But then things change; Mao reins in the Red Guard, Ma Bo's friends betray him, and Ma Bo becomes an outcast, forced to do hard labor on the Mongolian steppes. Here he tells about his long fight to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the Communists, until finally, he gets reassigned. (Book never says how he gets from there to his recent post as writer-in-residence at Brown University)..
Mao Zedong, by Jonathan Spence, (Penguin Lives series, 1999). Here is a short (188 pages, small format) story of the man who is directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese. Based on Mao's own writings (including marginalia in his philosophy books) and interviews with a few of Mao's contemporaries, Spence portrays young Mao as an idealist who started out working with other young Chinese intellectuals to prevent the country from further dismemberment at the hands of the forign invaders and local warlords. At first he's moderate and enjoys personally going into the countryside to report on village life; but as he gains more battle experience and press coverage, a cult forms around him, and cuts him off from seeing the results of his policies. Spence makes a case that the Communists around Mao knew that his policies were disasterous but were afraid to speak up. Spence provides a few great details -- like a vignette about how Mao missed out on his first big uprising in Wuhan because he stopped to find rain boots . But we never get in Mao's head; we have no clue what really made him turn from an idealist into a dictator; and we get no juicy details about Mao's life with Jiang Quing, other than the fact that he didn't get along with her at the end. I was hoping for the Citizen Kane of Mao, but this isn't it.
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Rice, by Su Tong, (Penguin Books, 1996). This is the same guy who wrote Raise the Red Lantern of movie fame. Rice is an incredibly violent, vicious story of Five Dragons, a young man who flees his famine-stricken village in the 1930s and makes his big city, where he starts out working for a rice merchant & his two daughters. They treat him poorly, but Five Dragons, evil personified, spends the rest of the book getting back at them in spades. I thought the book was really good, if disturbing, but much more telling about evil humans than China. Shudder.Suggested reading from site fans:
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Coming Home Crazy, A great book about life in China written by an American from Minnesota by Bill Holm. I read it before and after a trip I took to China and found it very informative, helpful, and truthful. Just a suggestion. Thanks for the great list..
Iron and Silk by Mark Salzman, In the early 80's, after getting a graduate degree in Chinese, he goes to China to teach English. Meanwhile, he also studies the Martial Arts. I originally saw the movie, then went back and got the book. Mark Salzman stars as himself, and many of the characters in the book also play themselves. It's a very good depiction of the life of an expat in China, with all the positives and negatives that come with the territory.FILMS
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Raise the Red Lantern, by director Zhang Yimou, 1991. An amazing movie about a guy in 1930s? China who has four wives, and how they backstab each other in their competition to sleep with him and bear him another male heir. Definitely disturbing, but not quite as much as the book Rice..
Ju Dou, director Zhang Yimou. An amazingly evil story with no truly sympathetic characters. A woman is married off to the evil owner of a dye factory, who beats her. She avenges herself by taking his servant as a lover and bearing the lover's child, whom she raises as her husband's son. As her husband grows older and more feeble, she and her lover conduct themselves more openly, and torture her husband in ways that made me cringe. A very dark film, but beautifully set among flowing pastel-colored bolts of cloth in the dye factory.
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India
BOOKS.
May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons, by Elisabeth Bumiller, (Ballantine Books, 1990). This is a great read!. It's a Western female journalist's take on Indian women's lives, ranging from the rich and famous (there's a chapter on Indian actresses) to the impoverished country folk. Chapters explore touchy topics including female infanticide, sex-selective abortions (Bumiller talks to both rich and poor women who aborted their babies because they were female), arranged marriages, forced sterilization, etc. etc. So it's not exactly uplifting. But it did feel like a good primer. Ironically, Bumiller was in India because she was following her husband, who was transferred there. She spends a lot of time, too much I think, apologizing for this in her book..
The End Play, by Indira Mahindra, (Interlink Books, Emerging Voices series, New York, 1995). This is a very readable novel about the ties and conflicts between three generations of women in one family: Gunga, the young and rebellious journalist (why are the women always journalists for lifestyle magazines?) who is determined to lose her virginity; her mother, a self-supporting doctor who gave up the love of her life to marry into a rich family with a dark past; and her grandmother, a queenly type who reins fiercely over various generations of offspring from her dusty but majestic courtyard in rural India. The fun begins when Gunga interviews the patriarchs of her own family for a story. I liked this book because it brought to life three generations of women, and their different ways of dealing with modern day India. Gunga is sometimes a bit unbelievable--but even so, the book is a great read..
