Getting Around

Dr. X posts this from the Minnetonka Clinic for Pretty Anxious People of Northern European Descent:

"I'm in recovery mode fro m my last business trip. I'm officially sick of airports.

"In the car today my wife named all 50 states. I'm fuzzy on Kansas and Oklahoma. I have specific recollections of having been in all the others.

"When we got home I played the kids this fine Youtube photomontage set to Johnny Cash's 'I've Been Everywhere', and it was a big hit.

"But I'm a piker compared to Vasco de Gama, who sailed across 6,000 miles of open water, or Juan Sebastian Elcano, who proved you could sail all the way around the world, returning to praise, honors, and a chorus of whispered 'so what's?

"Or so says Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, in his magnificent history of exploration, Pathfinders. It is not possible to list all the virtues of the book - they leap from every page. It is physically beautiful (including unique color maps from these guys), and the text is scholarly but entertaining. Fernandez-Armesto is particularly good about telling you when the evidence is thin and when it is strong, and uses strong academic research as the basis for coherent arguments about the big picture.

"You should get this book, and it's worth the extra bucks to get the hardcover edition."