Travel

Cinematographer and film director Garrett Brown has created the "Philadelphia: Getting to Know Us" advertising campaigns. He returns to Fresh Air to discuss why he wanted to show both the "grimy outskirts" and "scrubbed-up insides" of his home city.

Author and traveller Bruce Chatwin. His new book, Songlines, is a semi-fictional account of the myths that structure the lives of Australia's aborigines. Chatwin's early works include the acclaimed travel book In Patagonia.

Adventure essayist Tim Cahill. Cahill's writing appeared in the premiere issue of Outside magazine and has been a regular feature ever since. In his latest odyssey, Cahill drove from the tip of South America to Purdhoe Bay in Alaska. His newest collection of adventure tales is titled Jaguars Ripped My Flesh.

Jeana Yeager and Dick Rutan, who headed the six-year effort to fly a plane around the world without refueling. They completed their nine-day flight in their light-weight craft called The Voyager on December 23, 1986. They have written a book describing the adventure.

Author Kate Simon. Simon is best known for her travel books (Kate Simon's Paris, New York: Places and Pleasures) and for her two vivid memoirs of coming of age in the New York City of the 1920s and 30s. The first, Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood, portrays the immigrant neighborhoods just after World War I. In the second, A Wider World: Portraits in an Adolescence, Simon recalls her tumultuous adolescence as she discovered the world beyond the neighborhoods of her youth.

Traveler Eric Hansen. In 1982, Hansen set out alone across Borneo, an island in Indonesia composed almost entirely of rain forests and populated by natives who have had the least amount of of contact with westerners. Hansen's account of his travels is contained in the book Stranger in the Forest: A Foot Across Borneo. Hansen has also travelled to North Africa, Afghanistan, Nepal, India and Southeast Asia.

Travel writer Mary Morris. Her new book, Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone, recounts her travels, alone, through Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala, and what it means for a woman to travel alone. Her earlier works include Vanishing Animals & Other Stories and The Bus of Dreams.

Writer Paul Theroux. Since his first book, Waldo, was published in 1966, Theroux has written prolifically. His extensive travels have taken him through Africa, Asia and Central America, and a central theme of his work is the ironic examination of the clashing and mingling of Western and Third World cultures. Theroux's newest book, Riding the Iron Rooster, is an account of his travels by train through China.

Jane and Michael Stern are a husband-and-wife food-writing duo who travel the country to find the best regional food. Their work has spanned twenty years and several books. Their latest is called A Taste of America.

The fiction writer sought adventure, so he followed the Equator around the world. His new book describes the different cultures, colonial vestiges, and natural phenomena of his various stops -- many of which the locals described as the "middle of nowhere."

Essayist Paul Gruchow has a new collection of essays called The Necessity of Empty Places, which celebrates the American wilderness. Rejecting the macho, survivalist approach to confronting nature, Gruchow sees the wilderness as a place of meditation and discovery.

The British author and travel writer recently passed away. His acclaimed books include Songlines, a semi-fictional account of the myths that structure the lives of Australia's aborigines, and the travel book In Patagonia.

Writer Ian Frazier is known primarily as a humor writer for The New Yorker magazine. His new book, Great Plains, is describes a history of the region through Frazier's own trips driving 25,000 miles in a criss-cross of the area, and hours of research in the New York's Public Library.

Writer Joe Kane. In 1985, Kane, who had been a freelance writer living in San Francisco, was asked to follow the first attempt to navigate the entire Amazon River, starting in the Andes of Peru and ending in the Atlantic Ocean. Kane was going to follow the group at intervals, publicizing their progress for the American and European press.

Book Critic John Leonard reviews a posthumous collection of essays by writer Bruce Chatwin. The collection is titled What Am I Doing Here? Chatwin, who wrote extensively about his world travels and the collisions of cultures, died last year from a Chinese fungus that infected him on one of his trips.

Airline expert George Brown. In his new book, The Airline Passenger's Guerrilla Handbook, Brown explains how to beat the air travel system. He tells how to find the cheapest fares, accumulate frequent flyer points, how to beat jet lag, even how to make love while in flight.

Novelist, essayist, and reporter Barbara Grizutti Harrison. Her new book is called "Italian Days." It's a chronicle of her travels through Italy, but it's also more introspective, influenced by her parents Italian heritage and her conversion to Catholicism after a childhood spent in the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Travel writer and essayist Jan Morris. In her 1974 autobiography "Conundrum," Morris talked about her search for sexual identity and her sex change operation. The sequel, "Pleasures of a Tangled Life," is a collection of personal essays describing the experiences and sensations that have brought Morris pleasure over the years.

Adventurer and author Tristan Jones. Tristan Jones is almost certainly the most intrepid sailor alive. At last count he's journeyed more than 450-thousand miles in small boats. That includes 20 crossings of the Atlantic, and 3 and a half circumnavigations. Many of those miles were racked up during the course of exceedingly dangerous, some would say foolhardy, adventures. Jones tried to sail as close as possible to the North Pole, and as a result spent a year frozen in the Arctic ice pack.

Journalist Eddy L. Harris. Harris' book, "Mississippi Solo," is Harris' chronicle of his 23-hundred mile journey down the Mississippi by canoe. This was by no means an idyllic voyage for a black man traveling alone, and Harris faced racism and the threat of violence, in addition to the normal problems of such a lengthy journey. (Interview by Sedge Thomson)