Timothy Jacobson at The New Criterion:
One sort of travel writing we read merely for easy information about a place and its vendors. Another sort we read for vicarious experience because we are all ignorant of so much. trips was the latter sort, and it was a sadly short trip. Even today, when more people seem to be going everywhere all the time, more people yet armchair travel from home. And, I speculate, fewer and fewer of them actually read in that armchair. As countless television shows attest, travel, like cooking, has proven a natural fit for the video age. But there has been a loss here. Watching the screen requires nothing of us but our eyeballs and a half hour of our time during which we can also be doing something else—low investment, low reward. Reading about travel and faraway places, meanwhile, takes at least a modicum of intellectual effort and rewards us in proportion to our preparation and desire to know. “He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him,” wrote Samuel Johnson back in the eighteenth century when “the Indies” evoked the height of exoticism. (Johnson obviously did not know about Little Rock.) He went on: “So it is with traveling; a man must carry knowledge with him if he would bring home knowledge.” Two hundred years later, in the last pre-digital moment before travel became further commodified and mostly digitized, trips tried to show us the world, fresh and filled with wealth, through great writing and design, with wonder, not apology. It might have been too late even in 1988, but it was a noble attempt. I miss the second issue.
more here.