Contemporary Authors

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• Mountain Lines: A Journey through the French Alps - 2017 Skyhorse Publishing, New York

• Jonathan Arlan - http://jonathanarlan.com/about-1/

  Jonathan Arlan

  I am a writer, editor, musician, and sometimes-walker-of-long distances. Born and raised in Kansas, I've lived in New Orleans, New York, Egypt, Japan, and Serbia and traveled in over thirty-five countries. Now I live in Kansas City. Mountain Lines is my first book. Other things I've written have appeared in Perceptive Travel, The Millions, The Pitch, and elsewhere.

• Jonathan Arlan - http://jonathanarlan.com/mountain-lines/

  A nonfiction debut about an American’s solo, month-long, 400-mile walk from Lake Geneva to Nice.

  In the summer of 2015, Jonathan Arlan was nearing thirty. Restless, bored, and daydreaming of adventure, he comes across an image on the Internet one day: a map of the southeast corner of France with a single red line snaking south from Lake Geneva, through the jagged brown and white peaks of the Alps to the Mediterranean sea—a route more than four hundred miles long. He decides then and there to walk the whole trail solo.

  Lacking any outdoor experience, completely ignorant of mountains, sorely out of shape, and fighting last-minute nerves and bad weather, things get off to a rocky start. But Arlan eventually finds his mountain legs—along with a staggering variety of aches and pains—as he tramps a narrow thread of grass, dirt, and rock between cloud-collared, ice-capped peaks in the High Alps, through ancient hamlets built into hillsides, across sheep-dotted mountain pastures, and over countless cols on his way to the sea. In time, this simple, repetitive act of walking for hours each day in the remote beauty of the mountains becomes as exhilarating as it is exhausting.

  Mountain Lines is the stirring account of a month-long journey on foot through the French Alps and a passionate and intimate book laced with humor, wonder, and curiosity. In the tradition of trekking classics like A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, The Snow Leopard, and Tracks, the book is a meditation on movement, solitude, adventure, and the magnetic power of the natural world

• Rolf Potts - https://rolfpotts.com/jonathan-arlan/

  Travel Writer: Jonathan Arlan

  Follow this writer
  Author website
  Jon.arlan1@gmail.com
  February 1, 2017
  Jonathan Arlan is a writer and editor. Born and raised on the Great Plains, he has lived in New Orleans, New York, Egypt, Japan, and Serbia and traveled in over thirty-five countries. His first book, Mountain Lines: A Journey through the French Alps was published in February 2017.

  How did you get started traveling?

  My parents took us on great family vacations growing up—New Orleans, San Diego, Seattle, Portland. Always cities. We never went camping or anything like that. But we went all over the country. They both grew up in Kansas City, but they love the ocean, so we usually went toward big bodies of water, which meant venturing pretty far from Kansas. I consider myself pretty fortunate; they could have just taken us to Branson, Missouri or “the lake” (whichever lake is closest)—places within driving distance, basically—or nowhere at all. But they went to the trouble of bringing us out of the Midwest for a few days every year.

  I didn’t go overseas until my last year of high school, on a Jewish school trip to Poland and Israel. The idea of the trip, I think, was to make you really sad and angry in Poland and then ecstatically happy and proud to be a Jew in Israel. I remember almost nothing about the trip itself. But I do remember noticing that neither country looked anything like it was supposed to. In movies, pictures, and textbooks, Poland was always grey and full of bitter, sad people, but Krakow and Warsaw were beautiful cities (objectively prettier than the suburbs of Kansas City) and the people (also very pretty) seemed totally normal, happy even. Israel had been built up since I was a kid as this deeply holy place, a place where visitors are so overwhelmed when they arrive that they actually kneel down and kiss the ground at the airport, a real Jewish wonderland. It didn’t disappoint, exactly—it’s an extraordinary country—but so much of what I saw was so obviously ordinary—ordinary people doing ordinary things like shopping and eating in totally normal places like malls and McDonald’s. It’s such a trite realization—that I went with some preconceived ideas that were just way off—but I’m still surprised sometimes by how poorly informed my expectations of most places are. The upside to this, I suppose, is that I’m almost always surprised—usually in a good way—by the places I visit. And I’ve learned to arrive with fewer expectations. Often this comes at the expense of knowing very much about the place at all, which is another kind of problem. It’s a work in progress.

  How did you get started writing?

  I was a pretty serious reader way before I took a crack at writing. I think I thought about writing a lot, instead of actually doing any of it. In my late teens and early twenties, I really liked the idea of being a writer, and I managed to convince myself that reading (and watching movies) was just as valuable in terms of practice. I went to college in New Orleans and at some point a professor turned me on to travel writing (via Vagabonding, actually) and I started reading a lot of it, pretty much anything I could find, thinking I might like to become a travel writer one day (to this day, “travel writer” sounds like the coolest job title of all time). I even went so far as to line up a travel writing independent study during a semester abroad in Cairo, which I never completed it because there were more fun things to do in Cairo than hole up in the library and write.