Karma Cola, Marketing the Mystic East, by Gita Mehta (Random House, 1979). This is kind of a breezy patchwork of an Indian's impressions of all the gullible Western freaks who came wandering through her country in search of their Souls back in the 1960s, and the cast of characters and shysters who were their gurus. Funny and light, but easily forgettable I thought..
Bachelor of Arts, by R.K. Narayan (University of Chicago Press, 1937). The story of Chandran, his university studies and how he falls in love with a complete stranger he spies one night on the river banks. I'd put this one in the potato chip category. If it's in front of you, you wolf it down, enjoying it greatly until it's all gone, and then you forget all about it..
Arranged Marriage, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (Anchor Books, Doubleday, NY, 1995). This collection of short stories reminded me a lot of the works of Amy Tan and Alice Walker: like Tan and Walker, Divakaruni is great fun to read, but she has nothing good to say about men from her own culture. The tales are fairly riveting, about Indian women trying to make it in the U.S., all the while deciding which Indian traditions to keep and which to abandon. But check out this roster of male characters: There's a wife beater, a rapist, a guy who abandons his family to run off with his secretary, a guy who orders his wife to abort their child because it is a daughter, and a bunch of unfeeling sexist pigs (including one American). There are a few good guys, but one dies and one gets dumped. I'm all for exposing sexism, and there seems to be plenty of it in Indian culture. And granted, the theme is arranged marriage. But strangely, though arranged marriage fails again and again in this book, the characters always take pains to say that it worked for their parents. Why can't it work now? "We're different," Divakaruni's characters say, without explaining more.FILMS
Bandit Queen, based on the prison diaries of Phoolan Devi, a low caste woman who is married off at age 11, before puberty, and repeatedly raped. She joins up with a group of bandits, leading them on raids all over the country, and on one fatal spree, massacred 22 high caste men in a village that she thought was harboring two men who had raped her. The state government of Uttar Pradesh nearly fell because it couldn't capture her; she finally surrendered. Later, when a low-caste government took over, all charges were dismissed and she became a congresswoman. But recently charges were reinstated; the last story I found on this said she had agreed to show up for Congress duty in Feb. 1997, even though she knew she would be arrested. This film is very very violent and includes lots of rape scenes and interminable use of the f word.
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World of Apu trilogy, Satyajit Ray. (Pather Panchali--Song of the Little Road, 1955; Aparajito--The Unvanquished, 1956; Apu Sansar--World of Apu, 1958). The heart wrenching growing up story of Apu, a little boy who seems to lose at least one or two loved ones in each of the three films of this tragedy. The first film is about his childhood in the countryside, and later in Benares, where his father works as a priest. In the second film he goes to college. And in the third film he gets married--to a stranger of course--and has a son. (Simpsons trivia: In the TV show the Simpsons, there's one episode that has a flashback to when Apu, the guy who runs the 24-hour store, leaves India. In that scene, Apu's dad, who looks exactly like the Satyajit's Apu's dad, waves a tearful good-bye).
BOOKS
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The Buru Quartet, by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. This is actually four books, by a guy who wrote them *in his head* while in prison on Buru Island. The books are This Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations, Footsteps, and House of Glass, all published by William Morrow and Co. Inc., N.Y. They are about the adventures of Minke, a young guy who grows up in early 1900s, Dutch-controlled Indonesia, and gradually evolves from a happy Dutch subject to a journalist and political dissident who leads his fellow Native Indonesians in protest against the Dutch government and powerful sugar companies. These are great, easy and enjoyable reads, with lots of romance, revolution, spying, backstabbing and politicking. In the first book Minke falls in love with the naive Annelies, a half-Dutch, half-Native ("Indo") child who grows up privileged thanks to her Native mother, concubine-turned-businesswoman Nyai Ontosoroh. Nyai emerges as Minke's first political teacher.As the tale wends on Minke begins his journalism career, somewhat naively, and learns the hard way the different rights of the Dutch versus the Indos versus the Natives. In the second book, Minke enters medical school and meets his second mysterious love, Mei, a revolutionary from China who is dedicated to supporting the birth of the Chinese republic from Indonesia. In the third book he follows Mei's example and begins organizing Indonesians, transforming his newspaper, Medan, into a weapon against the government, and teaching his followers the art of the boycott. The fourth book is told from the perspective of a Native former policeman, who monitors Minke during his imprisonment. The last book is supposed to be the best, but actually, I thought the first three were way more fun. All of Toer's books are banned in Indonesia.
