Lauren Collins

Cover Story: An interesting essay on an American with Turkish heritage on assignment in Turkey, and her struggles to integrate the social mores of her ancestral culture with her American upbringing, especially the Muslim dictate for women to wear a head scarf. A good exploration of the question of personal authenticity vs. respecting the culture and country you are visiting.

Many of these essays are equally thoughtful, of people visiting another country, another city, another culture, than show more the one they were born into. What I love about travel writing is the syncopation of the exterior and the interior journey. The mind is always behind the body as it relocates, struggling to catch up and adjust. I think it is this process of adjustment that is so fascinating, the things we learn in a new place, how a new country makes us change our thoughts and ways. show less

As an armchair traveller, I look forward to the yearly release of ‘The Best American Travel Writing.’ The 2017 edition by Lauren Collins lived up to my expectations.

Collins has included essays from publications as diverse as ‘The Virginia Quarterly Review,’ ‘BuzzFeed,’ and ‘Creative Nonfiction,’ to the usual mix of ‘New Yorker,’ ‘NYT,’ and ‘Harper’s Magazine’ offerings.

I confess that most of the authors are unfamiliar to me, but with the wide variety of style show more and subject offered, I had no trouble finding essays that I enjoyed reading. I found Tom Bissell’s story, “My Holy Land Vacation,” exploring the connections between the US religious Right and Israel thought-provoking. But it was Kantor and Einhorn’s “Refugees Hear a Foreign Word: Welcome” that I found most intriguing.

I can give the potential purchaser a list of others that I particularly enjoyed, but, perhaps, more to the point would be a quick topic list: whale hunting in Alaska, locating a plane wreck in the mountains of Bolivia, and hunting mycorrhizal fungi. The offerings are varied and most, if not all, are both entertaining and informative.

(A free review copy was provided by the publisher.) show less

A very well-written memoir about learning French and marrying a Frenchman (and languages in general). She explores the differences between languages, how there is not always a one-to-one equivalent, how a different language can even have an effect on how you think, how difficult relationships can be when you don't have a shared maternal tongue. It's a good addition to the American in Paris memoir genre.

I really liked this book and found that a lot of the things Collins has to say about cross-cultural marriages resonated with me. (My husband and I speak the same native language, but I was raised Southern Baptist and he was raised Jewish, and I found that many of the frustrations Collins describes apply.)

It's very well-written, as one would expect of a New Yorker writer. I think it could have been a little tighter, but it's a pretty short book so I suppose she felt the need to stretch. show more Perfect Yom Kippur afternoon reading -- interesting but light enough that it didn't tax my tired, hungry brain. show less