Globetrotting

Gabi's Review 

Globetrotting, Duncan Minshull’s latest and most fascinating anthology, offers fifty writers’ observations and musings from walking among the world’s most iconic cities and sites. This collection of writers encompasses explorers and natural history writers from many decades, including Christopher Columbus, Japanese poet Matsuo Basho and Charles Darwin, and contemporary authors like William Boyd and Helen Garner. Globetrotting leads us through the historic streets of London, Rome, Cairo, Kiev, Dublin and Geneva; the frozen wastes of Antarctica; along the pilgrim paths of Japan; the jungles of Ghana; and atop the Great Wall of China. In short, across all seven glorious continents.

One of my favourite cameos is the letter written in 1863 from Lucie Duff to a friend. The piece, called ‘Her Hand on his Shoulder,’ is an account of Duff’s time in Cairo, where she spent the day observing the Bedouin: a tribe she refers to as “the glorious free people.”  She writes that “[to] see a Bedaween and his wife stroll through the streets of Cairo is superb. Her hand resting on his shoulder, and scarcely deigning to cover her haughty face, as she looks down on the veiled Egyptian woman who carries the heavy burden and walks behind her lord and master.” Some pieces are, unsurprisingly, seen through an imperial lens, and are inadvertently amusing by today’s standards. Here’s Beatrix Bultrode from her 1920s book A Tour In Mongolia, titled ‘The Passing Of Their God’: “A posse of lamas in robes and mitred head dress of high ceremony, looking for all the world like a perambulating bed of nasturtiums in full bloom, precede their pontiff.”  I had to pause there, because she becomes downright insulting after that!

Each of these 50 writers offers remarkable and enjoyable insights. The standouts for me are Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson and Katherine Mansfield. In the final pages, Minshull features Globetrotting Gobbets: seven final snippets from the seven continents. My favourite is American writer John Cheever, who initially contemplates taking a walk down an unexplored path but elects instead to walk to his pantry to mix himself a martini!

What transpires in this memorable assortment of scientists, explorers, adventurers, missionaries, pleasure-seekers and literary flaneurs is a sense of wonder in travel, in adventures to new horizons. As the words from the Hobbit remind us: “The greatest adventure is what lies ahead. Today and tomorrow are yet to be said. The chances, the changes are all yours to make. The mould of your life is in your hands to break.”

Publisher's Review 

"There was nowhere to go but everywhere." -Jack Kerouac

From Duncan Minshull, the UK's "laureate of walking," a collection of more than fifty writings about hiking the globe from contemporary and classic authors such as Mark Twain, William Boyd, Edith Wharton, Helen Garner, Rabindranath Tagore, and many more. 

In Globetrotting, Duncan Minshull, the UK's "laureate of walking," brings together the work of more than fifty walker-writers who have traveled the world's seven continents by foot. From the 1500s to the present day comes a memorable band of explorers and adventurers, scientists and missionaries, pleasure-seekers and literary drifters recalling their experiences and asking themselves a compelling question-why travel this way in the first place?

With contributions from Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Vernon Lee, Sarah H. Bradford, Rabindranath Tagore, D. H. Lawrence, Isabella Bird, Katherine Mansfield, Rachel Carson, Helen Garner, Jean-Paul Clebert, Colin Thubron, William Boyd, Matsuo Basho, and many more, Globetrotting takes us across the streets of London, Rome, Melbourne, Cairo, Kiev and Kabu; through the frozen wastes of Antarctica; along the pilgrim paths of Japan; into the jungles of Ghana; and around the Great Wall of China.