TRAVEL BOOKS - THE BEST

FROM THE NEW YOrK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Dec.2

THE GREAT WALL
From Beginning to End.
Photography by Michael Yamashita.
Text by Michael Yamashita and William Lindesay. (Sterling, $29.95.)

Yamashita, a photographer for National Geographic, spent a year traveling the lengthof the Great Wall of China, making images of the landscape, the people and the wall itself. This book collects 160 of them.

"Whereas the term adventurer suggests a passion for new frontiers,” Alexandra Lapierre observes in the coffee-table book she’s written with Christel Mouchard, WOMEN TRAVELERS: A Century of Trailblazing Adventures, 1850-1950 (Flammarion, $45), the term adventuress “connotes ambitiousness, intrigue, mercenary sex.” But the authors of six recent travel books — all men — suggest otherwise. These writers and their books traffic in ambitiousness, intrigue and mercenary sex. Could they be adventuresses too?

Part quest, part biography, part philosophical essay, MISHIMA’S SWORD: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend (Da Capo, paper, $15.95) is the British martial arts expert Christopher Ross’s account of his search for the sword that was used to cut off Yukio Mishima’s head after the Japanese writer committed seppuku in 1970. The book has the intensity and mystery of a fever dream, and it’s rife with memorable and sometimes unsettling information. We learn that the samurai wore makeup (pallor might be mistaken for cowardice) and that Mishima’s suicide remains controversial. (Seppuku is meant to be poetic and conducted in private, but the publicity-friendly Mishima took his life in the office of a Japanese general, and even looked into having it televised.) Ross’s quest takes him to a Tokyo S-and-M club, where he interviews a man Mishima seduced into sexual role-playing: as the famous writer and his star-struck charge acted out seppuku, Mishima, without any physical contact, would climax at the point of his “beheading.” By interspersing such graphic material with an account of Ross’s own childhood interest in kung fu and with more than you want to know about the role of swords in Japanese culture, Ross approaches a larger portrait of the nature of violence, as elucidated by one of his epigraphs, from G. K. Chesterton: “The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself kills all men.” Complete with two fantasy sequences, “Mishima’s Sword” is as strange and beguiling as its subject.

A real-estate deal that consists of a handshake and a bottle of Champagne. A “little elf of a man named Enzo who came to oil all the beams” of the house. A “noise-party” to get all the deer off the property. These are but a few of the elements that account for the soufflé-like charm of A VINEYARD IN TUSCANY: A Wine Lover’s Dream (Norton, $24.95), Ferenc Mate’s account of renovating an abandoned 13th-century friary in Montalcino — the wine zone whose signature offering is brunello — and turning it into a winery.

In her Washington Post review of Mate’s earlier work of Eurocozy lit, “The Hills of Tuscany,” Nancy McKeon noted that the personalities one encounters “are those of new friends and neighbors, not the hired hands (masons, plumbers and plasterers) of Mayle and Mayes.” “A Vineyard in Tuscany” is a combination — we get both Enzo the beam-oiler and a passel of lovable neighbors, some of them famed vintners. But more intriguing are the treasures and terrors lurking deep in the woods of the new property — things that are, by turns, lovely, ancient, creepy and slithery. Although Mate seems more interested in writing about house renovation than winemaking, by book’s end most charitable readers will share a feeling of accomplishment and pride when his wife’s syrah is voted one of the great Italian reds by Morrell’s of New York. The more hardheaded among us may be inclined to ask, “What hath Peter Mayle wrought?”

In WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T RUN: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide (Lyons Press, paper, $16.95), Peter Allison says most tourists want “to see animals that could kill them, but hopefully wouldn’t.” Given this fact, and the wealth of terrifying and enterprising animals Allison writes about — including a band of monkeys that break into the tents, “festooning the thorn trees with underwear like it was an early Christmas” — it’s a surprise that the African animal I’m most interested in seeing is a genet. This slinky hellion, “a long-bodied relative of the mongoose,” has “the markings of a leopard and an exquisite kittenlike face that is almost impossible to dislike.” Though it “bordered on illegal” to do so, Allison and his colleagues kept a genet in the lodge at his camp. The creature enjoyed climbing onto the dining room table and nibbling on leftovers; at one point, its ambitions even larger, it ate someone’s pet squirrel. Allison, who has spent most of his career at a camp called Mombo, in the Okavango Delta, also tells of unsuspectingly walking almost the full length of a submerged crocodile and driving a jeep full of tourists into a hippo-filled lagoon.

