Falling Off the Map (25 page)

As for the booming present tense, it is best inspected in the one area that contradicts the quiet and unpeopled air of the continent—and also, not coincidentally, the one area expressly designed for foreigners: the twenty-one-mile Floridian motel-and-minigolf seaside strip known as the Gold Coast, an hour south of Brisbane. Centered on the town of Surfers Paradise, a
place as self-effacing as its name, the Coast has become a furious riot of development, disco music pulsing through its glassy new arcades, Porsches cruising along its jungle of high-rises, a seemingly unending stretch of traffic-choked boulevards littered with ice cream parlors, Spanish-style motels, and Pizza Huts. There is a wax museum here, and Kenny Koala’s Dreamworld. Ripley’s Believe It or Not! is scheduled to open any day. And in truth, Surfers Paradise—or should it be called Surface Paradise?—has all the wound-up frenzy of an amusement park writ huge, a neo-Atlantic City tricked up in
Miami Vice
colors and high-tech accessories. Nothing is missing here, it seems, except surfers, perhaps, and paradise.

Amidst the hustle-bustle of the Gold Coast, you can even get a glimpse into the future tense of Australia and of many other outposts of the Japanese empire. Huge toy koalas sit on sidewalks, cradling hard-sell messages in katakana script. Japanese honeymoon couples, identified by their matching outfits (or their
HOMEY HONEYMOON
T-shirts), crowd into pink coffee shops and “Love Buses.” Neon signs flicker above prices in yen, and even male strip shows couch their ads in terms guaranteed to please wholesome visitors from Kansai—“Revealing, Naughty, but Nice.” What used to be the Holiday Inn is now the All Nippon Airways Hotel, and the most famous koala sanctuary in all Australia, Lone Pine, is now owned by Kamori Kanko Ltd. Even in the distant town of Cairns, desultory koto music drifts around the malls.

In the end, though, the greatest marvels of Australia reside simply in its land—the silence and the sky. For more than a day, you can travel through the Outback, a parched white land of ghosts, of blanched trees twisted at odd angles across a plain as vast and mysterious as Africa. Nothing breaks the vacancy but a dead cow, an upturned car, a stray eagle. Everywhere there is only emptiness and flatness. And then, rising up unanswerably
against a diorama-bright landscape of shocked blue and thick red, Ayers Rock, old and mute and implacable, in powerful counterpoint to the young, pretty, somewhat uninflected society all around. The sacred rock is one of those rare places with a genuine sense of mystery: it casts a larger shadow than any postcard could suggest.

Or awaken one Edenic morning in Kakadu to see the sun gilding the swampy billabong, jackaroos hovering above the water in the golden, gauzy early light. Two hours later, on the South Alligator River, listen to a guide reciting names as if riffling through the multicolored pages of some children’s picture book: pelicans and egrets and snakebirds are here; pied herons, masked plovers, and migrant warders from Siberia; lotus birds are among the mango trees, and white-breasted sea eagles (with a wingspan of six feet), glossy ibises (with sickle-shaped beaks), and whistling ducks (“not capable of quacking”). There are blue-winged kookaburras in the sky, and sulphur-crested cockatoos; frill-necked lizards along the riverbank, and even lazy crocodiles sunbathing just ten feet from the boat. At dusk, the birds honk and squawk above a huge, pink-flowering lily pond, and flocks of black magpie geese and silver-winged corellas fly across the face of a huge full moon that sits in the middle of the darkening sky, catching the silver of their wings. In the daily enchantment of dusk, a visitor begins, at last, to catch the presence of an Australia within, a
terra incognita
deep inside, and a loneliness that will stay with him even when he leaves. In the twilight of Australia, the foreigner can catch an intimation of what Melville calls “the great America on the other side of the sphere,” and so a sense of how everything brings him back to the natural state where he began: a lonely person in a Lonely, Lonely Place.

THE EMPEROR’S LAST ISLAND
by Julia Blackburn

The story of the deposed emperor Napoleon holding court amid the shabbiness and paranoia of an island prison is interwoven with a history of St. Helena itself and with a personal account of the author’s own voyage in search of Napoleon’s ghost.

“Dazzling … a compelling meditation on Napoleon’s exile … Blackburn has brought her startlingly imaginative sensitivity to bear on a vanished time.”

—
The New York Times Book Review
History/Travel/0-679-73937-8

AMONG THE THUGS
by Bill Buford

From a vandalous ride on the English railway to full-blown riots in Turin and Sardinia, the editor of the prestigious literary journal
Granta
gives us a terrifying record of his passage through an alternate society: that of England’s soccer thugs.

“An unflinching look into the festering soul of England … a great read.”

—David Byrne
Sociology/0-679-74535-1

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS
by Tim Cahill

In his latest grand tour of the earth’s remote, exotic, and dismal places, Tim Cahill sleeps with a grizzly bear, witnesses demonic possession in Bali, assesses the cuteness quotient of giant clams in the South Pacific, and survives a run-in with something called the Throne of Doom in Guatemala. The resulting travel pieces are at once vivid, nerve-wracking, and outrageously funny.

“Tim Cahill [has] the what-the-hell adventuresomeness of a T. E. Lawrence and the humor of a P. J. O’Rourke.”                  —
Condé Nast Traveler

Travel/Adventure/0-679-74929-2

THE ROAD FROM COORAIN
by Jill Ker Conway

A remarkable woman’s exquisitely clear-sighted memoir of growing up Australian: from the vastness of a sheep station in the outback to the stifling propriety of postwar Sydney; from untutored childhood to a life in academia; and from the shelter of a protective family to the lessons of independence and tragedy.