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The Fugitive, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, first published in 1950 under the name Perburuan. An historical novel of loyalty and treachery among three friends who rebel against the Japanese occupation of Indonesia during WWII. One of the three rebels, Hardo, travels through his home region disguised as a beggar, trying to make contact with his fiancée while avoiding the guns of the Japanese occupiers. Without revealing his disguise, he talks with relatives and friends from his former life, and runs them down for collaborating with the occupation forces. It's a story of how far one man is willing to go, and how much he's willing to give up to live life as a "free" fugitive, rather than succumb to colonialism. I read it after the Buru Quartet. I didn't like it nearly as much as the quartet, but I thought it was a great study of the greed and fear that makes people bow down to their oppressors..
Shooting the Boh, A Woman's Voyage Down the Wildest River in Borneo, by Tracy Johnston, 1992. A great and only somewhat terrifying story of a woman who learns she has menopause during the wildest rafting trip of her life. In between tales of people getting tossed out of rafts, Johnston gives us her somewhat insecure look at her more glorious travel partners, including a young model who keeps all her clothes miraculously dry by sealing them in double-layered ziplocks. You know the adventure will be fun when Johnston tells how she carefully packed a pharmacy of pills for the trip, but had to travel onward without it because of a baggage handling glitch.
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Rain of Gold, Victor Villasenor (Dell Publishing, 1992). This is the book I kept thinking of when I was reading Wild Swans. It is Villasenor's true tale of his family history, and how he came to believe it. He explains how he always thought his parents were making up stories, because his mother talked of growing up on a "mountain of gold" etc. But as he explores his past, he discovers that all the things they say can be explained--ie his mother grew up on a mountain with many gold mines. Here he tells the separate stories of his mother's and father's childhoods in Mexico, how they met and crossed the border to the U.S. The funniest part is how Villasenor's father, a liquor-running, gun toting bad boy who took how-to-be-a-gentleman lessons from a whore in Montana, managed to win over Villasenor's mother, a pure-as-the-driven snow type. Lots of pictures, and a great read. Villasenor says he had a lot of trouble finding a publisher who would publish it as a true story, instead of as a piece of fiction. I liked this book so much that I also picked up a much earlier book of his, Macho (1973 Bantam Books), which I didn't like at all.
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Mississippi River, U.S.A. books and links.
FILMS
Goodbye Pork Pie, 1981. This is a cheesy but fun car-chase film, about three delinquents who steal a car and drive it all over New Zealand, somehow managing to slip the cops as they hide the car on ferries and even a train! Wow. Fancy driving, but great views of what I hope was the New Zealand countryside. Eric says he bets it's a cult classic in New Zealand. (It turns out we're right. Check out the following letter we got from NZ):
Re: Goodbye Pork Pie (a cult movie in & about NZ)
As you speculate, GPP is a cult classic - at least in our family (mum, dad, son, 2 daughters). We have the video, watched it frequently at one time, and still get it out for an airing 2 or 3 times a year. It became the source for a fun game our family played once over dinner at a local restaurant.
It started accidentally when someone quoted a phrase from the movie in response to something that happened in the restaurant. We then took turns to quote more classic phrases or pivotal comments from the movie. Unexpectedly, the game went on for over half an hour. We've even driven parts of the route (yes, it was all filmed in NZ) down the West Coast of the South Island (where the Traffic Officer drives his car and mistress into the
lake) and across the Haast Pass (where a second traffic cop "busts his leg"). The latter location we believe is a touch of editing room magic - when driving the Haast 2 years ago we looked for the spot where the police car went off the road and found a place that looked like the exit point, but with no further run off, then saw a second location that resembled the run-off with the wrong exit point.The film is now becoming a historical record too - the Traffic Police no longer exist, having been merged into the Police Force, and the gravel road over the Haast has all been tar sealed (we have driven over it before and after). Some of the lifestyle, culture and attitudes have changed too. A week ago TVNZ showed the movie on late night, and followed up this week with Smash Palace. We can hardly wait to see what's on next week. How did I find your site? Needless to say, I used HotBot to search for "Goodbye Pork Pie". Now I'll browse the rest of your web pages.
