Exploring Scotland with Boswell and Johnson: Whisky, Kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster

"Whisky, Kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster" is a memoir of a twenty-first-century literary pilgrimage that celebrates Scottish life and endorses the unexpected discoveries to be made through good travel and good literature. Authored by an accomplished journalist and aficionado of fine literature, William W. Starr, the crisply written travelogue is enlivened with a playful wit, an enthusiasm for all things Scottish, the boon and burden of American sensibility, and an ardent appreciation for the literary giants James Boswell and Samuel Johnson, who make frequent cameos throughout the ramblings.

The journey began in 2007 when Starr embarked on a three-thousand-mile trek through the Scottish Lowlands and Highlands, following the path - though in reverse - of Boswell and Johnson's famous eighteenth-century Scottish journey. In 1773, the sixty-three-year-old Johnson was England's preeminent man of letters, and Boswell, some thirty years Johnson's junior, was on the cusp of achieving his own literary celebrity. For more than one hundred days, the distinguished duo toured what was then largely unknown Scottish terrain, later publishing their impressions of the trip in a pair of classic journals.

Like his literary forebears, Starr recorded a wealth of keen observations on his encounters with places and people, lochs and lore, castles and clans, fables and foibles. He couples his contemporary commentary with passages from Boswell's and Johnson's published accounts, letters, and diaries to weave together a cohesive travel guide to the Scotland of yore and today, comparing reflections from two centuries ago to his own modern-day perspectives. The tour begins and ends in Edinburgh and includes along the way visits to Glasgow, Inverness, Loch Ness, Culloden, Auchinleck, the Isles of Iona and Skye, and many more destinations. Starr also expands his course to include two of the farthest reaches of Scotland where eighteenth-century travelers dared not tread: the Outer Hebrides and the Orkney Islands, remarkable regions shaped by distinctive weather, history, and isolation.

Blending biography, intellectual and cultural history, and comic asides into his travelogue, Starr crafts an inviting vantage point from which to view aspects of Scotland's storied past and complex present through an illuminating literary lens. The well-read globetrotter and the armchair adventurer will each benefit from this compendium of fascinating revelations about Scotland's colorful, volatile heritage; its embrace of myth and legends; its flirtations with both tradition and commercialization; and its legacy as more than a source of single malts, bagpipes, and kilted genealogies.

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