Roads, by Larry McMurtry (Simon & Schuster, $25). After undergoing heart surgery in 1991, Larry McMurtry experienced, he says, "a death that wasn't fatal: my body lived on but my personality died, or at least imploded, disintegrated, shattered into fragments." He doesn't elaborate, but for the next eight years the
author of Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show attempted to "reassemble these drifting fragments of personality," in part by embarking on a series of solo jaunts on familiar highways. "I wanted to drive the American roads at the century's end," McMurtry writes, with no pretensions about taking
"the national pulse, or even my own pulse." Other than curiosity, he says, "there's no particular reason for these travels—just the old desire to be on the move." You might well ask, then, what reason there is to read about them, particularly since McMurtry shuns Kerouac-style adventure (he won't drive across Wyoming because it's raining or ascend to
the Mogollon Rim in Arizona because his rented car can't pass on a hill). You read because the McMurtry prose has survived along with the personality: On long hauls across the rolling plains on U.S. 35, the desert Southwest on I-40, and the Florida Keys on U.S. 1, past and present intersect with free associations about other writers (mostly Hemingway),
Hollywood, and Washington, D.C., where McMurtry lived for 20 years. But his real loves have not been writing or movies, but travel, rare books, and the opposite sex. Near the end of his road, on a South Dakota state highway, McMurtry has "a sobering realization about women, which is that there are just too many nice ones." And thus he concludes, "As it is
with women, so it is with roads."
View from the Summit, by Sir Edmund Hillary (Pocket Books, $15). In this sunset autobiography, the famed 79-year-old conqueror of Mount Everest brings readers with him to the peak's summit: "Having just paid our respects to the highest mountain in the world, I then had no choice but to urinate on it." Fellow New
Zealander George Lowe was waiting for Hillary and his partner, Tenzing Norgay, on Everest's South Col. "'Well, George,' I said, 'we knocked the bastard off!'" writes Hillary, recounting what has become one of mountaineering's most famous lines. "'Thought you must have,' he replied calmly, and poured us a drink of hot tomato soup from a thermos flask." Such
understated delivery is a far cry from the oxygen-deprived, adrenalized prose of modern climbing. And although there's not much new here—this is, after all, the great man's tenth book—and Hillary keeps mum about his opinions on the contemporary climbing scene, View from the Summit is packed withlogistical details
and wry asides from adventures ranging from a motorized trek to the South Pole in 1957 to a jet-boat trip up the Ganges in 1977. He became an instant global celebrity in 1953 when news of his success flashed around the world, but the modest Hillary nevertheless thought he was the victim of a prank when he got word in the mountains of Nepal that he was to
receive the Order of the Garter from Queen Elizabeth II. But even before that day, Hillary was using his fame well, raising funds for medical and educational assistance to the Nepalese and for conserving the landscapes through which he has since trekked for half a century.
The Eighth Continent: Life, Death, and Discovery in the Lost World of Madagascar, by Peter Tyson (Morrow, $28). Roughly the size of Texas, the world's fourth-largest island is home to a multitude of species found nowhere else. Located 250 miles off the east coast of Africa, this "eighth continent" has been isolated for
160 million years and inhabited by Homo sapiens for only two millennia, so its indigenous plants and animals never adapted defense mechanisms against people and their imports. And now, as a result of burgeoning human population in the 20th century, writes Tyson, a science journalist and online producer of the PBS series
Nova, this crucible of biodiversity "is also a global leader in environmental degradation."During his first night in the rainforest Tyson finds himself watching as herpetologist Christopher Raxworthy screams back at an angry leaf-tailed gecko, with its "crenellated, body-length fringe...a lichen come alive." This often droll
travel book has an old-fashioned appeal, in that the reader learns more about natural phenomena than about the author's difficulties. Ever the studious adventurer, Tyson observes Madagascar through the exploits of Raxworthyand three other scientists—a paleoecologist investigating the extinction of giant species, an archaeologist plumbing the origins
of the Malagasy people, and a primatologist hoping to understand extinction through the lemurs that are, like so many of the island's guileless inhabitants, apparently doomed.
Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource, by Marq De Villiers (Houghton Mifflin, $26). Another crisis in the works, the drain on clean water, is tracked here by the author of White Tribe Dreaming, an award-winning memoir of growing up in South Africa. De Villiers, a journalist now
living in Nova Scotia, takes an omnibus approach to his elusive subject. When he began, he admits, "I had no real grasp of the intricate interconnectedness of the global hydrological system," but in he plunged, spending several years investigating icebergs in Newfoundland, aridity in Tanzania, dams on the Colorado, and sinking aquifers from the Sahara to
South Korea. Unfortunately, as in other recent books on this hot topic, the writing is the antithesis of wet. Still, the urgent facts help to compensate for the earnest scholasticism. There's as much water on the earth today as ever, only less of it is accessible and potable, the problems being—surprise—politics and greed. Coping strategies are
both more and less surprising; they include such ingenious means of moving water as gargantuan codomlike containers dragged by ships and such time-honored tactics as stealing from less powerful neighbors. Summing up, De Villiers offers a certain dark optimism: "We are not without weapons," he writes, "in these wars we are waging against our own worst
nature." —JAMES CONAWAY
