lable at ScienceDirect

Tourism Management 48 (2015) 318

Contents lists avai

Tourism Management

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate/ tourman

Book Review

Explorer Travellers and Adventure Tourism, Jennifer Laing,Warwick Frost. Channel View Publications (2014). 263 pp. (fig-ures, bibliography, index), Hb. US$159.95 ISBN 9781845414580,Pbk. US$49.95 ISBN 9781845414573. http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Laing and Frost begin the book by describing 18-year-old PatrickLeigh Fermor's 1933 walking trip from London to Constantinople:

Fermor is a pioneer, a path-finder. He is an example of a smallgroup of elite travellers undertaking adventurous travel. They gowhere no-one has been before, at least where they imagine no-one has been. Their accounts e whether through books, tele-vision or increasingly the internet and other new media e openup new places and experiences, inspiring others to follow.Whether through reading them directly or picking up parts oftheir stories second hand, others are stimulated to try and havesimilar travels and adventures and push their own boundaries.(p. 3)

The book's aim is “to examine this phenomenon of travel basedon the desire for adventure and the need to explore” particularlythose “elite travellers who set out to be first and provide inspirationfor later flows of tourists” (p. 3).

The worlds and experiences of explorer travellers are examinedthrough personal stories recounted in first-hand accounts e storytelling seeming to be one of the defining characteristics of explorertravellers. Twomajor groups of stories are the basis for the book: 39semi-structured long interviews conducted with modern-day ex-plorer travellers from around the world; and published explorerand traveller accounts, both factual and fictional, mainly beginningwith the 19th Century. Laing and Frost develop a general anddescriptive (as opposed to analytical and prescriptive) typology ofexplorer travellers: official expeditions, unofficial discovery expedi-tions, conquerors, the personal quest, change of life, the re-enactment, quirky or comedic, the independent traveller, and thecommercial expedition. They identify nine themes in examiningthe accounts: explorer myth, new areas of travel, the extreme intravel, travel as transformative, a wide range of influences, growingnumbers and wider geographic spread, cultural biases, the role oftranslation, and the question of the existence of an explorer gene.

The book has four parts. The first (The Myth of the Explorer) isbased on Campbell's argument that many cultures around the

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2014.12.0030261-5177

world had common myths about a hero's journey with a similarstructure that was often applied in modern story-telling. Fourchapters focus on the call to adventure, preparation and departure,the journey, and the return. As occurs in all of the chapters in allfour parts, the stories of a wide range of travellers is examinedwith past accounts including the famous (and the infamous) andthe obscure; the current interviews are used to mirror the paststories and bring in the similarities over time. Some of the betterknown travellers include Peter Hillary (son of Edmund Hillary),Ranulph Fiennes, Robert Falcon Scott, Roald Amundsen, ErnestShacleton, astronaut Harrison Schmidt, and Eric Newby.

The second part (Imagining Explorers) examines exploration re-imagined through three chapters on fiction, desert island cast-aways, and re-enactments. The cast of characters includes JulesVerne, Henry Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, Groucho Marx(no, that is not a typographical error), Agatha Christie, Joseph Con-rad, Daniel Defoe, J. M. Barrie, William Golding, and Yann Martel.

Part 3 (Tourists at Play) focuses on modern tourism throughchapters on crossing borders and safaris. Among the long list oftravellers are Mountain Men re-enactors, Karen Blixen, RobynDavidson, Theodore Roosevelt, Jon Krakauer, and voluntourists.

The final part (The Future) consists of two chapters: one exam-ines how future (particularly commercial) trips to Mars might beconducted and the other critiques the experience economy. Thestory-tellers include H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, OrsonWelles, Douglas Adams, Jane Fonda (again, not a typo), Burt Rutan,Richard Branson, Thor Heyerdahl, Woody Allen (again …), pilgrimson the Camino Santiago, and food explorers.

The purpose of this review is to give the potential reader a briefsense of the range of issues and of travellers discussed so brilliantlyin this book. It would make a fine addition to the academic litera-ture in any tourism library, personal or institutional. And it is, quitesimply, a good read.

Paul F. WilkinsonFaculty of Environmental Studies,

York University,Toronto, Ontario,Canada, M3J 1P3

E-mail address: eswilkin@yorku.ca.

4 December 2014