Around the World in Fifty Years

“All my life I have disagreed with David Henry Thoreau: Unlike him, I definitely think it is “worthwhile to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.” Thus begins writer Elayne Clift’s 13th book, Around the World in Fifty Years: Travel Tales of a Not So Innocent Abroad, a collection of selected stories about her global travels, told in prose and poetry. Clift has visited almost 100 countries on every continent for work and pleasure. Her travel memoir shares personal stories, vignettes, photographs, and postscripts that range from poignant to hilarious. There are scenes from Indian railway stations to rural Romanian villages. Along the way readers meet the people who made her travel special, ranging from a professor in Jordan to a desert driver in Dubai to an elderly artist in France. One reviewer has called the book “a treasure of armchair travel.”