Text size:

Sightseeing from the seat of an airplane

SPENCER RUMSEY | spencer.rumsey@newsday.com

December 9, 2007

"America From the Air: A Guide to the Landscape Along Your Route," by Daniel Mathews and James S. Jackson (Houghton Mifflin, $18.95)

Too bad Orville Wright had other things on his mind or he might have appreciated the view a bit more during his time aloft. These days, lucky plane passengers with a window seat have plenty of time to appreciate the scenery (once they take off, that is) but they may not be able to put what they see in perspective. Farms, cities, hills, rivers, highways and lakes can all be a mishmash from a few thousand feet up. This 353-page colorful guidebook ingeniously lays out the countryside.

Daniel Mathews is author of two natural history books, and James S. Jackson is a geologist and adjunct professor of geology at Portland State University. What they've done here is combine their talents with an appreciation of history, science and topology that will surely engage the most frequent flier. The book covers 14 flight corridors (military airspace is excluded) involving nearly 60 of the most heavily traveled city pairings in the United States, with an index to help you navigate. (The book comes with a CD, too, for your laptop convenience.)

You can follow your route with an aerial photo, an accompanying essay and captions identifying key landmarks or significant geological features. There's so much to learn, you might not care to land. For instance, when you take off from New York heading west, the first hills you see are the Watchung Mountains in New Jersey, which were created by lava flows when the supercontinent Gondwanaland started to break up hundreds of millions of years ago. That will take your mind off the Jets at the Meadowlands.

"Transit Maps of the World," written and compiled by Mark Ovenden, edited by Mike Ashworth (Penguin Books, $25)

Remember the old story from World War II about the lost Gurkha soldier who found his way out of the Burmese jungle with a map of the London Underground? Apocryphal? Maybe, but anything seems possible with this amazing travel book in your hands.

Right on the frontispiece is what purports to be a subway map linking Vancouver and Auckland with stops at Newark and Prague, changing at Shanghai and Taipei - done in the same style as the classic diagram of the Tube by Harry Beck. You don't need a MetroCard to get lost in the book's 144 pages and 660 full-color images, just curiosity. The publisher boasts that this collection contains the current and historic maps of every rapid-transit system on Earth, ranging from the 1840 original done for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to a 2007 map of Tokyo that makes a PC board look simple by comparison.

The smart look of this book makes it an impressive achievement. The colorful utilitarian graphics shown by these diverse maps are a tribute to human ingenuity. I was truly transported.

"Biting the Wax Tadpole," by Elizabeth Little (Melville House, $21.95)

Elizabeth Little, a travel writer and a former editor of "Let's Go: China," admits that "languages are, without question, the great compulsion of my life." Before she went to China, she'd studied Mandarin for a year - two hours a day, five days a week. But once in the field, she realized she hadn't mastered the tonality at all and the frustration grew.

After a month on the road compiling information for a guide book, she found herself desperate and hungry at a small restaurant in Nanchang, a large city in southwestern China far from tourist hot spots. After making a sound as if she'd been "punched in the stomach," she knew she'd finally been understood when a waitress called out to another: "The huge foreigner wants a menu!" Success tasted sweet.

The title of this quirky, funny, intelligent little book (184 pages, complete with amusing illustrations) comes from Chinese shopkeepers' early attempts to find a phonetic equivalent for Coca-Cola. If you said you wanted a bottle of "bite the wax tadpole," you got a Coke. As you'd expect from someone who spends her weekends "digging through Romanian, Mongolian, Cree," Little has packed her work chock-full of the world's tantalizing linguistic nuggets. From an Arabic phrase book, she cites the instruction that the letter "ha" is "pronounced by sharply exhaling air from the throat as if blowing onto eyeglasses."

"Whether I'm traveling abroad or sitting at home," Little writes, "language is nothing less than a great adventure." Here the trip starts with a tip of the tongue.