French Ghosts, Russian Nights, and American Outlaws

This collection of pieces by Spano charts her travels and tells her stories. There are vignettes about her adventures squeezing through slot canyons in the wilds of southern Utah, fly-fishing for bonefish on a sunstruck bay in the Yucatan, sleeping on ice in Sweden, and following a bumpy backpacker trail into the Indian Himalayas.

Other chapters describe magical trips when all the variables?luck, mood, even weather?conspired to make a place unforgettable, or when she sought the kind of enlightenment only travel can provide by following in the footsteps of luminaries such as Federico Fellini, Mary Queen of Scots, and Chairman Mao.

And, finally, there are stories about travel itself: how it became Susan's passion and calling; the adventure of moving abroad, a last resort for the incurably restless; and her philosophy of travel and life: Go forth and find meaning. Take a condemned cable car over the Yangtze River or a shared taxi over the Andes with a leaking gas tank and chain-smoking driver; eat oysters and drink martinis wherever you can; and, as often as possible, come home with a tan.

Susan Spano has journeyed the world reporting on culture, nature, and the curiosities of humankind. She launched the still-running ?Frugal Traveler” column for the New York Times, and later joined the staff of the Los Angeles Times, which sent her to the City of Light from 2003 to 2006 to start the popular travel blog ?Postcards from Paris.” She spent six months in Beijing studying Mandarin and researching stories in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics before moving to Rome?her favorite foreign posting?where she wrote about everything Italian, from Caravaggio to mozzarella. Her work has appeared in the Financial Times, Chicago Tribune, Smithsonian, National Geographic Traveler and Redbook; she is the co-author of Women on Divorce: A Bedside Companion and Men on Divorce: The Other Side of the Story.