Michael Shapiro

About Michael Shapiro

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So far Michael Shapiro has created 6 blog entries.

Eric Newby: Through Love and War

An interview with Eric Newby at his home in Guildford, England in 2004, excerpted from A Sense of Place
Eric Newby’s life story reads like a Hollywood script. After a comfortable, middle-class English upbringing, Newby left home at eighteen to join the crew of one of the world’s last commercial sailing ships, the Moshulu, which

Beneath the Rim

by Michael Shapiro

A journey down the Colorado River with Captain John Wesley Powell.

Our boats are four in number. Three are built of oak, stanch and firm (with) water-tight cabins.… These will buoy the boats should the waves roll them over in rough water. The fourth is made of pine…built for fast rowing.… We take

Beijing Hostage

Michael Shapiro discovers it's hard to know if he was conned.

The Longest Day

by Michael Shapiro
The grip of love reaches through time.As a planeload of people stared at their tiny seat-back screens, I raised the cover of the oval window and witnessed my second dawn of the day. The orange-pink light illuminated the crystalline snow below that blanketed Baffin Island like diamond dust with a purity that took

Recent Books

The Soul of a Great Traveler

Since 2006 the editors of Travelers’ Tales have run a writing competition to find the best travel story of the year: The Solas Awards. Over those years, thousands of stories have come across their desks, from writers famous and unknown, covering all corners of the globe with stories of adventure and discovery, love and loss, humor and absurdity, grief and joy. In this collection appear all of the top prize winners of the first ten years, stories that bring readers along for journeys that are inspiring, uplifting, and, very often, transformative. These tales are powerful, moving testaments to the richness of our world, its cultures, people, and places.

The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 11

The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 11 presents stimulating, inspiring, and uplifting adventures from women who have traveled to the ends of the earth to discover new places, peoples, and facets of themselves. The common threads connecting these stories are a female perspective and fresh, compelling storytelling to make the reader laugh, weep, wish she were there, or be glad she wasn’t.

The 31 true travel stories in this year’s collection are, as always, wildly diverse in theme and location. They tell of places like California and Cuba, Switzerland and Singapore, Iran and Iceland, Montana and Mexico and Mongolia and Mali, our own back yards and some of the farthest, most extreme corners of the world. They are the personal stories we can’t help but collect when we travel, stories of reaching out to embrace the unfamiliar and creating cross-cultural connections while learning more about ourselves.

The Best Travel Writing, Volume 11

besttravel-v11_high2-webCELEBRATING GREAT TRAVEL WRITING

Travelers’ Tales publishes books about the world and life-changing experiences that happen on the road. The Best Travel Writing, Volume 11 is our latest collection of great stories guaranteed to ignite your wanderlust.

Includes Grand Prize Winners, Solas Awards

Introduction by Rolf Potts

The Way of Wanderlust

WOW_front-cover Explore the World with a Legendary Travel Writer

Don George has been captivating readers with chronicles of his wandering adventures for four decades. Here you’ll find his best stories and essays, from climbing Kilimanjaro and contemplating the magic of Uluru to exploring the jungles of Cambodia and the backcountry temples of Shikoku. Let Don open your eyes to the wonders of the world as he falls in love in Greece, encounters whales in Mexico and elephants in East Africa, makes roof tiles in Peru, dances like a South Seas warrior on Aitutaki, and much more.

With a Foreword by Pico Iyer.

The Best Travel Writing, Volume 10

The-Best-Travel Writing-Volume-10CELEBRATING GREAT TRAVEL WRITING

Travelers’ Tales publishes books about the world and life-changing experiences that happen on the road. The Best Travel Writing, Volume 10 is our latest collection of great stories guaranteed to ignite your wanderlust.

Includes Grand Prize Winners of the Solas Awards.

The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 10

bwtwv10_s“Tell me,” poet Mary Oliver once wrote, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Oliver’s quote opens the The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 10: True Stories from Around the World. And to answer the question, thirty celebrated and emerging writers invite you to ride shotgun as they travel the globe to discover new places, people, and facets of themselves. The essays are as diverse as the destinations, the common thread being fresh, compelling storytelling that will make you laugh, weep, wish you were there, or thank your lucky stars you weren’t. The Best Women’s Travel Writing speaks to the reasons why we travel—and how travel changes our lives.

Marco Polo Didn’t Go There

apolo

Rolf Potts has taken his keen postmodern travel sensibility into the far reaches of five continents as a travel writer for such prestigious publications as National Geographic Traveler, Salon.com, and The New York Times Magazine. This book documents his boldest, funniest, and most revealing journeys—from getting stranded without water in the Libyan Desert, to crashing the set of a Leonardo DiCaprio movie in Thailand, to learning the secrets of Tantric sex in a dubious Indian ashram.

Marco Polo Didn’t Go There is more than just an entertaining journey into fascinating corners of the world. It is a unique window into travel writing, with each chapter containing a “commentary track”—humorous endnotes that reveal the ragged edges behind the experience and creation of each tale. Offbeat and insightful, this book is an engrossing read for students of travel writing as well as armchair wanderers.

The Best Travel Writing, Volume 9

bestv9CELEBRATING GREAT TRAVEL WRITING

Travelers’ Tales publishes books about the world and life-changing experiences that happen on the road. The Best Travel Writing, Volume 9 is our latest annual collection of great stories guaranteed to ignite your wanderlust.

The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 8

bwtw2012_sIncludes stories by Susan Orlean, Ann Hood, and Laura Fraser
Since the publication of A Woman’s World in 1995, Travelers’ Tales has been publishing award-winning books by and for women. We continue this tradition with The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 8, the latest collection in our annual series guaranteed to inspire women to take their first trip—or to continue exploring the world with wit, soul, and verve, as so many adventurous women do each and every day.

Kin to the Wind

kin-to-the-wind“A most diverting and picaresque tale, one that reads like a sentimental journey of a hundred years ago.”
—the late Norman Cousins

In the early 1960s, a young, self-taught musician set out to travel the world with no money, equipped only with his guitar, his voice, and his belief in the goodness of people. Along the way, blown by the winds of fortune, guided by instinct, he played for kings and paupers, soldiers and servants, artists and terrorists. His name is Moro Buddy Bohn, and his unlikely and powerful story will uplift you and inspire you to live the life you want.

His audiences have included Queen Elizabeth II of England, King Frederick IX of Denmark, Pablo Picasso …