Monday, November 24, 2014

The Best American Travel Writing 2011

As I've said before, I'm a big fan of the Best American series. This volume contained many gems. My favorites:

Southern Culture on the Skids: NASCAR in a nutshell. Everything you've ever thought about the north-south and red-blue divide is contained in these pages.

Venance Lafrance Is Not Dead: American expats move to Haiti. Venance Lafrance is the young teenager they attempt to help while they live there. Also, they experience a devastating earthquake.

Stuck: Keith Gessen makes the case that Moscow's traffic is the worst in the world. Gessen posits that Russian drivers are jerks. A traffic engineer puts it more gently, "Russian drivers lack foresight." Either way, "don't block the box" is not a concept in Moscow. (Perhaps not coincidentally, I once sat in St. Petersburg traffic where the fast car on the road was the one being pushed by a half dozen men.)


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