Ultimate Travel Library—Around the World in 80+ Books To compile our list of classic travel books, we asked dozens of travelers (writers, photographers, explorers, editors, and others) to name the books that have most enriched their senses of place and best informed their peregrinations. Here are their choices. Find these and other great travel books in our Ultimate Travel Library, organized by geographic region.

• Amsterdam, by Geert Mak (1999). The city is much more than a charming

backdrop for a Rembrandt or a safe haven for oldest-profession debauchery. Dutch journalist Mak tells the 800-year story of the city in a manner that's less history tome and more soap opera—in an erudite kind of way. Translated by Philippe Blom.

• Andes, photographs by Pablo Corral Vega, text by Mario Vargas Llosa

(2001). Ecuadorian photographer Corral Vega travels the entire length of the Andes—nearly 5,000 miles (8,047 kilometers)—and discovers a stretch of remarkable human and geographic diversity.

• Arabian Sands, by Wilfred Thesiger (1959). Simply said, a classic.

Thesiger journeyed among the nomadic camel-breeding peoples of southern Arabia, fell in love with the desert and the Bedouin, and wrote a rich account of his experiences.

• Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, by

Barry Lopez (1986). Lopez is dreamy, and his meditation on the "last frontiers" of the Arctic is as much about natural history as it is about human landscapes of imagination, desire, and progress. This National Book Award-winner is based on his travels throughout the North, including Baffin Island, Canada's Northwest Territories, and Greenland.

• Australian Colors: Images of the Outback, photographs and text by Bill

Bachman (1994). The culmination of a two-year trudge, this photo book celebrates the bush from its Aboriginal roots to its present mosaic of cultures and urban spaces.

• Bad Land: An American Romance, by Jonathan Raban (1996). There's a

brutal beauty to the Dakotas and eastern Montana (a region described on old maps as the "Great American Desert"); the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 lured scores of settlers with 320-acre (130-hectare)land grants, but within a few years most had been defeated by drought and desperation. Raban's evocation of the place and its people stands as testimony to the grit and enduring legacy of America's homesteaders.

• Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History, by Robert D. Kaplan (1993).

To appreciate the complexity of contemporary Europe, one must understand the Balkans. Completed in 1990, before the first shot was fired in the war in Yugoslavia, Kaplan's riveting account of his travels weaves in history and politics.

• Blue Highways: A Journey into America, by William Least Heat-Moon

(1982). After losing his job, the author embarks on a 13,000-mile (20,920-kilometer) trip down America's back roads, into forgotten nooks and crannies from the South to the Pacific Northwest. The characters he meets make the journey come alive. As Robert Penn Warren said of Least Heat-Moon: "He has a genius for finding people who have not even found themselves."

• Brazilian Adventure, by Peter Fleming (1933). For a moment, forget

about the magic of modern-day Rio and go hunting for a missing British adventurer in the jungles of Brazil with Fleming, the Hugh Grant of1930s journalism. Underprepared, overwhelmed, but undaunted, Fleming and his mates marched, canoed, and fought through 3,000 miles (4,828 kilometers)of Amazon wilderness.

• Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, by Isabel Fonseca

(1995). Fonseca spent four nomadic years living with the Roma (as the Gypsies call themselves), moving from Albania to Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Bulgaria to document their traditions.

• Chasing Monarchs: Migrating with the Butterflies of Passage, by Robert

Michael Pyle (1999). Monarchs are well-traveled, so peripatetic readers would be wise to take wing with lyrical lepidopterist Pyle as he trails monarchs south from their breeding grounds in British Columbia; down the Columbia, Snake, Bear, and Colorado Rivers; across the Bonneville Salt Flats; to the Mexican border; and finally up the California coast.

• City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, by William Dalrymple (1993). Although

Dalrymple spent only 12 months in Delhi, his tour covers some 3,000 years—from the ancient (temples, palaces, despots) to curses of the modern (ubiquitous pigeons and insane taxi drivers). Part archaeological dig, part travelogue, this book is equal parts authoritative and fun, as is his In Xanadu.

• Cold Beer and Crocodiles: A Bicycle Journey into Australia, by Roff

Smith (2000). What's a man to do when, after 15 years, he doesn't understand his adopted country? If that man is Yankee journalist Roff Smith, he grabs his bike and makes a nine-month, 10,000-mile (16,090-kilometer)circuit of the place. He discovers a people who defy categorization but welcome visitors with (what else?) beer.

• The Colossus of Maroussi, by Henry Miller (1941). Miller captures the

spirit and warmth of the resilient Greek people in his story of a wartime journey from Athens to Crete, Corfu, and beyond with his friend Lawrence Durrell, himself the author of Bitter Lemons, a brilliant and funny evocation of Cyprus.

• Coming into the Country, by John McPhee (1976). Alaska might be

America's least portable state—photographs and travel tales rarely capture the complex sensuality of this frozen zone. But McPhee's passionate detachment brings the variety of Alaska into sharp focus; he spends time among miners, grizzly bears, a young Athabaskan chief, politicians, bush pilots, and durable (if cockeyed) settlers, and paints a picture that stretches from urban culture to pipeline-crossed wilderness to remote Arctic expanses.

• Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War,

by Tony Horwitz (1998). Witty Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Horwitz spent two years traveling through "the unvanquished South" (Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama), trying to understand why Americans are still obsessed with the war.

• Cuba, photographs by David Alan Harvey, text by Elizabeth Newhouse

(1999). Photographer Harvey's camera captures, lovingly, this isle's beauty amid a Spanish-colonial backdrop. His portraits reveal ebullient, resourceful people.

• Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea, by

Claudio Magris, Translated by Patrick Creagh (1986). Italian intellectual Magris's poetic river trip offers a portrait of Central Europe that's both exhaustive and energizing.

• Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, by Edward Abbey (1968).

Abbey delivers a lovably prickly meditation on the Southwest. Living in Utah as a ranger at Arches National Monument left him with an abiding affection for the places conjured here.

• The Edge of Paradise: America in Micronesia, by P. F. Kluge (1991).

How far away from the United States can you get without falling off the map? Kluge asks this question as he returns to the isolated atolls of Micronesia two decades after serving there as a Peace Corps volunteer. He discovers that—for better or worse—pop music and cold beer have a way of uniting even the most disparate worlds.

• The Eighth Continent: Life, Death, and Discovery in the Lost World of

Madagascar, by Peter Tyson (2000). Tyson writes of an isolated island—the world's fourth largest—that is rich in flora and fauna but threatened by ecological devastation.

• The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris, by Edmund White

(2001). "Paris is a big city, in the sense that London and New York are big cities and that Rome is a village, Los Angeles a collection of villages, and Zürich a backwater." So begins White, our flâneur (enlightened ambler), who lived in Paris for 16 years.

• A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East, by

Tiziano Terzani (1997). New Delhi-based but Italian by birth, journalist Terzani is a walking United Nations. When a Hong Kong fortune-teller told him in 1976 not to travel by plane, he took her warning perhaps too literally: he set off by foot, boat, bus, car, and train for a year of escapades in a dozen countries.

• Full Circle: One Man's Journey by Air, Train, Boat and Occasionally

Very Sore Feet Around the 50,000 Miles of the Pacific Rim, by Michael Palin and photographer Basil Pao (1997). Michael Palin (of Monty Python fame) uses wit and a keen eye to propel him through a brisk245-day tour that delivers richly on the book's promising title.

• Galapagos: Islands Born of Fire, photographs and text by Tui De Roy

(1998). Charles Darwin didn't have a camera, but if he had, his images might mirror these stunning glimpses of island life. For 35 years, De Roy lived among the world-famous blue-footed boobies, marine iguanas, and giant tortoises; her images and text convey wisdom gleaned from her own evolutionary immersion.

• The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest, by

Timothy Egan (1990). Egan's brooding book focuses on his native Washington State and the concerns of the region: timber and loggers, salmon, fruit-growing, urban development, Native Americans, and the Columbia River.

• Heidi's Alp: One Family's Search for Storybook Europe, by Christina

Hardyment (1987). It's a family affair as Hardyment and her four young daughters head out on a 4,000-mile (6,437-kilometer)road trip in search of the landscapes that inspired their favorite fairy tales.

• Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell (1938). Orwell joined the

militia in the Republican Army as a private in 1937, but his book—an account of the Spanish Civil War—is more than a soldier's story; it's a remarkable portrait of a nation in the revolutionary throes of growth and self-definition.

• Honeymoon in Purdah: An Iranian Journey, by Alison Wearing (2000).

When Wearing decided to travel through Iran with a male companion—in the guise of a honeymooning couple—she raised a few eyebrows. She also blasted through Western notions of Iran as an anti-American warren of fanatical repression to reveal, instead, a place of compassionate, philosophical people. More cause for the raising of eyebrows in light of recent headlines?

• Hong Kong, by Jan Morris (1989). The ever-piquant Morris masterfully

unravels the enigma that is Hong Kong, from its Sino-British bipolarity to its megalithic economic structure, its hypercrowded urban landscape to its surprisingly under-explored nature reserves.

• A House in Bali, by Colin McPhee (1947). The book should be called "An

Anthropological Brahms goes to Bali." In the 1930s Canadian musicologist Colin McPhee became enchanted by the clear, metallic music of the gamelan (a sort of spooky xylophone), an instrument indigenous to this Indonesian isle. He returned from the country's rice paddies years later with this lovingly composed tribute to the people and music of a faraway Hindu paradise.

• In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale, by

Amitav Ghosh (1993). Indian author Ghosh moved to the Egyptian farming village of Lataifa and became engrossed in the history of an Indian slave in 12th-century Egypt. Through this exploration, Ghosh shares keen insights on ancient Muslim traditions and the modern Egyptian identity.

• In a Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson (2000). Bryson would probably

be the perfect desert-island companion—an acerbic naturalist and historian who just can't keep an absurd moment or thought to himself. His Australia story teems with toxic caterpillars and ridiculous place-names ("Tittybong," for one).

• In Patagonia, by Bruce Chatwin (1977). Let's face it: Chatwin was

weird, but brilliantly so. This book, launched around a childhood fancy for his grandma's scrap of giant sloth skin, takes him to the "uttermost part of the Earth," from Rio Negro to the Chilean town of Punta Arenas.

• In Siberia, by Colin Thubron (1999). "Siberia: it fills one-twelfth of

the landmass of the whole Earth, yet this is all it leaves for certain in the mind. A bleak beauty, and an indelible fear," begins Thubron, who journeyed 15,000 miles (24,140 kilometers)along the Trans-Siberian Railway. His freeze-frame portrait penetrates the contradictions of this brutal landscape.

• In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon, by

Redmond O'Hanlon (1988). Here's where travel becomes, perhaps, too adventurous: Thrill-seeking, hilarious O'Hanlon takes a four-month river trip and trek in the jungles of Venezuela, a buggy, shadowy, prehistoric-seeming netherworld. The result? An illuminating diary of the jungle's wildlife and people.

• In Tuscany, by Frances Mayes and photographer Bob Krist (2000). As

those who've read Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany know, Mayes can't seem to get enough of the feasts and fields of Italy. This book perfectly pairs her evocative writing (and recipes) with Krist's sensual photographs.

• Iron and Silk, by Mark Salzman (1986). American martial arts expert

Salzman spent his days teaching English in Changsha, China, but devoted his mind to the study of contemporary Chinese society. His unpretentious and probing manner paves the way for genuine friendships with local Chinese.

• Last Places: A Journey in the North, by Lawrence Millman (1990).

Energetic, peripatetic, and chatty, Millman has penned a transcendent yet earthy (rich in irony and attitude) narrative about his journey along ancient Viking sea routes from Norway to Newfoundland.

• London: The Biography, by Peter Ackroyd (2000). Ackroyd lights up

nearly 800 pages of historical dissection (Druids to the present) with felicitous tales underscoring the city's raucous side.

• Looking for Lovedu: Days and Nights in Africa, by Ann Jones (2001). At

the beginning of this axle-smashing road-trip tale is a map depicting Jones's insane route from Tangier to Cape Town, which she undertook in a blue 1980 Land Rover. Her mission was to find the Lovedu people (a tribe guided by "feminine" principles), which she accomplishes in this eye-popping adventure tale.

• Lords of the Atlas: The Rise and Fall of the House of Glaoua

1893-1956, by Gavin Maxwell (1961). Set against the background of Marrakech and the castles of the High Atlas, this is the story of a legendary tribal warlord (the barbaric and ostentatious son of a concubine) and his assent to power in Morocco at the end of the 19th century.

• The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America, by Bill Bryson

(1989). An appropriate update of Steinbeck's search for idyllic America, Bryson's journey from his native Des Moines across dozens of states reads like a hilariously bitchy postcard. Bryson articulates those nasty thoughts we've all had while driving past strip malls, but in the end his unsentimental love of "Americanness" is what rises to the top.

• Motoring with Mohammed: Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea, by Eric

Hansen (1991). Ten years after he was shipwrecked on an island in the Red Sea and rescued by goat smugglers from Eritrea, wily Hansen returns to Yemen in search of journals he buried in the sand. This book is everything travel writing should be: insightful, personal, informative, and entertaining.

• A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway (1964). "This is how Paris was

in the early days when we were very poor and very happy," recollects Hemingway in this vivid memoir of 1920s Paris, a metropolis brimming with creative types and revolutionary ideas.

• Nomads of Niger, photographs by Carol Beckwith, text by Marion van

Offelen (1993). Beckwith spent 18 months traveling through sub-Saharan bushland, shooting these drop-dead-gorgeous images of the Fulani, nomadic herders who have been here for centuries. The book is simple by design but profound in aesthetics and implication.

• Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone, by Mary Morris

(1988). Emotive, gutsy Morris deserves a place on one of those morning TV talk shows. Her memoir of living in the Mexican town San Miguel de Allende and her travels around Central America highlight the challenge of residing in a foreign land, and the lessons in self-understanding that come from such an escape.

• Off the Rails in Phnom Penh: Into the Dark Heart of Guns, Girls, and

Ganja, by Amit Gilboa (1998). Tired of gentility? Gilboa is. "Cambodia is a place where the usual restraints on behavior—legal, financial, social—are noticeably absent," he writes. Israel-born Gilboa's account of expat humanitarian relief workers living badly ($2 brothels, marijuana pizzas, etc.) makes for zesty reading.

• Old Glory: A Voyage Down the Mississippi, by Jonathan Raban (1981).

Not for the first time, a Brit tells us what we need to know about America. Raban's trip in a 16-foot (five-meter) motorboat is part Huckleberry Finn, part Mosquito Coast. "It is as big and depthless as the sky itself," writes Raban of the great river, which he sees as a perfect metaphor for America: vast, rich, unpredictable.

• The Old Patagonian Express: By Train through the Americas, by Paul

Theroux (1979). The delight in Theroux and his many books is that, although he's a curmudgeon and a complainer, he's fun to read. It's amusing to watch him hopscotch train-to-train from Boston to the tip of Argentina, stopping in dozens of annoying (to him) places on the way.

• Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen (1937). This is the beguiling story of

a Danish woman's life managing a coffee plantation in Kenya from 1914 to 1931. The book is vastly more colorful and engaging than the movie.

• The Panama Hat Trail: A Journey from South America, by Tom Miller

(1986). What (besides your head) goes into a hat? Miller follows the making and marketing of Panama's famed hat and in so doing draws a fascinating picture of South America—in particular, Ecuador.

• The Ponds of Kalambayi: An African Sojourn, by Mike Tidwell (1990).

Tidwell was a wet-behind-the-ears 23-year-old fish-culture expert with the Peace Corps when he was sent to the tribal chiefdom of Kalambayi, in Zaire, to teach the benefits of fish farming. The story this fish out of water tells about working and living with locals is both funny and heartwarming.

• The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze, and

Back in Chinese Time, by Simon Winchester (1996). Historian Winchester seems to know everything, but he's such an engaging raconteur you can hardly begrudge him his smarts. Here he travels the 3,434-mile (5,526-kilometer)Yangtze River, reflecting on the historic importance of the river and the social straits in which the Chinese now find themselves.

• Road Fever: A High-Speed Travelogue, by Tim Cahill (1991). Tierra del

Fuego, Chile, to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska (15,000 miles [24,140 kilometers]), by truck in 23.5 days? Better pack the No-Doz. Better yet, read Cahill's killer diary of his Guinness Book of World Records-making road trip and be glad you're at home. This book ups the ante on driving "vacations."

• The Roads to Sata: A 2,000-Mile Walk through Japan, by Alan Booth

(1985). By turns whimsical and poignant, Booth's artfully irreverent look at his adopted homeland sheds light on a culture that can be tough for Westerners to understand.

• Roughing It, by Mark Twain (1872). Every American traveler (and Yankee

travel writer) rambles in the comforting shadow of Twain, who in 1869 satirized the pretensions of mindless travelers to Europe and the Holy Land in The Innocents Abroad and who here spins a fictionalized recollection of his stagecoach trip through the West and his subsequent adventures in the Pacific. Beneath his genteel demeanor beats the heart of a streetwise original.

• Running in the Family, by Michael Ondaatje (1982). This is a

nonfiction (with hefty poetic license) depiction of the author's early life in Sri Lanka. For Ondaatje (who wrote The English Patient), a return to his roots uncorks elaborate memories of his Dutch-Ceylonese family.

• Sahara Unveiled: A Journey Across the Desert, by William Langewiesche

(1996). "The desert teaches by taking away," writes journalist Langewiesche, but his 1,200-mile (1,931-kilometer)trek through Algiers, Timbuktu, and beyond produced a generous meditation on the towns and people that survive along the great desert's fringes.

• Sea and Sardinia, by D. H. Lawrence (1921). Nine days on the

Mediterranean island of Sardinia, west of the Italian mainland, was all it took to enchant Lawrence into writing this stylish and mesmerizing examination.

• Seven Years in Tibet, by Heinrich Harrer (1953). In 1943, German

mountain climber Heinrich Harrer—no, not Brad Pitt, as in the film—escaped captivity in India and headed across Himalayan passes to the Forbidden City of Lhasa in Tibet, where he became friends with the14-year-old Dalai Lama. This book truly captures mystical pre-Chinese-invasion Tibet.

• Serengeti: Natural Order on the African Plain, by Mitsuaki Iwago

(1986). Iwago is a poet with the camera who captures not just light and form, but emotion. His images of animals (wildlife is his specialty) reflect a nuanced perspective on time and life cycles within this majestic ecosystem.

• Slowly Down the Ganges, by Eric Newby (1966). We like A Short Walk in

the Hindu Kush—Newby's breathless adventure in northeast Afghanistan (1958)—but we love his 1,200-mile (1,931-kilometer)journey down India's great river. Traveling with Eric Newby is like traveling with Jeeves: He's a brilliant, stiff-upper-lipped companion, but he probably won't carry your bags.

• The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen (1978). Matthiessen is a

multi-task traveler. In this book—one of many fine ones he's written—he and zoologist friend George Schaller trek through Nepal in physical search of Himalayan blue sheep and the rare snow leopard, and in spiritual search (Matthiessen is a Zen Buddhist) of the Lama of Shey at the ancient Buddhist shrine on Crystal Mountain. Enlightenment, anyone?

• The Songlines, by Bruce Chatwin (1987). More lyrical than

anthropological, The Songlines explores the "labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia," the "dreaming-tracks" or "songlines" of the Aboriginals. But in the end, this, like so many of his books, is a tale of Chatwin's ecstatically nomadic tilt.

• South Southeast, photographs by Steve McCurry (2000). McCurry is maker

of the shot seen 'round the world—that is, the piercing-green-eyed Afghan girl whose photo all but embodies the essence of the National Geographic Society. In this title, he invites readers on an achingly beautiful visual journey through Southeast Asia.

• Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo, by Eric Hansen (1988).

Hansen is like a brainy little brother. His audacious spin through the dwindling forests of Borneo (with no visa, no passport, and severely limited local vocabulary) was fueled entirely by his resilience, humor, and friends made along the way, some of whom had never been beyond the fringes of the forest.

• Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, by Sara Wheeler (1996). For a

bookish writer (she really knows her history), Wheeler makes for a gutsy and extroverted travel companion. She spent seven months in the coldest, windiest, highest, driest place on Earth, contemplating the bold adventures of such explorers as Ernest Shackleton and Apsley Cherry-Garrard and uncovering a remarkable warmth in the landscape.

• 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account, by Peter Carey (2001).

"A metropolis is, by definition, inexhaustible, and by the time I departed, thirty days later, Sydney was as unknowable to me as it had been on that clear April morning when I arrived," concludes Carey. But his impressionistic ramble through his homeland is indeed telling.

• This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland, by Gretel Ehrlich

(2001). With grit and grace, naturalist Ehrlich metaphorically thaws the ice sheet that separates our contemporary western lives from those of the Inuits, ice-adapted people who first traveled from Siberia across the polar North more than 5,000 years ago.

• Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback,

by Robyn Davidson (1980). Davidson is your typical crazy aunt. With her dog and four camels as companions, she walks across the landscapes and contradictions of rural Australia. She's at times touchy, confrontational, vulnerable, and loopy, but her story is a page-turner.

• Travels with Charley: In Search of America, by John Steinbeck (1961).

"When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch," Steinbeck begins. The itch in question went unscratched until, at 58, he launched a road trip from Maine to California—accompanied by his poodle, Charley. The America he discovers surprises both himself and his readers.

• Turkish Reflections: A Biography of a Place, by Mary Lee Settle

(1991). In Turkey, life can be a contradictory confluence of Byzantine history and contemporary bustle. After a 20-year absence, Settle returns to Turkey to revisit the myths, archaeological treasures, and people she never stopped loving.

• Two Towns in Provence, by M.F.K. Fisher (1964). Fisher, author of a

wealth of worthwhile books, is like an Impressionist painter with a photographic imagination. In this book, France is her canvas. She contrasts village life in Aix-en-Provence with bustling Marseille, capturing with graceful finesse all the details and moods.

• An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan, by Jason Elliot (1999).

Afghanistan is on our minds these days, but it has been in Elliot's thoughts since 1979, when he fought with the mujahideen. A subsequent visit to the war-torn land only heightened his perceptions of the paradoxes of this ancient place.

• The Valleys of the Assassins: And Other Persian Travels, by Freya

Stark (1934). It's fully appropriate that the intrepid Stark—who traveled on a shoestring to Luristan, the mountainous (and dangerous) region of western Iran—is acknowledged in Lonely Planet's Iran guide. Stark was romantic and bold, as is her chronicle of travels among the nomadic peoples of the Middle East.

• Vanishing Breed: Photographs of the Cowboy and the West, by William

Albert Allard (1982). Traveler staffers are unabashed photophiles. We love Jack Dykinga's red-rock studies in Desert: The Mojave and Death Valley and Michael Melford's endless landscapes in Big Sky Country: The Best of Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming and Idaho. But there's something 100 percent American about Allard's take on our Western lands that leaves us feeling proudly patriotic.

• Video Night in Kathmandu: and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East,

by Pico Iyer (1988). The contents page of this tour de force reads like a backpacker's fantasy—Bali, Tibet, Nepal, China, the Philippines, Burma, Hong Kong, India, Thailand, Japan. Indeed, this crafty, kinetic, outrageous book by Iyer—an earnest sort of smart-ass—continues to intoxicate wanderlusters.

• West with the Night, by Beryl Markham (1942). Aviatrix Markham shares

a spellbinding account of her childhood in Kenya, her experiences as a bush pilot in the 1930s, and her landmark solo flight across the Atlantic from east to west—she was the first person to accomplish this feat.

• Where Masks Still Dance: New Guinea, by Chris Rainier (1996). Over the

course of ten years, photographer Chris Rainier documented the aboriginal tribes of Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya in hauntingly beautiful black-and-white images. In short essays, he recounts the adventures behind the photographs and explores the influence of modern technology on these indigenous people.

-- http://traveler.nationalgeographic.com/travel-books/classic-travel-books-text