New on the Bookshelf

by Chris Springer, Contributing Editor

“Himalaya” by Michael Palin (2004, Thomas Dunne Books. ISBN 0312341628 — 288 pp., $29.95 hardcover).

It’s been called the “Palin effect.” Whenever a Michael Palin travel series airs on the BBC, British tour operators are deluged with inquiries about the featured destinations.

Previously, the comic actor traveled around the world in 80 days, retraced Ernest Hemingway’s footsteps and crossed the Sahara. In this coffee-table companion to his latest TV series, he treks to the world’s rooftop, the Himalayas.

It’s not hard to see why Palin’s expeditions mesmerize would-be holidaymakers. The man’s access seems limitless. He is welcomed into the homes of simple folk and becomes privy to the customs of myriad cultures (like China’s Mosuo, who neither marry nor cohabitate). He also converses at length with the region’s movers and shakers, like the Dalai Lama and Imran Khan. Who wouldn’t crave a vacation like that?

Also appealing is the sense that this is a real adventure — one ambitious enough to be risky. On his way to the Mount Everest base camp, Palin grapples with altitude sickness and icy winds. In Nepal, a British officer looking after Palin’s safety is briefly abducted by Maoist guerrillas.

Palin looms as large as Everest on the front cover and appears in half of the photos inside. Only an extraordinary personality can make a star vehicle like this work. But then, this is the same man who rose to fame on “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” selling a dead parrot. He still wields charm, wit and an irresistible sense of the absurd.

“A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk about Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration” by Michael Shapiro (2004, Travelers’ Tales, ISBN 1932361081 — 378 pp., $18.95 paperback).

Michael Shapiro reports from an offbeat destination: the homes of fellow travel writers. He visits the masters of the genre for engaging one-on-one discussions of their works and life experiences.

Shapiro comes prepared. His familiarity with each writer’s oeuvre keeps the conversations flowing. So does his admiration for his subjects, although at times it also holds him back from tougher questions. (One author, Sara Wheeler, blithely admits to inventing people and situations in her “nonfiction” and escapes unchallenged.)

An engrossing interview with Bill Bryson or Rick Steves may be a slam dunk. But Shapiro also coaxes enlightening responses from writers as enigmatic as Pico Iyer and as prickly as Paul Theroux.

Even amid the celebrity authors, the lesser lights covered here hold their own. One writer, Brad New­sham, circled the globe looking for someone to invite to America as his guest, all expenses paid.

The interviewees reference one another’s work and give complementary views on the same topics, like traveling alone, or America’s place in the world. (Three writers rave about “The Worst Journey in the World,” a 1922 account of an Antarctic expedition — convincing praise, indeed.)

The resulting book achieves something greater than the sum of its parts.

(For another intriguing set of interviews with travel writers — including Shapiro himself — see Rolf Potts’s website at www.rolfpotts.com.)