Without Reservations (42 page)

In London, a friend presents Steinbach with
The Journey’s Echo
, by Freya Stark, the intrepid British wanderer who left her comfortable life in Italy to traverse the Middle East, alone, from Persia to Yemen. Stark’s own chronicles of her travels can be found in her landmark travelogues,
The Valleys of the Assassins
and
The Southern Gates of Arabia: A Journey in the Hadhramaut.
Jane Fletcher Geniesse’s critical yet sensitive biography of the remarkable and revolutionary traveler,
Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark
, is one of the most recent and insightful biographies of Steinbach’s muse to date.

Steinbach also seems to acknowledge a debt of gratitude and admiration to E. B. White, an author known best for his children’s books,
Charlotte’s Web
and
Stuart Little
, and one to whom she owes some element of her craft. In more than fifty years of writing for
The New Yorker
, White honed his style to one described by
The Washington Post
as “creative, humane, graceful.” His essays, collected in
The Essays of E. B. White
, and the portrait he draws of one of the world’s most exciting cities in
Here Is New York
, will delight any reader who is
searching for a backdrop to Steinbach’s perceptive, elegant, journalistic prose.

Of course, diving headfirst into the vast wealth of travel literature is another option for Steinbach’s “curious and courageous reader.” In this case, it would seem only appropriate to begin with Hemingway’s
A Moveable Feast
, his slender memoir that is as much about Paris in the 1920s as it is about the Americans who encounter it.

A more contemporary piece of travel writing, Frances Mayes’s
Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy
weaves together one woman’s story of leaving the familiarity of her home in California to renovate a Tuscan villa. Through the inclusion of her own journal entries, local recipes, and reflections on the Italian countryside as a food writer and journalist, Mayes provides another perspective on the essence of northern Italy as seen through the eyes of an awed and inspired traveler.