“A small masterpiece of scene, memory … this book [is] the most rewarding journey of all.”                                        —John Kenneth Galbraith

Autobiography/0-679-72436-2

BAD TRIPS
Edited and with an Introduction by Keath Fraser

From Martin Amis in the air to Peter Matthiessen on a mountaintop, some of the best-known writers of our time recount sometimes harrowing and sometimes exhilarating tales of their most memorable misadventures in travel.

“The only aspect of our travels that is guaranteed to hold an audience is disaster.… Nothing is better for survival.”                —Martha Gellhorn

A Vintage Original/Travel/Adventure/0-679-72908-9

FALLING OFF THE MAP
SOME LONELY PLACES OF THE WORLD
by Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer voyages from the nostalgic elegance of Argentina to the raffish nonchalance of Australia, documents the cruising rites of Icelandic teenagers, gets interrogated by tipsy Cuban police, and attends a screening of Bhutan’s first feature film. Throughout, he remains both uncannily observant and hilarious.

“[Iyer is the] rightful heir to Jan Morris [and] Paul Theroux.… He writes the kind of lyrical, flowing prose that could make Des Moines sound beguiling.”

—
Los Angeles Times Book Review
Travel/Adventure/0-679-74612-9

RIDING THE WHITE HORSE HOME
A WESTERN FAMILY ALBUM
by Teresa Jordan

The daughter and granddaughter of Wyoming ranchers tells the stories of her forebears—men who saw broken bones as professional credentials and women who coped with physical hardship and killing loneliness. She acquaints us with the lore and science of ranching, and does so with a breathtaking immediacy that recalls the best writing of Wallace Stegner and Gretel Ehrlich.

“A haunting and elegant memoir.”  —Terry Tempest Williams, author of
Refuge

Memoir/Travel/0-679-75135-1

BALKAN GHOSTS
A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY
by Robert D. Kaplan

As Kaplan travels from the breakaway states of Yugoslavia to Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, he reconstructs the Balkans’ history as a time warp in which ancient passions and hatreds are continually resurrected.

“Powerfully argued … the most insightful and timely work on the Balkans to date.”

—
Boston Globe
History/Current Affairs/Travel/0-679-74981-0

LOOKING FOR OSMAN
ONE MAN’S TRAVELS THROUGH THE PARADOX
OF MODERN TURKEY
by Eric Lawlor

As he traverses Turkey in search of exotic splendor recorded by nineteenth-century romanticists, Eric Lawlor finds instead a modern, professional, sometimes brutal land, with unexpected remnants of the old Turkey to be encountered along the way.

A Vintage Original/Travel/Adventure/0-679-73822-3

THE OTHER SIDE
by Rubén Martínez

Martínez’s work of cultural reportage and personal memoir provides a vision of a new Latino culture that bubbles from San Salvador to L.A. and that embraces
cumbia
and hip-hop, anarchists and Catholic priests.

“
The Other Side
is a brilliant and breathtaking account of the new culture created by guerrillas of San Salvador and performance artists of feverish Tijuana, by young painters of graffiti in Los Angeles and rock ‘n’ roll singers of Mexico City. It is a revealing, remarkable and timely book.”

—Ryszard Kapuściński
Sociology/Current Affairs/0-679-74591-2

A YEAR IN PROVENCE
by Peter Mayle

An “engaging, funny and richly appreciative” (
The New York Times Book Review
) account of an English couple’s first year living in Provence, settling in amid the enchanting gardens and equally festive bistros of their new home.

“Stylish, witty, delightfully readable.”       —
The Sunday Times
(London)

Travel/0-679-73114-8

MAIDEN VOYAGES
THE WRITINGS OF WOMEN TRAVELERS
Edited and with an Introduction by Mary Morris

In this delightful and generous anthology, women such as Beryl Markham, Willa Cather, Annie Dillard, and Joan Didion share their experiences traveling throughout the world. From the Rocky Mountains to a Marrakech palace, in voices wry, lyrical, and sometimes wistful, these women show as much of themselves as they do of the strange and wonderful places they visit.

A Vintage Original/Travel/Women’s Studies/0-679-74030-9

IRON & SILK
by Mark Salzman

The critically acclaimed and bestselling adventures of a young American martial arts master in China.

“Dazzling … exhilarating … a joy to read from beginning to end.”     —
People

Travel/Adventure/0-394-75511-1

LOW LIFE
LURES AND SNARES OF NEW YORK
by Luc Sante

In this “fascinating … entertaining and sobering” (
Philadelphia Inquirer
) journey through New York City, from 1840 to 1919, Luc Sante discovers the dark heart, wherein dwell pimps, madams, rat-killing dogs, ear-chewing thugs, con men, and extravagantly crooked cops.

“
Low Life
captures the rollicking atmosphere of city life.… Sante reclaims an essential piece of the city’s past.”          —
The New York Times Book Review

History/Sociology/0-679-73876-2

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SACRED GROVE
by Carol Spindel

A moving memoir of an American woman’s difficult and gradual acceptance into the daily life of a rural West African community.

“I was unprepared for the quietly gathering power of this respectfully inquisitive study of modern life in a small West African village. It poses, and answers, questions about the lives of a proud and shy people.”          —Alice Walker