| Title | : | The World: Travels 1950-2000 |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0393052087 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780393052084 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 480 |
| Publication | : | First published November 17, 2003 |
The World: Travels 1950-2000 Reviews
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If you like to travel, or read about traveling, this is a wonderful book! Jan Morris has been everywhere, she has written beautifully about her travels in many, many books. This book condenses the stories into vignettes of those trips. From accompanying Edmund Hillary on the first successful summiting of Mount Everest to strolling in Venice, Morris explores a variety of experiences and settings. Kyoto, Cape Town, Jerusalem, Atlanta, Addis Ababa, and on into so many marvelous places to intrigue fellow travelers.
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The greatest travel-writer ever, in full, expansive literary flow.
If you're a traveller or a tourist, this can only enhance your experience mightily. If you're an armchair traveller, it'll save you a fortune in airfares and hotels, and you'll still be able to bang on at length and in detail about all the places you've 'been'. -
It was a pleasure to have so much of Jan Morris' work in one work. her insights on Europe post WWII as well as in the eighties was fabulous. I love her work, however I must keep a dictionary close by. I rarely find a writer with such a command of the English language and a use of wide vocabulary that doesn't seemed forced or ostentatious.
I would recommend this book to anyone that enjoys literary travel writing. -
A strange mixture of gems and casual, unreconstructed racisms from fifty or sixty years ago that make your breath catch in shock. I think not having a sensitivity reader check this over with modern eyes was a mistake.
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This compilation was enough to make her my favorite travel writer. I respect the balance she's able to maintain between objective/subjective, awe/critique, deep/superficial, and all written with an surprisingly wide array of vocabulary (a dictionary was needed at least a few times for each of her pieces to find esoteric words used not to be fancy, but to be precise).
She lived an incredible life (part of the first expedition to scale Mt. Everest for a start) and wrote about where she was incredibly well. I highly recommend this collection for anyone interested in travel, cities, countries and the people and cultures that comprise them. Learning to adopt her perspective will help me more deeply appreciate the places I go to live and visit in the future. -
Probably the best travel writer of the latter half of the 20th century.
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I am an armchair traveler. Thus, I love to visit other countries with a seasoned guide like Jan Morris. Since this covers 50 years of travel, some of the articles are dated. Nonetheless, a fun read. I place this alongside by other favorite travel writers Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson.
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Classic travel writing that really captures the essence of a place.
Moscow (1960s)
"A fusty crowd of passengers, muffled in wrappings, hangs about the customs desk: a fat, broad-faced woman in tears, her child tugging at the strap of her handbag; a sallow man in a velvet hat, arguing over a suitcase of brocades; a covey of Chinese, dignified and double-breasted; a welter of thick-set, sweaty, colorless men with badges in their lapels and elaborate medals dangling from their chests. Among them all the traveller warily passes, a shuffling, heavy-breathing porter carrying his bags behind, and into the car that waits outside; and so down the dank, snow-muffled road, through a landscape numb with cold, he is driven towards the city.
Thin flurries of snow are chased by the wind across the road..."
Kashmir
(1970s, on a poop boat)
"The lap of the water takes over, the quacking of the ducks in the dawn, the hazed blue smoke loitering from the cook-boat, the soft water-light, the glitter of the dewdrop in the water-lily leaf, the flick of the little fish in the clear blue water, the dim purplish presence of the mountain beyond the lake, fringed with a line of distant snow.
Time expands in such a setting... Scale, on the other hand, contracts. The focus narrows, within the frame of the Kashmir water-life. The picture gets clearer, more exact, and one finds oneself concentrating upon the minutiae, like the number of leaves upon the plucked waterweed, or the twitchy movements of the kingfishers..."
Darjeeling (1970s)
"Yet it is not the spectacle of the Himalayas that sets the style of Darjeeling. It is simply their presence. The town lives in the knowledge of them, and so acknowledges another scale of things. Its littleness is not inferiority complex, but self-awareness, and it gives the community a particular intensity and vivacity. Darjeeling is built in layers, neatly along its ridge like an exhibition town, from the posh hotels and villas at the top to the jumbled bazaar quarter at the bottom: and all the way down this dense tiered mass of buildings life incessantly buzzes, hums and fizzes. Darjeeling's energies seem to burn the brighter for their smallness, and not a corner of the town is still, or empty, or dull." -
Morris can never write badly but this wasn't unmitigated joy. Her earlier articles often have the patronising, imperialist tone common to travel journalism of the era. It remains interesting in showing us a picture of a city in that time. The patronising Tome still crops up in later articles and I find it more grating there. By this time, as she says, she preferred writing books and articles were a way of ensuring a regular income and sometimes these articles seem slight and superficial. Some gems nonetheless.