  I did, however, travel around Egypt and the Middle East and read a lot of great travel writing while doing so. More importantly, I got into the habit of taking notes for all the stories I’d write when, you know, I just sat down to write them. (Up until my professor told me it was too late, I still fully planned on working on the project.) Taking notes turned out to be a lot of fun, though. And it totally fit with an image I had of travel writers as people who are constantly scribbling notes into beat-up old notebooks. (It was very hard to picture them doing anything but scribbling notes, really, least of all typing. I actually think my moleskin came with a story about Bruce Chatwin printed on a little card and that was enough to get me started.) Journaling was an easy way to get outside of myself, to spin something halfway interesting out of basically nothing. And it directed and focused a curiosity I’d had about people and places that up to then I must have just ignored. With my pen and notebook, I could sit in a café for a couple hours, or walk around the city and get lost somewhere, and still have something to write about. Nothing that anyone would want to read, but that didn’t matter. I could talk to Egyptians, ask people about some scrap of local history, the story behind a street name or market. I could chat with perfect strangers—people I would never meet in a million years in Kansas or New Orleans—and pretend I was Paul Theroux.

  What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?

  My background is in book publishing, so my first break as a writer was really my first break as an editor. After a few years abroad in Japan, I was living in New York and working in the basement of the Strand bookstore (a break all by itself). And like everyone else working at the Strand (at least this is how it felt), I was desperately trying to get a job, an internship, an interview, a coffee—anything—with a book publisher. I must have sent out hundreds of applications that year and almost all of them went completely unanswered. Then I got a call from a very small, but very good publisher who needed an unpaid intern for twenty hours a week. I went in for an interview, got the job and through a bizarre series of coincidences and connections, managed to get a paid job at a bigger publisher a few months later. At both places I was incredibly lucky to work with some very smart people: publishing veterans, unbelievably hard working young editors, publicists and sales people, and a ton of real-life, professional writers, who, as it turns out, spend an insane amount of time writing.

  As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?

  Fact and story gathering. I can easily spend a day (or a few days) lost in my head, wandering around—or just sitting around—reading. I love traveling alone, and I’m relatively good at it, but I’m lousy at most things that involve planning or organization logistics, so there’s very little accountability for what I end up doing with my time. I have to sort of force myself to get into it, to talk to people, to ask questions, to poke around. But once I do, I’m usually good. I’m always thinking of a line from Geoff Dyer’s story “Decline and Fall”: “In Rome I lived in the grand manner of writers. I basically did nothing all day. Not a thing.” I love to travel and I love to write, but deep down my dream is probably to live in Dyer’s grand manner of writers.

  What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?

  I find nearly every aspect of writing challenging and frustrating, which, like any creative effort, is also what makes it exhilarating. Everything from being accurate with details to wracking my brain for the right word to avoiding clichés like “wracking my brain” to finding the proper tone to telling a decent story to figuring out what I’m trying to say—it’s just one stumbling block after another and I’m pretty much always stumbling. There are so many moving parts in a story that it feels like a miracle when I can get them all to work together. There are probably some good parallels here between writing and traveling.

  What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?

  Understanding how any of it works. Writing for an audience still feels very new to me, and the business of it is overwhelming and extremely mysterious. Even the business of book publishing, which I’m more familiar with, is difficult to wrap my head around.

  Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?

  I worked as an editor at a busy publishing house for years. I’ve also taught English, given guitar lessons, done all kinds of non-writing freelance work, sold books, sold vacuums, and, a few times, sold some of my belongings. I once edited a book by a writer whose author bio said that he had worked as an actor, a shepherd, and a circus clown. I think about that a lot.

  What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?

  So many travel books have had a profound influence on me. Early on it was the classics: Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar, Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, anything by Patrick Leigh Fermor—books that made me want to see the world. When I discovered Pico Iyer, I immediately fell in love with his work, which has this real soulfulness to it. His stories pack a punch that sneaks up on me every time, even when I’m rereading something of his I’ve already read half a dozen times. (I keep a link to his story “In the Realm of Jetlag” in my browser and check in on it from time to time.)

  I read Rosemary Mahoney’s Down the Nile right after I returned from Egypt and immediately wanted to go back and do the whole semester again—differently. I regretted the half-assed job I’d done of taking advantage of such an astonishing place while I was actually there. Why hadn’t I thought to row myself down the Nile? Or camp with Bedouins? Or learn more than twelve words of Arabic? Or do any number of interesting things that occurred to me only after I’d left. I made a mental note to not let that happen again, to really dig into a place when I’m there, to immerse myself. I’m not sure if I’ve gotten any better at it in the years since, but at the very least I’m more conscious of it.

  I’m a huge fan of Jan Morris’s work, and I had a copy of her book Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere for years before I read it. I don’t know why, but I wanted to save it for when I went to Trieste, a city that had fascinated me for a long time and that I knew I’d visit at some point. I started reading it, finally, on an Italy-bound train from Zagreb, and finished it a few days later in the park next to Archduke Maximillian’s Miramare castle. The book resonated with the city in an odd way and now I can’t think of one without thinking of the other. I have memories of Trieste that may actually belong to Jan Morris. I’m okay with that.

  I’ll read anything about mountaineering, even though I am not even remotely a mountaineer. Books about mountains tend to be inspiring even when they’re tragic, which, I think, has something to do with the huge personalities of mountain climbers. David Robert’s The Mountain of My Fear and Walter Bonatti’s The Mountains of My Life are two classics that made me think I should spend more time in the mountains. Come to think of it, they are almost certainly what got me thinking about mountains in the first place, which led me to spend a month in the French Alps and write about it.

  A few random others that I’m always recommending: Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, Adrift by Steven Callahan, William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days, which isn’t really a travel book, but has a remarkable travel book hiding inside of it, Carl Hoffman’s Savage Harvest, and two anthologies that are packed ridiculously full of stunning travel/adventure writing: The Best of Outside: The First 20 Years and Wild Stories: The Best of Men’s Journal. The list could go on for pages, so I’ll stop here.

  What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?

