For the “Summer Reading” issue of The New York Times Book Review, Simon Winchester (author, most recently, of Pacific), offers a brisk roundup of the latest travel titles to be published Stateside. Most of the 40-or-so, he says, were “possessed of a certain predictability — an urgent need to escape here, a frantic need to impress there, a pressing need to inquire and explore and explain what goes on in the faraway. Only a handful could possibly be chosen for a closer look.” He majors, as they say on that side of the pond, on Rising Ground, by Philip Marsden, which was short-listed in Britain last year for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year award.