Also of interest...in globe-trotting adventures

The Grand Tour

by Agatha Christie (Harper, $30)

Unlike her characters, Agatha Christie could travel around the world peril-free, said Clea Simon in The Boston Globe. Accompanying her husband on a 1922 British trade mission, Christie was “still very much the carefree young wife,” if a reader can judge by the letters and memoir excerpts gathered here. Though Christie sometimes thoughtlessly maligns the natives as she surfs in South Africa or picks oranges in Australia, she also inadvertently provides “a profile of the last days of an empire.”

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Searching for Zion

by Emily Raboteau (Atlantic Monthly, $25)

Emily Raboteau’s new book is “at once a memoir and an exercise in researching and reclaiming history,” said Aisha Harris in Slate.com. Traveling to Ghana, Israel, Jamaica, and other places where people of the African diaspora have sought a promised land, this daughter of a white mother and a black father discovers that finding a place that feels like home is never easy. Zion is “a frame of mind, and a place you can’t get to on a plane,” yet Raboteau manages to locate it.

Heat

by Bill Streever (Little, Brown, $27)

Biologist Bill Streever proves “an able guide” to the world’s true hot spots, said Stephen J. Lyons in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Following up on his 2009 book, Cold, Streever here brings us Death Valley, Mount Vesuvius, the world’s first oil well, and numerous other sites that elicit insights into heat and its extremes. Whether he’s contemplating the sun’s useful life span or a hydrogen bomb test, Streever supplies “a pleasing mix” of first-person narrative and digestible science.

Here, There, Elsewhere

by William Least Heat-Moon (Little, Brown, $30)

“Traveling with William Least Heat-Moon is always an adventure,” said Steve Weinberg in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In this remarkable anthology, the author of 1983’s Blue Highways takes readers from the back roads of the Midwest to rural Japan and the mountains of New Zealand. “Occasionally his words sound more grand than perhaps they should when describing certain landscapes,” but the 73-year-old is a “memorable wordsmith,” a great listener, and an ever-curious explorer.