  I couldn’t possibly give travel writing advice to anyone except to encourage people to travel alone and to stay open to advice from those who sounds like they know what they are talking about. I’ve learned quite a bit by acknowledging that nearly everyone around me is smarter and more experienced than I am in one way or another. There’s always something to learn and there’s usually someone to learn it from.

  What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?

  I really think travel and writing complement each other more than people realize, or at least more than I realized. Traveling can get so overwhelming so quickly, especially if you’ve gone off the tourist trail a little—you’re in a new city, you don’t know anyone, you don’t know the language, the food is weird, simple interactions are inexplicably difficult, all your money has suddenly been transformed into an insane wad of dirty bills and coins. Writing is a great way to sort yourself out amidst all that information, to make sense of it, basically. I suspect that’s why people like to send letters or postcards or emails home from exotic places (other than to make those people back home jealous and tell them they’re still alive). It feels good to boil a complicated thing down to a few lines, like you’ve mastered it. It’s even better if those lines actually manage capture something true and fresh about the place. I like to think that in the process of training myself to think and write more carefully about travel, I’ve also trained myself to be a better traveler—to look a little deeper, to think more openly. Plus, as a genre, travel writing can contain and combine so many kinds of storytelling—memoir, history, science, sociology, adventure. Very little feels off-limits. That freedom is truly rewarding.

  With my book, the biggest reward is the thought that I might share shelf (and Internet) space with the writers, books, and stories I’ve admired for so long. It feels like I’ve wedged myself into a seat at the cool kids’ table.

