BEDSIDE TABLE
“Good travel writing should read like iction—not just a day-to-day chronology of what happened. Until A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958), by English writer Eric Newby, the genre was serious and stufy. But
Newby’s book, prefaced by Evelyn Waugh, was hilarious—it set a new bar. Newby was a prisoner of war in Italy during World War II. Afterward, he spent a decade working in fashion in London, then decided to go exploring. He sent a cable to a friend in Rio de Janeiro, the British diplomat Hugh Carless, and proposed that they be the irst to climb the glacial mountain of Mir Samir. At the time, Afghanistan was one of the more developed nations in Asia, and even though the mountains were quite wild and tribal, there was peace.