It is easy to become inured to a country like Afghanistan, to dismiss it as a place endlessly wracked by war, hopeless.

It is easy to forget that it is full of human beings who do not fight on one side or the other but simply live their destinies, giving birth and harvesting whatever crops they are lucky to grow, building and rebuilding their homes, teaching their children, burying their elders, dreaming, scheming, worrying if there will be enough food the next season, or month, or day.

In her new memoir, The World Is a Carpet, award-winning journalist Anna Badkhen focuses on this Afghanistan, whose everyday rites and rhythms abide behind the newspaper headlines and nightly news reports.

An intrepid reporter who has written three previous books on Afghanistan, Badkhen chooses to set her new work mostly in Oqa, a hardscrabble village of 240 souls located on the edge of the Dasht-e-Leili Desert in far northern Afghanistan, a hamlet so negligible it doesn’t appear on any maps and government officials claim it doesn’t exist; even Google Maps doesn’t show it.

Yet Oqa is also in the heart of a region of renowned weavers, whose Turkoman carpets have been praised for their surpassing beauty, density and durability for centuries.

Explaining her attraction to Oqa, Badkhen writes:

“Perhaps I had come back for this: the unobstructed sky, the resilient candor of my hosts who wove joy out of sorrow, the seductive contrast between the ancient and the modern, between the unspeakable violence and the inexpressible beauty…. This was the friction that pierced me the first time I saw Oqa, in 2010, when I met Baba Nezar and his family, and watched for the first time his daughter-in-law squat upon the loom. That visit had lasted an afternoon. I had to return. I had to return and spend more time here—the time it took to weave a carpet.”

The book begins with Baba Nezar journeying to the market town of Dawlatabad to buy the yarn that his daughter-in-law, Thawra, will use to make this year’s carpet.

“For the next seven months,” Badkhen writes, “Thawra would squat on top of a horizontal loom built with two rusty lengths of iron pipe, cinder blocks, and sticks in one of Oqa’s forty cob huts. Day after day, she would knot coarse weft threads over warps of thin, undyed wool, weaving the most beautiful carpet I have ever seen.”

As the months unfold and the carpet grows, knot by knot, we learn how every carpet is a personal diary of the weaver’s, and her village’s, life:

“Fine clay dust will filter into Thawra’s mud-and-dung loom room as she weaves. Through the scrub-brush lath ceiling there will seep into the room particles of manure, infinitesimal flecks of gold from nearby barchans, the terrible black cough of her neighbors’ famished children, echoes of the war that jolts the plains and contorts the Cretaceous massifs of her land.”

We also learn about the village outside Thawra’s loom room: how the passage of time is measured in Oqa by the coming of the cranes in March, the return of the mynah birds in May, the ripening of melons (“gourdfuls of condensed sunshine”) in August; how time is passed in the village — drinking tea, talking, weaving, smoking opium.

We learn how villagers scrabble to eke a precarious existence out of their parched surroundings, raising goats, hunting for increasingly rare fowl, combing the desert for brush and minerals. We inhale the “smells of Afghanistan—manure, juniper fires, raw lamb fat.” We take part in an elaborate wedding that attracts some 700 celebrants to the roadless village – though the hired musicians refuse to show up because of fear of the Taliban.

Season by season, rite by rite, encounter by encounter, thread by illuminating thread, Badkhen weaves a glorious prose carpet that poignantly captures the surface and the soul of life in Oqa, and in all the Oqas that grace the loom of Afghanistan.

Don George is an editor at large at Traveler magazine and has edited several travel-writing anthologies, including his latest, Better Than Fiction. Follow him on Twitter @don_george.

Read any good travel books lately? Leave a comment or use the #Triplit hashtag on Twitter or Google+ to share your recommendations with the Intelligent Travel community.

“As a twenty-two-year-old teacher at a small school in rural Africa I had spent some of the happiest years of my life,” writes Paul Theroux in his new book, The Last Train to Zona Verde. Africa seeped into Theroux’s soul on that first visit, so much so that he has regularly returned to it as a kind of touchstone throughout his celebrated 50-year career as a world-wandering novelist and travel writer.