Print Marked Items
Travel
Liesl Schillinger
The New York Times Book Review.
(June 4, 2017): Arts and Entertainment: p16(L). From Literature Resource Center.
COPYRIGHT 2017 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Full Text:
In 1750, during the reign of Louis XV, a peripatetic Frenchman named Louis-Charles Fougeret de Monbron began his
travel memoir, ''Le Cosmopolite,'' with the declaration: ''The universe is a kind of book; and if you've only seen your
own country, you've only read the first page.'' A crowd of audacious and distinctive new books by spirited, inquisitive
globe-trotters now expands our geographical lexicon, conveying what they saw, enjoyed and endured with humor and
passion.
The British writer and publisher Diana Athill, born in 1917, spent most of her 20s trapped in England, ''hungry for the
thrill of being elsewhere'' while World War II raged. In 1947, to celebrate the return of peacetime, her aunt treated her
and her cousin Pen to a holiday in Florence -- a reprieve from the ''cruel bottling up of six years of war.'' Athill kept a
record of her adventure, which she recently rediscovered. In A FLORENCE DIARY (House of Anansi, $16.95), a
delectable time capsule, she brings alive the liberation, luck and drama of those heady Italian days. When her cousin
ditches her on the Simplon-Orient Express for a better carriage, Athill ends up sharing a compartment with a young man
who turns out to be a Roman prince -- and sends flowers ahead to greet her at her hotel. Moving with Pen to an
affordable pension, she exults like Lucy Honeychurch in ''A Room With a View,'' discovering that ''our rooms look half
over the river and half over a lovely bosky garden.'' Her exaltation extends beyond the pension to loggias, chapels,
Michelangelo sculptures, Fra Angelico frescos, ''miraculous'' pastries and scrumptious Florentine men. ''It's partly their
marvelous color, but, they are beautifully proportioned too,'' she muses. ''The ones that mess about in boats on the Arno
look so very right with almost nothing on.'' In later years, Athill would travel widely, but her postwar Florence stands
apart. ''I am forever grateful that it was my very first 'elsewhere,' '' she writes. ''None could be lovelier.''
The loveliness of Havana, that ''strip of city facing a sparkling tropical sea,'' is less accessible than Florence's. In
HAVANA: A Subtropical Delirium (Bloomsbury, $26), Mark Kurlansky (whose previous books include ''Cod,'' ''Salt''
and ''Paper'') concedes that '' to be truthful,'' the place ''is a mess. The sidewalks are cracked and broken, as are most of
the streets.'' Havana's crumbling landmarks (''drab gray buildings, or rust-streaked, turquoise and rotting pink ones --
resembling birthday cakes left out too long'') lack the magnificence of the Duomo and it's difficult to find ''miraculous''
pastries. For many years, geopolitical contretemps have kept most North Americans (except Canadians) from seeing the
city for themselves. Yet, as Athill well knew, there's nothing like being kept away from a place to make you want to go
there. Since Fidel Castro came to power, Cuba has been off-limits to casual American travelers, and any who tried to
sneak in unofficially had to pray that Cuban customs officials wouldn't stamp their passports. But after President Obama
initiated a thaw, a full-scale tourist invasion commenced. So that prospective visitors can know what they're not yet
missing, Kurlansky reaches back 500 years to track the city's evolving history, separating out the different strands --
Spanish, African, American, Russian; political, social, musical, culinary -- that slowly steeped to create Havana's
piquant blend of static defiance. For now, the city retains the form it has held for so long, ''frozen in the tropics'' and
time.
Visitors to Havana make a point of touring the house on the outskirts of the city where Ernest Hemingway lived for two
decades, Finca VigE a, and drop by his haunts in Habana Vieja. In the Cuban capital, Kurlansky writes, Hemingway is
''remembered with an obsession that borders on fetish.'' This sort of fixation is hardly limited to Hemingway, or to
Havana. Any point on the globe where a famous writer has paused to pick up a pen has heated the imagination -- and
changed the travel plans -- of besotted fans. In FOOTSTEPS: From Ferrante's Naples to Hammett's San Francisco,
Literary Pilgrimages Around the World (Three Rivers, paper, $16), Monica Drake, the New York Times travel editor,
brings together several dozen stories by journalists who went spelunking for the geographic touchstones of their literary
heroes, from William Butler Yeats to James Baldwin, Edith Wharton to Pablo Neruda. In these pages, you'll accompany
Lawrence Downes as he retraces Mark Twain's gonzo months in Hawaii in 1866, where Twain kick-started his career by
sending dispatches to The Sacramento Union, reporting on the outlandish practices of surfing, eating poi and swimming
with naked ladies. (''When he got into the surf, they got out.'') Ann Mah, under the spell of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan
novels, went to the Italian port city to track down the hardscrabble neighborhood where Ferrante's characters LenE and
Lila grew up. Tony Perrottet traveled to the Swiss village of Cologny, on Lake Geneva, to imbibe the amorous
atmosphere that engulfed Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont,
in 1816 during the summer when Wollstonecraft thought up ''Frankenstein,'' Shelley worked on ''Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty,'' Byron composed ''The Prisoner of Chillon'' and Claire Clairmont seduced Byron. The villagers believed
Byron's villa was ''a virtual bordello.'' Regardless, the libidinous foursome took time out from their horseplay and
masterpiece-making to visit the nearby places where Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote ''Julie'' and Gibbon slaved over ''The
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.'' Even geniuses aren't above making literary pilgrimages.
To research THE ALPS: A Human History From Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond (Norton, $26.95), his entertaining,
turbocharged race among the high mountain passes of six alpine countries, Stephen O'Shea rented a low-slung, limitededition
Renault ME[umlaut]gane sports car. Not out of machismo, but out of prudence. Afraid of heights, he dreaded the
hairpin curves and steep descents that his route imposed and didn't want this phobia to bar him from vistas that might
enrich his troves of anecdote. His powerful car was a road-hugging automotive security blanket. Not so terribly long
ago, O'Shea explains, most people feared the towering mountains as much as he did: ''With their avalanches, landslides
and crashing boulders, they were killers.'' As late as the 1780s, Goethe dismissed the Alps as ''zigzags and irritating
silhouettes and shapeless piles of granite,'' but by then a cult of the natural ''sublime,'' championed by Edmund Burke