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This author has traveled just about everywhere over the past 50 years. She has a gift for figuring out a city's personality. Probably not something to read from cover to cover straight through, but definitely worth jumping around in over time. Especially the essays on NYC.
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Jan Morris stumbles from one cliche to another. Too many factual errors and misspellings.
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Jan Morris was a reporter, working for the Times of London, who wrote a huge number of travel essays on assignment for that paper and other publications. He began his career as a man, but after a sex change operation in Casablanca (who goes to Casablanca for a sex change?), finished her career as a woman.
Morris had a couple of tendencies that show up in this book. First, she used a ton of obscure vocabulary. Quick! Define, without googling the terms, "gallimaufry", "prolixity", and "quiddity." This book will challenge you, certainly, even if you consider yourself well-versed in word lore. Second, she tended to long, flowery descriptions of the places she visited, with very little concrete information about realities "on the ground", and lots of talk about the atmosphere and attitude of those far-off lands.
A humorous aside:
"...long after Ernesto (Guevara) had matured into Che and had become a world-celebrated icon of the youth culture, I gave a lift in England to a hitch-hiker whose T-shirt bore a familiar picture of him - by then one of the best-known photographs on earth. 'I bet I'm the onlhy person you've ever got a lift from who actually met Che Guevara.' 'Oh yeah,' was the reply. 'Who was Che Guevara?'"
On the dreariness of the Soviet Union:
"Moscow in winter is hardly a dream, and not exactly a nightmare, but has more the quality of a hangover: blurred, dry-mouthed and baleful, but pierced by moments of almost painful clarity, in which words, ideas, or recollections roll about in the mind metallically, like balls on a pin-table."
On the job of travel writing/reporting:
"In Khartoum...I was interviewing the Minister of National Guidance (later executed for misguiding the nation) and he told me that my duties should be to report 'thrilling, attractive and good news, coinciding where possible with the truth.' I have followed his advice ever since."
Some things never change, and Morris remarks on Kashmir in the 70s:
"Kashmir is one of those places, deposited here and there in awkward corners of the earth, that never seem quite settled; a bazaar rumour kind of place, a UN resolution place, a plae that nags the lesser headlines down the years, like a family argument never finally resolved."
When I worked in the semiconductor industry a while back, Singapore was well on its way to world dominance in the field. Morris seems to anticipate this, also written in the 70s:
"Lee Kuan Yew (a Chinese politician) believes that the whole state must be resolutely directed towards a kind of communal expertise. There is no time for argument. There is no room for dilettantism, nostalgia or party politics. Prosperity is the single aim of the state, and it can be retained only by rigorous discipline and specialization, under the unchallenged authority of an intelligent despotism. Political stability, reasons Lee Kuan Yew, equals foreign confidence, equals investment, equals money for all, which is all the average citizen wants of life and statesmanship."
Might be some words for our own politicians to heed, there.
Morris seemed also to enjoy the big cities of the U.S.:
"New York..is a city of dedicated poets, earnest actors and endlessly rehearsing musicians. Draft after draft its writers are rejecting, and there are more good pianists playing in New York every evening than in the whole of Europe - smouldering jazz pianists in the downtown clubs, crazy punk pianists on Bleecker Street, stuff-shirt romantic pianists in the Midtown tourist spots, smashing student pianists practising for next year's Tchaikovsky competition, jolly young pianists accompnaying off Broadway musicals, drop-out pianists, drunk ruined pianists, mendicant pianists with instruments on trolley wheels, Steinway pianists flown by Concorde that afternoon for their concerti at Lincoln Center."
Armchair travelers should really have fun with Morris' book. -
In her introduction to these collected essays on travel and autobiography, Jan Morris dryly notes that after transitioning gender she felt "a sense of liberation which some critics have claimed to find apparent in my writing (if you would be amused to judge for yourselves, the final metamorphosis occurs on page 209)." It's a good line, and characteristic of the author's dry sense of humor.