The goal of the trip he describes in this new account seems simple and symmetrical enough: “For a previous book of mine, Dark Star Safari, I had traveled overland from Cairo to Cape Town down the right-hand side of Africa. This time … I wanted to resume my trip at Cape Town and … travel north in a new direction, up the left-hand side until I found the end of the line, either on the road or in my mind.”

A journey so elegantly plotted on a map encounters innumerable obstacles in the real world, of course. And Theroux’s journey becomes more and more challenging as he travels from Cape Town to Namibia, Botswana, and Angola, trying to uncover the Africa that has eluded him.

While he finds instances of intense happiness and inspiration—an enterprising English-language education program run by an American and a safari camp that rescues abandoned elephants are two examples — for the most part the Africa he encounters is a place of grinding heat, poverty, despair, thirst, and neglect. Before long, his hopeful, curiosity-fueled quest to explore the Africa tourists rarely see becomes one of the most difficult and demanding journeys of his life.

And yet while the journey is a trial, the book itself is a triumph, full of qualities to admire and emulate.

First of these is Theroux’s precise and powerful prose, as in this indelible snapshot:

“Beyond the wire was the more familiar Africa of skinny, hungry-looking children wincing in sunlight, of men drinking beer under trees, of straggling villages and frantic chickens and cattle wandering on the roads, of blowing paper and flimsy plastic bags snagged on trees, of piles of castoff rags and trampled beer cans, the improvised, slapped-together Africa of tumbled fences and cooking fires, of mud and thatch.”

Other exemplary traits include his signature straightforwardness; his thoughtfulness; his knowledge; and his intrepid, sheer 70-year-old gumption as he elbows his way onto battered buses, endures taunting youths, navigates jostling crowds, and confronts belligerent officials, and as he determinedly makes peace with flea-bitten hotels, fly-bitten chicken, and futility-bitten wastelands.

Most poignant of all is the portrait of a great travel writer, to my mind the greatest American travel writer of our time, confronting the continent that first inspired him and the daunting realities of the place it has become, and simultaneously confronting the equally daunting realities of the man he has become, the impediments and diminishments that age confers, and the possibility that this might be his farewell to Africa, the place that launched his career as a traveler and as a writer.

All these could conspire to make The Last Train to Zona Verde a book about limits.

But to the contrary, through his consummate skill as a story-spinner of people and place, his all-pervading spirit of adventure, his thirst for knowledge and connection, his determination in the face of adversity, and his ultimate understanding that sometimes enough is enough, Theroux creates a moving testament to the completion and contentment that we all can find within a lifetime of limits—and that this incomplete, discontented African odyssey unexpectedly bestows.

Don George is an editor at large at National Geographic Traveler magazine and has edited several travel-writing anthologies, including his latest, Better Than Fiction. Follow his story on Twitter @don_george.

Have you read any great new travel books lately? Share your recommendations with the Intelligent Travel community by leaving a comment or using the #TripLit hashtag on Twitter or Google+.

While Greece may be in the headlines these days for its economic woes and social unrest, when I think of Greece, I picture crystalline sunlight on a landscape of rock, sea, sand, and tree; bone-white ruins of layered history; and bright-eyed, big-living people.

That’s the Greece I fell in love with when I lived there for a year in the 1970s. American professor and poet Christopher Bakken fell in love with this same Greece when he lived there in the early 1990s, and he brings its characteristics to life in his delightful new book. 

Bakken moved to Greece to teach in Thessaloniki, its second largest city, for two years. After that initial visit, he returned so frequently that after two decades, Greece has become his second home. His intent in this new book is to celebrate that home through its cuisine. As he writes, “Almost everything I have learned about Greece, I have learned at the table. The country’s history is written in the elements of its cuisine: olives, bread, fish, and cheese.”

The result is an exuberant exploration of Greece’s defining riches. On the island of Thasos, Bakken harvests olives and grapes and goes fishing for tasty barbounia; he learns the yeasty art of bread-making on Crete, savors the smelly secrets of cheese on Naxos, chases goats on Chios and chickpeas on Serifos, and exults in creamy honey on Kythira—and makes an assault on Mount Olympus for good measure.