and Rousseau, had begun to pull culturally aspirational Europeans into their beguiling bergophilia. Before long, thrillseeking
youths were scaling the rocky heights, armed with diaries and easels to record their impressions; and by the
1890s, the limber and intrepid had taken up a novelty sport called downhill skiing. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an early
adopter, schussed down a slope 2,400 meters above Davos, then predicted that one day ''hundreds of Englishmen will
come to Switzerland for the skiing season.'' Now of course, that sounds elementary.
It would be challenging, if it were even possible, to repeat O'Shea's comprehensive, and intrepid journey; but
MOUNTAIN LINES: A Journey Through the French Alps (Skyhorse, $22.99), a disarmingly engaging memoir by a
millennial Kansan, Jonathan Arlan, presents a less daunting itinerary for those who prefer bunny slopes to black
diamonds. Early in 2015, rootless after a breakup, Arlan traveled briefly to Greece, then drifted to a Serbian monastery
in the Balkans. One restless night, seeking direction, he opened his laptop and Googled ''long,'' ''mountains,'' ''hard'' and
''walk.'' Up popped a map ''with a lake at the top and an ocean at the bottom and the word ALPS in between.'' A thick red
line ran down the center, marking a 400-mile walking route called the Grande TraversE[umlaut]e des Alpes, from Lake
Geneva to the Mediterranean. Three months later, he stepped into the mountains, where he would slip on narrow paths
and scrabble up rockfaces, stopping at night in hiker huts to share meals and bedrooms with strangers. Arlan had little
prior experience of hiking. In fact, he had ''spent most of my life avoiding sports, hard physical labor and anything else
that might make me sore the next day.'' As his mileage mounts, a panoramic portrait emerges, not of the breathtaking
alpine backdrop or of the author's endurance but of the emotional landscape created by the fellowship of hikers.
For eight months, a few years back, a rural community in the Gers -- the agricultural core of Gascony -- folded a
Chicago food writer and his family in their warm embrace. That writer, David McAninch, first encountered his
borrowed Gallic terroir in 2012, when he traveled to the region to research a story on duck and rapturously succumbed
to the local manner of preparing it -- whether confited, carpaccioed, grilled, roasted, braised in wine or scattered as
cracklings across a salad. Returning for another taste, he devoured duck rillettes, and pan-seared foie gras and confirmed
his love not only for the cuisine but for the people: ''The Gascons I met drank wine with lunch every day. They ate what
they craved.'' To them, such Rabelaisian ways were ''a right to be exercised not just on special occasions, but every day.''
Resolving to claim that right for himself, he rented a picturesque old water mill and moved his family to this culinary
paradis. DUCK SEASON: Eating, Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gascony -- France's Last Best Place
(Harper/HarperCollins, $28.99) is his loving record of that stay. Early on, he joined a men's cooking club whose macho,
rugby-playing members whipped up lamb navarin, duck steaks and apricot tart at ''epic Friday-night dinners.'' Later one
of them inducts him into the ancient rite of creating gEoteau Ea la broche, a ''tall, conical, hearth-baked confection''
made by pouring a rich hazelnut batter in layers into a mold that revolves around a spit. Mostly though, he and his
family simply eat and drink very well, reveling in the daily rhythm of Gascon society.
Another water bird changed the life of the Midwestern writer Andrew Evans. He captured video of a rare variety of
penguin just as he was achieving his lifelong dream: traveling as a journalist to Antarctica. In THE BLACK PENGUIN
(University of Wisconsin, $24.95), Evans interleaves three urgent personal quests: his expedition, his effort to convince
his family to accept his homosexuality and his struggle for the right to marry the man he loved. As a Mormon growing
up in rural Ohio, Evans knew he wasn't like everyone else and so did the kids at school, who bullied him mercilessly.
His only ''shield of defense'' was ''a worn copy of National Geographic.'' At 14, he wrote an earnest letter to the National
Geographic Society, which responded in two months with encouragement. Many years later, after becoming an Eagle
Scout, serving as a missionary in Ukraine and graduating from Brigham Young University, where he was forced to
submit to ''reparative'' conversion therapy, Evans wrote to the magazine again, and this time he got an interview. It was
the fall of 2009. ''I want to go to Antarctica,'' he told the editor. ''I want to go overland -- I want to take the bus.'' What he
was after, he explained, was to ''take an old-fashioned expedition to the bottom of the world'' but ''to tell the story in real
time, online.'' ''The Black Penguin'' relays the ups and downs of that journey, but the terra incognita Evans claims is his
own pride.
When Lisa Dickey went to live in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1995, hoping to energize her journalistic career, she had no
idea she would be drawn back again and again. But that year she accepted an invitation from a photojournalist to travel
by car and create a ''very personal'' photo essay. The result was a portrait, ''in words and photographs, of the lives of
contemporary Russians.'' At Lake Baikal, they joined scientists on a research expedition; in Birobidzhan, capital of
Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region, they attended services in the last remaining synagogue, where the custodian led
headscarved old women in prayers to Jesus. And they ''watched with delight as two closeted gay men in Novosibirsk put
on a spectacular drag show for us in their living room.'' Dickey didn't tell them she was a closeted gay woman.
Ten years later, she returned to revisit the people she had met. And in 2015 she returned yet again. This time she told her
close Russian friends that she was married -- to a woman. In BEARS IN THE STREETS: Three Journeys Across a
Changing Russia (St. Martin's, $25.99), Dickey integrates all three visits in 12 chapters, divided by city. The title of her
book comes from a repeated complaint she heard on her most recent trip: ''Americans think that in Russia, we have bears
roaming in the streets!'' ''Over all, relations between Russia and America are at their worst since the Stalin era,'' she
writes. But '''People are people' was a phrase I heard again and again, whether in the hills of Buryatia, on the waters of
Lake Baikal or sitting in any of the innumerable kitchens where Russians fed me and we toasted our friendship.''
The British journalist Tim Moore is no Russophile, and he has his reasons. In 2015, having learned of the existence of
an Iron Curtain Trail for bicyclists, also known as Euro Velo 13, he decided to traverse its 10,000-odd kilometers,
