Continental Drifter: Dispatches from the Uttermost Parts of the Earth

Michael McRae confesses to owning an insatiable appetite for roads less traveled, an appetite born of "a nomadic upbringing as a military brat, my romanticism, and the counterculture ethic of the sixties." His forays to out-of-the-way corners of Africa, Asia, and South America have yielded this entertaining collection of nature-travel journalism. One moment finds him inside the welcome sanctuary of the writer Isak Dinesen's Kenyan plantation, quarters that are quite suddenly overrun by flashbulb-snapping American visitors. Next, he's in Bwindi, Uganda, a mountain reserve also called The Impenetrable Forest that, like all tropical woodlands, is imperiled by international development. For my money, the best piece in the book is "Prisoners of Zuulchin," a humorous but never patronizing recollection of a sometimes-hellish excursion into the Gobi Desert under the care of Mongolia's state travel bureau.