Bakken’s culinary quest leads him deep into the heart of the countryside and of the country people. Along the way we meet an endearing cast of characters, including the irrepressibly energetic Tasos of Thasos, “restaurateur, farmer, shepherd, octopus fisherman, rabbit hunter, traditional dancer, and wedding singer.”

We also learn fascinating snippets, such as the fact that on Crete, “on one Saturday each spring all the bakers take their profane slurries of water and flour to church to be sprinkled with holy water and blessed by the priest.”

And at a singularly Greek party on Thasos, we are taught the true meaning of kefi, which, Bakken writes, “refers to that moment when the party turns ecstatic, when individual feelings are subsumed into the group’s euphoria. You know it’s kicked in when someone is spontaneously moved to dance a zeibekiko, an improvised solo that is as much flying as dancing.”

At moments in this memory-stoking account, my soul was doing its own zeibekiko.

Don George is an editor at large at National Geographic Traveler magazine and has edited several travel-writing anthologies, including his latest, Better Than Fiction. Follow his story on Twitter @don_george.

Have you read any great new travel books lately? Share your recommendations with the Intelligent Travel community by leaving a comment or using the #TripLit hashtag on Twitter or Google+.

In recent years the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, has gained a certain cachet. Books have been written on it; movies have been made about it. Almost invariably, the focus of these accounts has been the Spanish portion of the pilgrimage, culminating with arrival at the cathedral in Santiago itself.

In his evocative and moving new account, David Downie and his wife, photographer Alison Harris, trace this venerable pilgrims’ trail as well, but only in the French portion, ending their journey when they reach the border with Spain.

Downie’s quest is unconventional in tone and spirit as well as route. He refuses to label himself a pilgrim, and his goal is as much historical and cultural as it is spiritual.

“Practically speaking,” he writes, “I planned to follow the 2,000-year-old Via Agrippa and pre-Roman, Gallic footpaths, routes predating Christianity, safe in the knowledge that, unbeknownst to most pilgrims, they underlie the Way of Saint James just as surely as Paganism underlies Roman Catholicism…. Forget Santiago de Compostela, I told myself; if I could make it across France, nothing could stop me from one day hiking across the Alps into Italy and down the boot to Rome.”

A lively wordsmith who has been based in Paris for two decades, Downie brings a deep and impassioned knowledge of French history, culture, and language to this pilgrimage. He also brings something more, a longing that he himself can’t pin down at the beginning.

As the duo walk from Vézelay to Solutré, they pass through a few large towns, such as Beaune and Cluny, but for the most part their path winds through bucolic landscapes and half-forgotten villages where the past—manifest in crumbling churches and stark war memorials—seems more vibrant than the present.

Along the way, they encounter a memorable succession of taciturn, deep-rooted local farmers and gregarious, transplanted-from-Paris innkeepers. They also encounter the multi-layered, interweaving pathways of French history, commerce, religion, and spirituality—and manage to tuck in a few sumptuous celebrations of French food and wine, too.

The result is an extraordinary account that illuminates France past and present and casts a light on something even greater: the truth that, however we choose to label our journey, we are all pilgrims on a common quest, to answer why we wander life’s question-paved path.

Don George is an editor at large at National Geographic Traveler magazine and has edited several travel-writing anthologies, including his latest, Better Than Fiction. Follow his story on Twitter @don_george.

Have you read any great new travel books lately? Share your recommendations with the Intelligent Travel community by leaving a comment or using the #TripLit hashtag on Twitter or Google+.

India is often described as a country that either seduces or repels visitors; no one returns feeling indifferent about the place. But what happens when you fall in love with an Indian before you’ve ever met India? And what happens when that Indian brings you back to his ancestral home — and it turns out that he’s a prince with a 100-room palace?