threaded along the borders of the former Soviet Union, from above the Arctic Circle to the Black Sea. To increase the
rigors of throwback privation, he chose an ancient, heavy East German bicycle, the MIFA. In THE CYCLIST WHO
WENT OUT IN THE COLD: Adventures Riding the Iron Curtain (Pegasus, $26.95), Moore's mirthful account of his
perversely arduous ordeal, he concedes that his plan contained one serious flaw. When he decided to begin his ride in
mid-March, he forgot that it might still be winter in Scandinavia. ''As a slave to the 'idiot's gravity' of the map,'' he
explains, ''I just couldn't begin to imagine heading from south to north.'' Never mind: He had laid in porcupiney snow
tires for his clunker and had handwarmers resembling oven mitts on his handlebars. Still, after a hard day's cycling, he
discovered that his arms were stiffly angled into backward wings -- his sleeves had frozen. But by then he was in
Finland, so there was a sauna. Still, as fears of hypothermia set in, he put in an emergency call to Finland's point person
for the European Cycling Federation, who arranged provisional housing through a network of good Samaritans. As
Moore rolls south, his mood improves. The only real dip in his equanimity comes during his brief crossing into the
''pothole slalom'' of Russia, which spurs a torrent of grumbles about the ''rolling miasma of unregulated neglect and
decay,'' the depressing sight of ''stack-a-prole ... five-floor prefab tenements'' and the sinister drabness of his hotel, ''silent
as Chernobyl and about as welcoming.''
A Russian woman set off the astonishing chain reaction that transformed the fate of another cyclist, the Indian artist
Jagat Ananda Pradyumna Kumar Mahanandia. To read his biography, THE AMAZING STORY OF THE MAN WHO
CYCLED FROM INDIA TO EUROPE FOR LOVE (Oneworld, $19.99), written by Per J Andersson and translated by
Anna Holmwood, is to absorb a feel-good story that's so feel-good it makes other feel-good stories feel bad. As a baby
in the jungles of Orissa, the child of untouchables, Pradyumna Kumar (who goes, for obvious reasons, by the nickname
PK) received a bewildering prophecy. He would ''marry a girl from far, far away, from outside the village, the district,
the province, the state and even the country,'' an astrologer declared, adding, ''You needn't go looking for her, she will
come to you.'' For years, that prophecy and his own beatific disposition were PK's only birthright. Having moved to New
Delhi to accept a scholarship to an art school but lacking funds to support himself, he made money by drawing portraits
of passers-by. On Jan. 26, 1975, PK was sketching near the airport when he saw a cortege of jeeps escorting a white
woman who PK thought might be his long-awaited soul mate. She wasn't, but he did her portrait anyway, and she liked
it so much that he was instructed to bring it to the Soviet Embassy. The woman turned out to be Valentina Tereshkova,
the first female cosmonaut. Soon PK's name appeared in The Times of India and the next thing he knew, he was invited
to draw Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In December of that year, Gandhi's secretary created a government-approved area
by a fountain where PK and other artists could draw, ''just like the Place du Tertre in Paris.'' On Dec. 17, his future wife,
Lotta, appeared. The stars aligned. But then Lotta returned to Sweden. How would he get back to her? That's the story
this book tells, and it will involve a bicycle (several, in fact), which will carry him through India, Afghanistan, Iran and
Turkey, following a map called serendipity. When he at last reaches Sweden, and Lotta, the page of another country will
open for him.
O*
What travel books are you looking forward to this summer?
''Four books top my to-read pile. Two are about women who walk: Melanie Radzicki McManus's memoir of her hike
across Wisconsin, 'Thousand-Miler: Adventures Hiking the Ice Age Trail,' and Lauren Elkin's 'FlEoneuse: Women Walk
the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London,' about the wanderings of fascinating women. I'm eager to read
Tsh Oxenreider's 'At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe.' Oxenreider and her
husband traveled for nine months with their three children, which my husband and I also plan to do with our kids
someday. Martha Cooley's memoir, 'Guesswork: A Reckoning With Loss,' goes deep, chronicling the year she spent
living in a small village in Italy.'' -- Cheryl Strayed
CAPTION(S):
DRAWING (DRAWING BY MIGUEL PORLAN)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Schillinger, Liesl. "Travel." The New York Times Book Review, 4 June 2017, p. 16(L). Literature Resource Center,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA494210715&it=r&asid=6791b3199c7941fdd4180a51401c5b15.
Accessed 23 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494210715
Mountain Lines; A Journey through the French
Mountain Lines; A Journey through the French
Alps
Michelle Anne Schingler
ForeWord.
(Feb. 3, 2017): From Literature Resource Center.
COPYRIGHT 2017 ForeWord
http://www.forewordmagazine.com
Full Text:
Jonathan Arlan; MOUNTAIN LINES; Skyhorse Publishing (Nonfiction: Travel) 22.99 ISBN: 9781510709751
Byline: Michelle Anne Schingler
In this spirited account of a walk through the Alps, inspiration carries through.
"One discovers a whole new level of solitude on the inside of a cloud five thousand miles from home," writes Jonathan
Arlan in Mountain Lines, an account of his long traipse through the Alps. That thought becomes a theme of his
meditative work, which finds him caught between his thirst for turning corners, and his nostalgia for the land behind
him.
At a monastery stopover between Tokyo and home, Arlan traced a path on a map that led through the Alps to Nice,
France. He summoned resolve. A year later, he was back, and ready -- if in spirit more so than through preparation -- for
his four-hundred-mile jaunt through the mountains.
There's an openness to Arlan's travelogue that makes it easy to underestimate the scope of his journey, and the
treacherousness -- though he does mention rainstorms and chilling mistakes. He stops for soupy hot chocolate in towns
along the way, and happens into strangers who fill him with the moonshine needed to power on; he thumbs through
massive novels in the sunlight, and captures almost-unreal flowers on his cameraphone along the way. His is a text
where "quiet trespasses between borders" and mornings that are perfect and "gauzy" stand at the fore -- and in which
you almost forget that his backbreaking, leg-ache-inducing walk was no simple undertaking.
By avoiding bombasity in favor of capturing moments on the trail, Mountain Lines invites interlopers in more
graciously than other narratives in the genre. The trip proves to be a realignment for Arlan; its open-ended spirit of
welcome invites the same sort of adventurousness in its audience. Pick your starting point, and then go: Mountain Lines,
