Sunday, August 11, 2013

Six of the best travel books

Philip Caputo is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, including the acclaimed A Rumor of War. His novels include Acts of Faith, The Voyage, Horn of Africa, and Crossers.

His latest book is The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean.

One of Caputo's six favorite travel books, as told to The Week magazine:
The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman.

Parkman was one of the 19th century's finest historians. His evocation of the old American West, which he glimpsed on an 1846 journey on horseback, is without parallel. Though occasionally marred by the racial prejudices of Parkman's day, his portraits of prairie Indian tribes are largely good-hearted and quite often droll.
Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue