This year’s top titles include The Last Ride of the Pony Express, Elixir, Airplane Mode, and more.
Illustration by Emily Lankiewicz
It’s often said that travel is all about the journey, whether it’s planning a remote island holiday or setting out on the adventure of a lifetime across the Arctic Ocean. But it can be almost as thrilling to roam the world from the comfort of our homes. Just take our pick of 2023 travel books, which include everything from humor-fueled essay collections and thought-provoking narratives to tomes brimming with full-page colorful photographs and tips on finding the most welcoming LGBTQ+ spots around the globe. They all share the uncanny ability to transport readers through time and space without ever having to open the front door.
Whether it’s a deep delve into a Balkan landscape of healing plants and foraging, or a more than 2,000-mile road trip through America’s racial history, here are ten travel books that are more than worthy of this year’s holiday wish lists.
Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance by Alvin Hall
From 1936 to 1967, the Green Book served as an annual travel guide for African Americans, helping them to identify welcoming hotels, restaurants, gas stations and other businesses across the United States during the Jim Crow era. Compiled by Black New York City postman Victor Hugo Green, this essential reference publication included places like Manhattan’s Hotel Theresa, once considered the “Waldorf of Harlem,” and the Moulin Rouge Hotel in Las Vegas, frequented by celebrities like Harry Belafonte and Ella Fitzgerald during its five-month stint in 1955.
Award-winning broadcaster Alvin Hall first learned about the Green Book in 2015, and he was immediately intrigued. Several years later, he and a friend, activist Janée Woods Weber, set out on a 2,000-plus-mile cross-country road trip from Detroit to New Orleans, visiting many of the establishments once featured in the guide’s pages. (Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has a nearly complete collection of the Green Book, which Hall utilized.) Along the way, Hall also gathered memories from some of the guide’s last surviving users.
The result, Driving the Green Book: a Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance, is a…
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