which refuses to relinquish its question marks even at the trail's end, is a reminder that such journeys are never a waste.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Schingler, Michelle Anne. "Mountain Lines; A Journey through the French Alps." ForeWord, 3 Feb. 2017. Literature
Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480216220&it=r&asid=fee731ddc15dbfdd6ac78de7ec71dc6d.
Accessed 23 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A480216220
Arlan, Jonathan. Mountain Lines: A Journey
Arlan, Jonathan. Mountain Lines: A Journey
Through the French Alps
Linda M. Kaufmann
Library Journal.
142.2 (Feb. 1, 2017): p94. From Literature Resource Center.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Arlan, Jonathan. Mountain Lines: A Journey Through the French Alps. Skyhorse. Feb. 2017.254p. ISBN
9781510709751. $24.99; ebk. ISBN 9781510709768. trav
Writer and editor Arlan embarked on a monthlong, 400-mile trek through the Alps in southeastern France. Alone and
physically unprepared for the challenges of these majestic mountains, Arlan persevered through lightning-filled
tempests, falls, and self-doubt. Fellow hikers, as well as Arlan's friend Colin, who joins him for a week of terrible
weather, make brief appearances and add interest to this day-by-day account. Physical comforts (food, hotel beds) and
discomforts (extreme temperatures and sickness), take up a large part of the narrative. Never clear about why he is
attempting the trail, the author refers to hiking as long, boring, and hard, and he finds litde joy or satisfaction in finishing
the daunting journey. Background information about the trail, part of what made Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods so
interesting, is sporadic. VERDICT Readers who enjoy their walking memoirs full of humor or with a more personal or
spiritual outcome, such as Cheryl Strayed's Wild, will find this easy-to-read story only mildly satisfying. Best as a
cautionary guide for neophytes thinking of taking on their first big hike.--Linda M. Kaufmann, Massachusetts Coll, of
Liberal Arts Lib., North Adams
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Kaufmann, Linda M. "Arlan, Jonathan. Mountain Lines: A Journey Through the French Alps." Library Journal, 1 Feb.
2017, p. 94. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479301302&it=r&asid=56c50a2cebe7379afd06e1b2fca80ff4.
Accessed 23 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479301302
Mountain Lines: A Journey Through the French
Mountain Lines: A Journey Through the French
Alps
Publishers Weekly.
264.2 (Jan. 9, 2017): p60. From Literature Resource Center.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Mountain Lines: A Journey Through the French Alps
Jonathan Arlan. Skyhorse, $24.99 (254p)
ISBN 978-1-5107-0975-1
First-time author Arlan, a self-described "intensely lazy person," decides at age 30 to leave "a boring career behind to
travel alone" on a walk that starts on the southern tip of Lake Geneva and continues to through the French Alps and
finally to the Mediterranean Sea--an idea that he stumbles across while Googling "various permutations of the search
terms 'long,' 'mountain,' 'hard,' and 'walk.'" What he finds--and what he admirably and amiably describes in this memoir-
-is a journey of self-discovery that encompasses "the breathtaking pain that blasted upward from the soles of my feet"
after his first walks; the beauty that he sees almost every day on the road ("the light on the mountains turned every
direction I looked into gorgeously rendered landscape paintings"); and the surprising similarity to parts of his journey to
his native Kansas ("The scenery moves so slow that you never feel like you are making any progress"). In the end, one
of the pleasures of the book is that Arlan strives for no grand pronouncements as he reaches the end of his trail, just
stating the satisfaction of accomplishing a goal and a reminding himself "to take it slow, to not rush." (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Mountain Lines: A Journey Through the French Alps." Publishers Weekly, 9 Jan. 2017, p. 60. Literature Resource
Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477339349&it=r&asid=ca0e97b7a055ba458afb189c00000e9e.
Accessed 23 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A477339349
Arlan, Jonathan: MOUNTAIN LINES
Arlan, Jonathan: MOUNTAIN LINES
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 15, 2016): From Literature Resource Center.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Arlan, Jonathan MOUNTAIN LINES Skyhorse Publishing (Adult Nonfiction) $24.99 2, 14 ISBN: 978-1-5107-0975-1
A writer, editor, and "inveterate walker" chronicles his monthlong hike in the Alps. In his first book, Arlan follows the
literary path that others have blazed, to great popular success, though he has taken a different route, both geographically
and thematically. "Everyone back home knows the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, the John Muir Trail," he
writes. "But so few seem to have heard of the Grand Traverse of the Alps....There was something untouched about it that
I liked, so I treated it preciously, like a secret." This alone must have seemed like a good enough reason to undertake the
trek and to write a book about it. However, there is little sense of true purpose in this account: no spiritual illumination,
no sudden epiphanies, no meditative insight, no transformation--at least none that occurred during the hike or the writing
about it. Toward the end, Arlan told a traveler, "I've been walking for over three weeks. Not every day, but almost. From
Geneva." When asked why, he responds, "The longer I walk the harder it is to answer the question." Readers who have
encountered such literary journeys will likely knows what happens: the author sacrifices some financial security; he
encounters strangers, some of whom are kind; he gets lost; he is more tired than he has ever been; it rains a lot; he
survives a dangerous fall. By the time he finished both his journey and his book, he changed a bit, discovering some
stamina and inner resources he never knew he possessed. "I am a quitter by nature," he insists, though the evidence
suggests the contrary. "I don't like pain the way some people do. I have no interest in 'pushing myself,' in 'broadening
my horizons'....The path of least resistance has always been my favorite path. So, again, I wonder: what was I doing
here?" Perhaps the best reader for this book is someone who wants to hike that same trail and is willing to risk being
talked out of it.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Arlan, Jonathan: MOUNTAIN LINES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2016. Literature Resource Center,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473652365&it=r&asid=e24f01f887f3cf22fe5bd754b775cd0a.
Accessed 23 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473652365

