I recently finished Tim Hannigan's The Travel Writing Tribe. He approaches travel writing as both a thoughtful critic and a clear-eyed enthusiast, and through his wide reading – not just of travel literature but also academic studies of it – and his penetrating interviews with a diverse group of practitioners, he shows how this sometimes disparaged genre sparkles and illuminates by borrowing elements from all of the others. It is a scholarly work written for a general audience - the first for travel writing since Abroad in 1980 - but unlike Paul Fussell, Hannigan focuses on the contemporary scene. So it's not just a brilliant book but also a hopeful one.
