Traveling By Book

Wonder Cabinet

Wonder Cabinet Productions

Society & Culture, Wonder, Philosophy, Ttbook, Knowledge, Interview

4.8 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 September 2021

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Before the time of commercial flights and road trips, we traveled to far off places without taking a single step. All you had to do was open a book. From Africa to England, to a kamikaze cockpit, and to realms of fantasy. Books aren’t just books. They’re passports to anywhere.

Original Air Date: March 14, 2020

Guests:

Philip Pullman — Ruth Ozeki — Robert Macfarlane — Petina Gappah

Interviews In This Hour:

Philip Pullman on 'The Pocket Atlas of the World' — 'His Dark Materials' Author Philip Pullman On The Consciousness Of All Things — A Diary Becomes A Time Capsule — Ruth Ozeki on 'Kamikaze Diaries' — Petina Gappah on 'Persuasion' — The Empire Writes Back: Author Discusses Explorer David Livingstone's Complicated Legacy — Robert Macfarlane on 'The Living Mountain'

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey guys, it's Anne. I had a couple of trips planned for this spring, but thanks to coronavirus, I'm reconsidering them. Maybe you are too. Luckily, there is a time-honored way to travel virus-free. Books. Books are your passport to anywhere. In today's show, we'll take you to a few places.
0:22.0	Africa, World War II, Japan, Scotland's Cairngor Mountains, beautiful places you can visit
0:28.1	in the comfort of your own home with no co-passengers coughing on you.
0:33.7	Stay tuned.
0:41.0	Wisconsin Public Radio.
0:50.6	Long before I ever got on an airplane, I was traveling the world.
0:57.2	Paris with Madeline, London with Paddington Bear, Boston Common with Mr. and Mrs. Mallard.
1:03.5	I'm Anne-Straintz. It's to the best of our knowledge, and books made a lot of us want to grow up and see the world, including some famous writers. Hello there. I'm Philip Pullman. I'm the author of His Dark
1:09.7	Materials, currently being shown on television,
1:13.4	and of a new series of books called The Book of Dust.
1:17.7	Millions of children have read and loved Philip Pullman's books. But when he was a child,
1:23.4	the age of his famous protagonist, Lyra Balacqua. What book did he love most?
1:33.4	I'm going to talk about a book that was a big influence on me,
1:36.6	which I first encountered at the age of, let me think, about nine.
1:40.4	I was nine years old.
1:42.9	And it was a little pocket atlas, an atlas of the world, which I could put in my pocket of my blazer that I wore to school.
1:50.4	And I took it everywhere with me because it absolutely fascinated me.
1:54.1	I was fascinated by the look of my own country, England, looking at the town where I was born, Norwich, in East Anglia, and all around
2:02.6	the coast that I knew, and looking at all the European countries and wondering what it
2:06.9	would be like to go to Italy or to go to Germany or to go to France.
2:14.8	I had spent quite a lot of my childhood travelling around the world because my father and then my stepfather were both in the Royal Air Force.
2:24.5	And in those days, the RAF sent its pilots and its personnel to, well, what was then the empire still, the British Empire.
	...

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