THE SUCCESS of his fourth book, Stolen Continents, hasconfirmed Ronald Wright as Canada`s pre-eminent travel writer. Home and Away isa collection of 18 travel pieces and memoirs tracing his life as a travellerover the past 20 years. Some have been previously published, in Destinations,Saturday Night, Granta, andelsewhere; others are rescued from the oblivion of the personal computer disk. Wright heads north to write of thestruggle for Canada`s Native languages in the Yukon, and south to Ayers Rock inthe Australian Cutback. He revisits the cultural landscapes of Peru, Fiji, andthe Mayan culture of Mexico and Central America made familiar in his firstthree books. Wherever he goes, Wright brings the same empathy, dry wit, and adesire to cut the crap. Wright says that a serious travel writerworks as a translator between cultures. He is bound to fall short sometimes,but one essay in particular reveals his ability not only to enter othercultures, in itself more difficult than it looks, but to bring back and sharewhat he`s found out. When he writes of Guatemalan refugees living in Torontoand hoping to go home someday, he tells their story of surviving the deathsquads not with bombastic anger but with an almost inaudible voice. You see, heknows the importance of listening. Travel writing has been described as theart of the nonfiction short story, and Wright uses the skills of the fictionwriter in his deft descriptions and dialogue. He evokes images casually, yetwith almost photographic clarity describing, for example, the face of aPeruvian man as resembling "a frost-bitten potato" - but rarelywrites at the expense of subjects. However, he does let them hang themselves ifthey must. In the best of the memoirs, he describes crossing the Atlantic in atramp steamer during a hurricane in the winter of 1969. He and three otherstalwart Englishmen were part of a cultural exchange to assist at anarchaeological dig in Mexico. Even as a greenhorn student from Cambridge,Wright choked on the accepted version of how Europe brought civilization to theNew World. He tackled Major Trench, their leader, over drinks at the meeting inLondon: "About Project Montezuma. We oughtto change the name." "How`s that?" "It ought to be ProjectCauahtemoc - the king who fought the Spaniards - he`s the real hero. Mexicansregard Montezuma as a sort of pansy mystic who died with a sword up hisbum." "Can`t be done. Nobody`s heard ofthis ... of this other chap." My own favourite among the travel piecesin Home and Away, remembered clearly from reading the article in Destinations,is an essay on Egypt that began: Great antiquities are like great films:the clutter and banality of life are stripped away and we are left with thecompelling image, the larger- than- life character, the sunset more beautifulthan any belonging to the quotidian world. There could be no better description ofthe best of Ronald Wright`s writing.