Writing a travel book is now practically as easy as buying a cheap plane ticket. This year has already ushered in tomes by a divinity student fumbling along Spain's Camino de Santiago, a journalist venturing into the earth's icy north, and a golfer who finds sporty nirvana in Mongolia. But many of today's first-time travel writers are surprisingly inexperienced — as either travelers or writers. Rory Stewart's first book, The Places in Between, is a welcome departure from the genre's lackadaisical approach to escapism. The author's account of his 36-day walk across post-Taliban Afghanistan is staggeringly well-researched, planned, and recounted.

Stewart is a Scotsman, a self-described historian, and a diplomat by training. As he perseveres through the snow, from one village to the next, speaking Farsi or Dari and anticipating traditional Muslim hospitality, he interacts with landlords, soldiers, and farmers in a way that no average backpacker could. But he is also distinct among those in his field. While British embassy employees in Afghanistan are forbidden by their superiors to leave regularly patrolled zones, Stewart defies the rules of cautious bureaucrats to venture beyond "secure" areas. Questions as to the sanity of such an endeavor are inevitable, but Stewart (whose Afghani walk is just one segment of an epic hike across Asia) places his trek in an eloquent context: "Afghanistan was the missing section of my walk," he explains, "the place in between the deserts and the Himalayas, between Persian, Hellenic, and Hindu culture, between Islam and Buddhism, between mystical and militant Islam."

Stewart often compares himself to Babur, the 16th century Mughal emperor who journeyed through the same territory. Other reviewers have suggested a host of other flattering comparisons, but Stewart's sobering determination to understand a famously hostile terrain and its people draws him closest to Tracks author Robyn Davidson, the woman who crossed a 1,700-mile stretch of Australian desert in the 1970s. Like Davidson, Stewart takes on his daunting trek as a personal challenge first and as a publicity stunt second.

-Emily Stone