I don't know if I sense the big change there, on page 209 (which describes what would now be called a gender-affirmatio surgery in Casablanca in 1972). But there are certainly changes in the books. Changes in the world, obviously, from the early Cold War to the first decade after it. But changes in the writer too. The early writings reflect some of the unthinking prejudices of an upper-middle-class Englishman (educated Lancing and Oxford, briefly a Lieutenant in the 9th Queens' Royal Lancers at the end of the Second World War) in the 1950s. Professing liberalism, Morris is horrified by racism in South Africa in the early days of Apartheid but hardly without racial prejudice herself, something that is also reflected in her writings on travels in the American south. A more genuine broadmindedness grows as Morris matures. And then there is the transition, unremarked on but very obvious, from someone who identifies regularly and apparently instinctively as British to a proudly self-identified Welsh nationalist.
I think it is to Morris' credit that she kept, and sometimes commented on, the earlier passages that don't necessarily reflect well her. She allowed her earlier pieces to be period pieces, captured in the moment. And what moments they were: rushing down Everest to telegraph London that Hilary and Norgay had safely descended from the summit, interviewing Che Guevara in Havana, attending the trials of Eichmann in Jerusalem and Gary Powers in Moscow....
There is no question that Morris lived one of the most remarkable lives of the later twentieth century. She also wrote about it constantly and rather well. Part of me wishes that, like her friend and contemporary Patrick Leigh Fermor, she had left a magnum opus that combined the reflections and knowledge of her older self with the experiences of her youth. But her scattered writings, some of which are collected here, are still wonderful. -
Jan Morris is an impressionistic travel writer. By that, I mean she likes to get the feel of a place by walking around, observing people, noting colors and activities. She engages with the locals constantly.
This makes her writings from 1950 to 2000 as much a time capsule as a travelogue. She writes about times and places that don't exist anymore. Well, the places exist, but not in the same way. Sometimes this is quite radical (the ex-Soviet Union) and sometimes more subtle (Manhattan then and now). At all times, it's diverting and informative.
My one caveat is that these short pieces were not written to be read together. Their rich imagery make them seem like confections, bon-bons that should be eaten sparingly rather than gorged upon. It's almost too much lush description to take in at one time, but it makes for great bathroom reading to read a few essays at a time.
Jan Morris died last November at the age of 94; she had quit her travel writing at 74, so her travels encapsulated the latter half of the 20th century. This book is an excellent summary of her life's work. I can't think of another writer who traveled more widely and wrote more engagingly about that time period. -
Jan Morris died last month. I had not heard of her before but was interested to hear that she was a Welsh journalist whose first news story was the successful ascent of Mount Everest in 1953 and who traveled all over the world reporting for over fifty years. Included is an essay on Casablanca and the clinic where Jan had gender confirmation surgery in the 1970s. This 450-page volume sets her travel writing into a historical framework by decades and includes annotations on most of the stories. I confess to reading only about the places I was most interested in. The writing is intelligent, witty, and insightful.
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This book is a real treat, spanning five decades and visiting every continent. With her eye for detail, her deadpan humour and her sometimes breakneck prose, Jan Morris is generous in letting us share her remarkable life.
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Jan Morris is always unbeatable.
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Got this at Skoob Books after much deliberation. Was probably right to be hesitant - the font and type size made it difficult to read, and the selection was too scattered.
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Lovely writing style. Some passages don’t stand the test of time. Curious disdain for Paris.
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This collection of essays spanning 50+ years (1950's to early 2000's) and the entire planet was such a rewarding reading experience. Morris is an extraordinarily gifted writer. Her accounts of her globe-spanning travels and sojourns and the people she intermingles with are just luminescent. She has such an incisive knack for capturing the ethos and essence of a place and its people, how their history has informed the self-conception and personality of whole societies, and conveying it all in original and convincing prose. Make sure you have a dictionary close at hand to read Morris, and you'll be rewarded with several new delightful additions to your vocabulary (a fun one for me was 'truculent').
Reading Jan Morris on travel and societies seems to me something like watching Michael Jordan play basketball, or Martina Navratilova play tennis. All-time great practitioners of their craft. -
This is great travel writing. He is an astute observer wherever he goes. I thought he got a little testy in his later years. I guess one would be a little jaded and a bit too demanding after 50 years of travel, but this is just a little cavil. By and large, I loved going along with him wherever he went.
