Karen Gershowitz suffers from the only traveler’s disease it’s fun to have—and be around: the compulsion toward travel itself. The author of this wonderful book brings us with her on a staggering variety of journeys, trekking through jungles and deserts, climbing Kilimanjaro, exploring great cities and obscure villages across the world. The book is full of terrific stories, revealing with richness and particularity not just places and people, but the traveler herself—complicated and often conflicted, comforted by certain traveling companions and people met on the road, driven to distraction by others, but never daunted, never able to resist the pull of another journey. Beginning with jammed family car trips and terrifying childhood subway rides commuting to school, the book ends with the surreal experience of traveling home to New York through nearly empty airports and on nearly empty planes as the pandemic settles over the planet. This book was a delight to me during these times of shutdown and is an inspiration for the times to come.