Schillinger, Liesl. "Travel." The New York Times Book Review, 4 June 2017, p. 16(L). Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA494210715&it=r. Accessed 23 Sept. 2017. Schingler, Michelle Anne. "Mountain Lines; A Journey through the French Alps." ForeWord, 3 Feb. 2017. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480216220&it=r. Accessed 23 Sept. 2017. Kaufmann, Linda M. "Arlan, Jonathan. Mountain Lines: A Journey Through the French Alps." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 94. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479301302&it=r. Accessed 23 Sept. 2017. "Mountain Lines: A Journey Through the French Alps." Publishers Weekly, 9 Jan. 2017, p. 60. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477339349&it=r. Accessed 23 Sept. 2017. "Arlan, Jonathan: MOUNTAIN LINES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2016. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473652365&it=r. Accessed 23 Sept. 2017.

• Go Nomad
  https://www.gonomad.com/87322-mountain-lines-genuine-travel-memoir
  Word count: 1278

  Mountain Lines: A Genuine Travel Memoir
  Trekking through the French Alps is an extensive and long feat with stunning views.
  Trekking through the French Alps is an extensive and long climb with stunning views.
  By Mary Govoni
  In Jonathan Arlan’s memoir Mountain Lines, he reflects upon the personal experiences he faced during his 400-mile walk through the French Alps.
  Arlan’s accounts of his experience, both the sensations and their accompanying thoughts, are remarkably genuine and accurate throughout the novel. He describes the highs and lows of such a journey, both literally and figuratively as he reaches summits and descends into valleys.
  The awe, the pain, the frustration, and the excitement he recounts are feelings that any traveler can relate to, regardless of their own experiences. Mountain Lines describes human emotion in its truest form.
  The book cover shows just one of the French Alps' beautiful picturesque scenes.
  The book cover shows just one of the French Alps’ beautiful picturesque scenes.
  Introduction
  Arlan introduces the reader to his situation before he has taken on such a massive feat in the story’s introduction. As he is nearing thirty, Arlan is growing restless, tired of his monotonous everyday routine.
  It is a feeling that almost every traveler has experienced. After having seen the magnificent views and the enchanting cities that the world has to offer, it’s impossible not to daydream about those places on your morning commute to work.
  When he stumbled upon an image on the internet one day, Arlan begins to study a map of the southeast corner of France, where the Alps are marked simply by a red line running south from Lake Geneva all the way down to the Mediterranean.
  It is the image of this red line that inspires Arlan to commit himself to this journey.
  The Excitement of the Idea
  In the beginning of the novel, Arlan describes a feeling well-known to travelers of all different walks of life. He describes the overwhelming excitement of the idea of such a trip, only to be later reminded of the harsh realities that such a trip guarantees:
  “Some days it was all I could think about. I would picture myself in the photographs I had seen on the internet, images of ice-capped mountains of endless fields of wildflowers, of warm dining rooms full of like-minded people…I dreamt, as one dreams of a long-lost love, of walking myself into the sea.
  It as only once I’d committed to the journey, once I’d bought the plane ticket that I started to worry about it”.
  Painting Pictures of Landscapes
  Arlan sets to his adventure lacking any previous outdoor experience, roughly out of shape, and nearly overtaken by last minute nerves. The beginning suggests a sense of hopelessness that Arlan himself experienced and encourages his reader to experience with him. Yet, as his journey continues, he begins to find his mountain legs.
  Arlan describes stumbling upon a google image of the red line that traces the French Alps and feeling inspired.
  Arlan describes stumbling upon a google image of the red line that traces the French Alps and feeling inspired.
  And as he does so, he realizes how much pain mountain legs can cause, he vividly retells the feelings of aches and pains unlike any others that he had ever felt.
  Almost simultaneously, Arlan contrasts these depictions of raw human pain with illustrations of his surrounding landscapes.
  He describes everything from the grass, dirt and rock, to the ice-capped peaks in the High Alps shrouded in clouds.
  He speaks of hamlets, sheep-filled pastures, and countless lakes as he walks endlessly towards the Mediterranean.
  Arlan manages to paint these picturesque landscapes without romanticizing them. His walk, he reminds us, is as exhausting as it is exhilarating.
  Perhaps one of the account’s most climatic moments – no pun intended – is when he reaches the peak that provides him with the grandiose view of Mont Blanc.
  Anyone that has ever reached a summit, tired and out of breath, knows the overwhelming feelings that come when you finally see the far-reaching landscapes below.
  The way Arlan articulates this moment is both honest and endearing, it suggests an impressive grasp on both the English language and the sensations provided from such a moment:
  Mount Blanc, which Arlan describes, is known as the "the roof of Europe".
  Mount Blanc, which Arlan describes, is known as the “the roof of Europe”.
  “Where the clouds broke, light glinted off the steel-black rock. The mountains rescaled the world around me and I stared at them, gobsmacked and dumbfounded like I had discovered them.
  And in some sense, I had…I recognized it from the pictures, like a celebrity I’d only seen in magazines: Mont Blanc, the roof of Europe.”
  Other Reviews
  The reviews of Mountain Lines are consistently filled with praise, highlighting the honesty and inspiration that the text promotes.
  The Publisher’s Weekly review makes the claim that one of the greatest pleasures of the book is that “Arlan strives for no grand pronouncements as reaches the end of his trail, just stating the satisfaction of accomplishing a goal”.
  Likewise, Anna Badkhen, author and travel writer, boasts of the novel’s effects claiming the book is an opportunity to be reminded that: “wandering, and wondering, can and should be an accessible miracle, easy to fall in love with and to pursue”.
  The seemingly endless praise of the book remains relatively consistent, it is the type of praise that suggests the book is tailored towards a specific type of reader.
  The reader is not necessarily limited to those that strive to complete the same trek, or perhaps even any hiking trail at all. The book is meant to inspire travelers of all kinds to take the necessary steps in starting their own adventure and to embrace both the highs and the lows of any trip.
  About the Author
  Jonathan Arlan is an author and editor that now currently resides in Kansas City.
  Jonathan Arlan is an author and editor that now currently resides in Kansas City.
  Jonathan Arlan is a writer and editor now living in Kansas City, Missouri. After having been raised in the Great Plains, he has spent years residing in New Orleans, New York, Egypt, Japan, and Serbia.
  His traveling has been extensive, but Mountain Lines is his only published book thus far. Arlan is proud of the way he retells his story in his memoir, and rather nonchalantly refers to the text by saying:
  “In any case, I’ve etched a version of my trip into my brain in the months since — and for better or worse, it’s all I have.”
  This rings true for all travelers and all adventures. Sure, we can post pictures on facebook and we share stories with friends and family. But in the months and the years that follow, the version of the trip etched into your brain is all you truly have. And maybe that is for the best.
  Mountain Lines is a compelling narrative. Perhaps a review may seem like too much of a spoiler alert. Yet, Arlan never comes to any profound, grand conclusion from his experience and nor is he meant to. It is laced with humor, wonder, and curiosity.
  The book is worth reading solely for the genuine way it depicts a traveler’s relationship with adventure.

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