That’s the tantalizing premise at the heart of Alison Singh Gee’s heart-warming and eye-opening debut memoir. Gee is a social-butterflying, celebrity-profiling magazine journalist based in Hong Kong when she meets a thoughtful Indian journalist named Ajay Singh at an international conference. Where the Peacocks Sing recounts the cross-cultural challenges and revelations that arise as their romance blossoms, twining from Gee’s middle-class Chinese-American roots in suburban Los Angeles to the now-crumbling estate in rural India where Singh’s own aristocratic past plunges deep.

Gee describes high-flying expat Hong Kong—tea at the Peninsula, weekends in Bali, clubbing in Lan Kwai Fong — then immerses us in the disorientingly different world of Singh’s India. His family palace is five hard hours east of Delhi, at the end of a road that is paved not with gold but “rocks, oxen poop and potholes the size of small craters.” Yet when she arrives, Gee discovers an enchanting landscape of mango trees, wheat fields, water buffalo, and bougainvillea, and a rambling mansion with a history as rich as its present is problematic.

As her relationship deepens, Gee evokes India with an insider’s understanding. She captures the heartfelt art of cooking — “you can taste a family’s entire legacy in one paratha” pancake, she writes — and the land’s defining smells: cardamom and cumin, “night-blooming jasmine, blue pines and the scent of a kerosene fire.” She evokes the slowing stretch of time in the Indian countryside, and illuminates the contradictions that confound so many travelers, such as the relationship between master and servant.

At one point in their emotional odyssey, Ajay says, “The only way to understand India is to surrender unconditionally.” Gee’s own surrender here is a revealing triumph.

New Book Roundups:

• Two from the British Isles

With titles like “Occult London,” “White Hair Right Now: Styling the London Man,” and “Rats with Wings: London’s Battle with Animals,” the essays in London from Punk to Blair detail the modern-day issues affecting this ancient city. In On Glasgow and Edinburgh, Robert Crawford recalls the roots of the 300-year-old rivalry between Scotland’s two largest cities and argues, using landmarks and histories, that their competitive relationship has helped their growth and Scotland’s.

• Just in Time for Valentine’s Day

In All This Talk of Love, Christopher Castellani presents the Grasso family — Italian immigrants with a deep and storied past in the village of Santa Cecilia. Their daughter, American-born Prima, raised on stories of the old country, resolves to take her aging parents back again — and the ensuing adventure almost tears the family apart. An urbanite with a fear of deep water and a tendency toward seasickness, Torre DeRoche is about to lose her newfound love, Ivan, as he plans to set off on a sailing adventure. At the last minute she decides to join him, boarding his leaky sailboat for a year-long voyage that she describes in her memoir Love with a Chance of Drowning.

• Predators and Place

In Never Look a Polar Bear in the Eye, Zac Unger travels to Churchill, Manitoba, the “Polar Bear Capital of the World,” to find the real story behind an animal that many hold up as a symbol for our changing planet. In Wolves in the Land of Salmon, David Moskowitz follows these most controversial of animals through the wilds of the Cascade Range and up into British Columbia, richly evoking their habitat and complex nature.

• One Last Thing: First Contact

Every once in a while a book comes along that rekindles the Indiana Jones embers in my soul. One such tome is Napoleon A. Chagnon’s Noble Savages, which describes the noted anthropologist’s adventures among the Yanomamö Indians of the Amazon Basin. The Yanomamö are a textbook tribe today, but when Chagnon first settled with them in 1964, they were living in almost complete isolation from the outside world. Chagnon’s detailed account machetes the mythical glamour of living in primitive conditions for extended periods of time, but at the same time, it offers a fascinating portrait of the evolution of a wild tribe within our own time, and it embodies the passion of the scientist who observes and absorbs firsthand, and who enlarges our knowledge of the world, from the vine-latticed forests of South America to the ivy-clad jungles of academia.

Don George is an editor at large at National Geographic Traveler magazine and has edited several travel-writing anthologies, including his latest, Better Than Fiction. Follow his story on Twitter @don_george.

Do you have any recommendations for great travel reads? Share them with @NatGeoTraveler on Twitter by using the #TripLit hashtag.