Recent literary scholars, trying to determine if there’s a male equivalent of chick-lit, have latched onto the gambling writer Ben Mezrich (“Bringing Down the House”) and his tales of yuppie men in collective search of ka-ching. But you could just as easily point to the flourishing genre of eat-challenging-or-vile-food books, as practiced by Anthony Bourdain, Steven Rinella and now Tom Parker Bowles. Here is machismo salted with 7,000 pounds of willingness and served in a delicate croute of irony. In THE YEAR OF EATING DANGEROUSLY: A Global Adventure in Search of Culinary Extremes (St. Martin’s, $24.95), Parker Bowles brings to the gross-out formula his outsider status — a self-deprecating Brit, he acknowledges that he’s “a half toff.” Though he’s never afraid of coming off like a nervous Nellie — a harrowing cobra-killing sequence in a Chinese market ends with Parker Bowles running shrieking into the street — he is, on the whole, fairly obsessed with his own masculinity or lack thereof. In overzealous preparation for the National Fiery Foods and Barbeque Show in Albuquerque, which he’s told is “the culinary equivalent of running with the bulls,” he finds himself soaking his member in ice water after chopping chiles and forgetting to wash his hands. When he eats a smelly dog soup in Seoul, he does his best to avoid vomiting and configures his “arms into strong man pose to show my appreciation of its virile powers.” Parker Bowles’s gonzo spirit is matched only by that of his publisher. The author bio on the book’s jacket begins by identifying him as the “son of Prince Charles’s wife, Camilla.” In other words, a mama’s boy.

“The overly sentimental, cautious and commercial tenor of travel writing is satisfying to almost no one beyond the navel gazers who write it and the ‘hospitality’ advertisers who sponsor it.” So says the travel writer and former Maxim features editor Chuck Thompson in the introduction to his new collection, SMILE WHEN YOU’RE LYING: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer (Holt, paper, $15), billed as “a small effort to correct the travel industry’s bias against candor and honesty.” Anyone who’s read anything written under the aegis of the place they’re visiting — or the means by which they’ve been conveyed there — will find Thompson’s mandate refreshing, even if a good deal of his own writing seems to have been done with a ball-peen hammer. We hear about the time four charming Thai girls stole all his money on Ko Samet and about his tussle with customs officials in Belarus. But is no-holds-barred travel writing any more “real” or revelatory than corporate travel writing? When you read something like “One of the best meals I ever had was spent facedown on the bathroom floor of our favorite Indian restaurant” or a description of a Thai prostitute with breasts like “crenelated zeppelins,” you have to wonder. But just when you think you’re going to buckle from Thompson’s surfeit of sneer, he trundles out a good one — “No nationality has a monopoly on, or scarcity of, ugly.”

In the grammatically challenged patois through which we have come to know him, the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Borat Sagdiyev — the man Chuck Thompson wishes he could be — has written a guidebook to Kazakhstan and “to minor nation of U.S. and A.” BORAT: Touristic Guidings to Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Doubleday/Flying Dolphin, $24.95) is almost as outrageous as Borat’s movie, only less squirm-inducingly so. That said, the many semi-clothed pictures of Borat and various friends, relatives and sex workers make this scabrous and occasionally hilarious book challenging to read in public. The captions don’t help. (One for a full-page picture of a shirtless, pantless Borat in a lime green scrotal sling reads, “For protection against sunburning I make rub squirrel cheese on my skins.”) Given that the government of Kazakhstan was less than pleased about the movie, it may be Borat’s sly intention to get his glorious nation to fire-bomb the book; indeed, each copy of this absolutely filthy item should come with a pair of rubber gloves, if not a Hazmat suit. From libelous assertions (“Some famous homosexuals American men includes Spiderman, Ronald Micdonalds and Madonna”) to goofball self-ridicule (Borat was teased as a child “since my moustache was slow and did not appear until I was age of 9”), there’s something here to offend everyone, much of it related to “ambitiousness, intrigue, mercenary sex.” What Joan Didion once wrote about the California governor’s mansion can be said about this book: I have seldom seen anything so evocative of the unspeakable.

Henry Alford is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and Travel & Leisure