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Grove Koger has written the kind of book I would like to write.  With When the Going Was Good:  A Guide to the 99 Best Narratives of Travel, Exploration, and Adventure, Koger has finally done in book form for travel narratives what he did for horror and spy novels in Library Journal.[1]  

Unlike the British Blue Guides, the green French Michelins, and the red German Baedekers that figure so prominently in the novels of E. M. Forster and their Merchant Ivory dramatizations, travel narratives give the traveler’s impressions—that travel guides cannot give—of the people, places, and things that are the sources of the joys, as well as frustrations, of traveling.  When the Going Was Good, the title taken from Evelyn Waugh’s (author of Brideshead Revisited) 1946 anthology of previously published narratives, is an annotated bibliography of the 99 travel narratives, domestic and international, Koger thinks best.  Each entry includes the author’s name and years of birth and death, the original edition’s title and imprint, the narrative’s geographical setting, a summary of the narrative, its later editions, and bibliographies of similar works, of other works by the author, and of biographical and critical works about the author.  When the Going Was Good is the best catalog of travel narratives that I have seen, and it will be indispensable in libraries with active reader’s advisory services.  The best compliment, however, I can pay is to say that When the Going Was Good will keep me in my armchair for a very long time.

Although others will disagree with his selection, Koger’s 99 well represent the globe.  Nevertheless, Koger omits significant narratives that almost certainly should be included in any such bibliography, such as Fanny Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans, Charles Dickens’s American Notes, Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies, and Henry James’s The American Scene.  (An interesting and significant sub-genre of the travel narrative is that written by the novelist.  Koger could therefore have thus fruitfully categorized his narratives.)  Likewise, his inclusion of such “broadly interpreted” narratives of exploration and adventure (p. vii) as Out of Africa, Christ Stopped at Eboli, and A Year in Provence would also justify inclusion of such “spiritual journeys” as Saint Thérèse of Lisieux’s Story of a Soul (L’Histoire d’une Ame), Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness, and Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, among many other such autobiographies.  Some of the numerous captivity and slave narratives, such as those by Mary Rowlandson and by Olaudah Equiano, would also thereby merit inclusion.

Moreover, although doing so would, indeed, more rapidly age the book, Koger could have mentioned which editions are still in print for those eager to buy their own copies, as well as which were published in series, such as the University of Oklahoma’s American Exploration and Travel Series, the Armchair Traveller Series of Paragon House, and the National Geographic Adventure Classics, for those wanting to read similar narratives.  He does, however, mention the applicable four British and two American travel-narrative volumes of the superlative series Dictionary of Literary Biography.

A number of spelling and punctuation errors, however, that should have been caught before book went to press—the transposition of the “l” and “a” in “islands” in the tenth line of p. 70, the omission of the apostrophes in “Marco’s” and “Niccolo’s” in the sixth and eighth lines from the bottom of p. 92, and the inconsistent use throughout of the comma before the last element in a series of three or more, for example—will annoy readers.  (Alas, library catalogers sometimes review books.)

Moreover, the price for this small paperback will dissuade some, particularly individuals and small public and school libraries with tight budgets.  I therefore recommend When the Going Was Good for large public and academic libraries.