Thanks. -- Gordon, NZ (first place to see the sun), June 1999
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U.S.A.
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A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson (Broadway Books, 1999). Here's the story of a pot-bellied middle-aged guy who decides to walk the 2,100-mile Appalachian trail with his old college buddy, a fellow belly man. They wrestle with donut lust, fear of bears and jealousy of the slender-bodied youths who bound past them on the trail. Along the way, Bryson, who has spent the previous few decades living in England, ponders what it is to be American. Bryson has a sweet pen, and he's a funny guy, so it's a fun read. He also includes lots of history about the trail itself, from tales of tourists who were mauled by bears to more boring stuff about flora and fauna.Libby, The Sketches, letters & Journal of Libby Beaman, by Libby Beaman, presented by grand daughter Betty John (Council Oak Books Tulsa/San Francisco, 1998). Here's the amazing journal Libby kept in 1879-1880, when she left the genteel world of Washington D.C. to accompany her husband John--against his will--to his post supervising the fur seal industry in Alaska's Pribiloff Islands. As the first white woman in that land of fog, tufted puffins and Aleuts who have never seen corsets, Libby finds, to her horror, that she has fallen in love with John's gruff boss, also their roommate. For the next year, Libby struggles with duty, passion and scurvy as she chronicles the lives of the Aleuts around her. It's a great, great read!
Where the Sea Breaks its Back, by Corey Ford (Alaska Northwest Books, Anchorage/Seattle/Portland 1966).
Maybe you've heard of Vitus Bering's last death-defying journey across the uncharted North Pacific in 1741. But have you ever heard of Georg Wilhelm Steller, the German-born naturalist who tagged along and made incredible discoveries while also making an incredible pain-in-the-ass out of himself? Steller tells all in this journal of his attempt to chronicle the strange sea life and flora of the land "where the sea breaks its back." He discovers, among other things, white ravens and Steller's sea cow, a huge (28 to 35 feet long, 25 feet around the middle) gentle cow-like creature that lived in water, may have mated monogamously, and went extinct shortly after Steller observed them (with a little help from Steller and Bering's starving crew; they ate some sea cows to stay alive). The story is full of Steller's whining, often rightfully so, about the crew's bad decisions, including their refusal to stop on an island where Steller knew he could pick up an herb to treat the crew's scurvy. Storms, shipwrecks, backstabbing, and a snotty French astronomer with bad maps, this book has it all..
All the Right Places, by Brad Newsham (Villard Books, 1989). Another great read, although I'm getting suspicious of the 'my wife divorced me' excuse for traveling and writing travel books. Newsham's book opens with his impending divorce. He takes six months off to adventure through Japan, where he accidentally succumbs to baptism by Christian fundamentalists; Singapore, where he meets an alluring young travel companion; China, where he learns the art of money changing and stumbles across a field used for executions; and finally, a ride on the trans-Siberian, where he spends most of his time with other Western travelers, and a few Africans, and has only brief encounters with real Russians. He does pal around with a guy who helps him extend his passing-through visa so he can stay for two nights in Moscow. I loved the book but somehow also got the sense, maybe from Newsham's sense of modesty, that he didn't really get to know the countries he traveled through..
Miles from Nowhere, Barbara Savage. The tale of Savage's two-year, 23,000-mile bicycle odyssey through 25 countries with her husband. Lots of adventures and brutal honesty about how the couple fought a lot over their different traveling styles. Adventures include a fistfight in Florida with a college professor who nearly killed them with his car, lots of partying in Spain, an escape from rock-throwers in Egypt, fear of bandits in Thailand and India, and Savage's encounter with an ape on a rooftop in India. Tragically, although Savage survived the entire trip without a helmet, she later died of head injuries when a car hit her bicycle near her home in Santa Barbara. She wasn't wearing a helmet.
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Suggestions. We'd love to hear any of your suggestions on books or films on any place, but especially on: Alaska, Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, Borneo, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Laos, China, Nepal, France, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Czech, former East Germany, Germany, or Holland. If you've got a moment, and want to share a title, please send it here.
last updated Oct. 7, 2002