The Travel Blog

Decoding Air Travel is the most comprehensive and insightful work to date on the intricacies of the modern air travel system from a customer perspective, and the most effective tool for making travel more affordable, convenient, comfortable and fun. It's the only book that can teach you how to save hundreds -- even thousands -- of dollars per ticket by building your own airfare, how to fly in Business and First Class for the price of coach, and how to enjoy various travel luxuries at no additional cost. The book has two goals: Improving your travel life and saving you lots of money. It seeks to achieve those goals by helping you become a knowledgeable, smart and sophisticated traveler who has mastered an increasingly complex and frustrating system and can work it to his or her advantage. For more details, visit the book's website: DecodingAirTravel.com.

Price: $22.48  $32.48

With plenty of sunscreen and a cold beer swaddled in his sleeping bag, writer and botanist Jim Malusa bicycled alone to the lowest point on each of six continents, a six-year series of “anti-expeditions” to the “anti-summits.” His journeys took him to Lake Eyre in the arid heart of Australia, along Moses’ route to the Dead Sea, and from Moscow to the Caspian Sea. He pedaled across the Andes to Patagonia, around tiny Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, and from Tucson to Death Valley. With a scientist’s eye, he vividly observes local landscapes and creatures. As a lone man, he is overfed by grandmothers, courted by ladies of the night in Volgograd, invited into a mosque by Africa’s most feared tribe, chased by sandstorms and hurricanes — yet Malusa keeps riding. His reward: the deep silence of the world’s great depressions. A large-hearted narrative of what happens when a friendly, perceptive American puts himself at the mercy of strange landscapes and their denizens, Into Thick Air presents one of the most talented new voices in contemporary travel writing.

Price: $0.71  $10.71

Betty in the Sky with a Suitcase is a wildly popular podcast about airline travel by real life flight attendant Betty, who shares funny stories from pilots, flight controllers, ground crew, passengers, and fellow flight attendants and is listened to by hundreds of thousands of Betty fans around the world. Now, by popular demand, here is the best of Betty in a book in what may be the world's first podcast-turned-book, or pook. It's a wonderful way to be entertained in the airport, on a plane, at home, and anywhere you want a good laugh.

Price: $5.22  $15.22

Paul Theroux may be pompous, self-important, cynical, and grumpy. He may even be, as accused by a heckler in Australia, "a wanker." So what? The man is prolific--having penned 36 books--and when he's inspired, his insights and sparkling writing are so startling that it's easy to forgive him for his occasional crankiness. Besides, as he reminds readers frequently, he is a man who takes pen to paper for a living; as the title essay points out: "Normal, happy, well-balanced individuals seldom become imaginative writers...." In Fresh Air Fiend, Theroux's pen serves him well with astute, lively pieces that stray far beyond simple "travel essays" and reveal his self-inflicted lifestyle of compulsive travel, writing, and alienation. In this collection--containing mostly previously published magazine pieces written over the past 15 years--there's a strong autobiographical streak, as well as historical perspectives and a sardonic view on aging. "One of the more bewildering aspects of growing older," he writes in "'Memory and Creation,'" "is that people constantly remind you of things that never happened." Now nearly 60, Theroux has lived a rich, varied life: the book jumps from post-Mao China and years spent as an Africa-based Peace Corps volunteer in the '60s to turtle watching in Hawaii and kayaking on Cape Cod; the jumbled collection even includes pieces on other travel writers (Bruce Chatwin, Graham Greene, and William Least Heat-Moon) and the film adaptation of his novel The Mosquito Coast. A chronic sense of aloneness permeates all these pieces--be it the lost traveler paddling through fog, the lone writer living without a phone, or the hermetic trekker who can't speak the native language. Most touching: a short sketch of a road trip when he's lost, his wife is anxious, and the children are fighting; Theroux doesn't want the moment to end and soon enough he returns to his self-imposed alienation. It's that perpetual sense of loneliness and not fitting in that seems to motivate Theroux in many of these essays. Theroux may be getting older, even nostalgic, but as these vibrant essays show, he sure isn't getting stale. --Melissa Rossi

Price: $2.57  $12.57