The World: Travels 1950-2000

by Jan Morris

Overview

"The travel book of the season."—Craig Seligman, New York Times Book Review

The first book to distill Jan Morris's entire body of work into one volume, The World is a magnum opus by the most-celebrated travel writer in the world. To read it is to take an epic armchair journey through the last half of twentieth-century history. A breathtakingly vivid guide to our greatest cosmopolitan cities and cultures from Manhattan to Venice and from Baghdad to Barbados, this book assembles fifty years of Morris's finest travel writing. With eyewitness accounts of such seminal moments as the first successful ascent of Everest, the Eichmann trial, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the handover of Hong Kong, The World promises to create an entirely new generation of Jan Morris readers. A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2003.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393326482
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/01/2005
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	476
Sales rank:	658,790
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.06(d)

About the Author

Born in 1926, Jan Morris is the author of such classics as the Pax Britannica trilogy and The World, among many others. She lives in Wales.

Editorial Reviews

Everyone who reads books treasures Jan Morris. For more than 50 years, she quietly traversed the planet, pausing to reflect most often in its cities. Her records of what she saw and thought -- part reportage, part impression -- have filled three dozen books. Beyond the accuracy of her observations and the acuity of her reflections, her writing itself -- as easy as speech and as artful as may be -- has been a singular joy to readers and will almost certainly outlive some of her subjects.

A wonderful selection of that writing is collected in The World: Travels 1950-2000, an irresistible portal to all of her work. — Alan Peter Ryan

The Washington Post

This collection of essays and excerpts from the globe-spanning career of Morris, one of the most admired and imitated travel writers alive, is fantastic in its depth and breadth. But whether it also succeeds as a portrait of the world in the years 1950-2000 depends on readers' response to Morris's impressionistic style. Morris had the good fortune of beginning her career (when she was still James Morris) writing for two great British newspapers, the Times and the Guardian, when the British Empire still spanned the world, and she's spent much of her career writing about former colonies. But she is much more than a chronicler of empire. This work finds Morris in Atlanta, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Capetown, Kyoto, Odessa, La Paz, Sydney and Addis Ababa, to name just a few cities from which she files reports in the first two decades of the period alone. Her style of reporting, increasingly abstract as time passes (and increasingly joyous following her sex-change operation in Morocco, a story she tells from a touchingly wry distance), finds her ignoring politicians and celebrities in favor of the wisdom of cab drivers and the tone of street signs. Her job, as she writes, is "simply to grin like a dog and run about the city." A brief, pessimistic epilogue aside, Morris likes what she has seen in the world. Inevitably, her many devoted readers will be disappointed by the necessary brevity of most of the excerpts here (she has written more than 30 books), but as an introduction to the writer's luminous prose, there is no better place to start. 6 illus. (Nov.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

A preeminent reporter who specializes in terrific travel pieces (Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, 2001, etc.) reviews a half-century of literary snapshots in her considerable album and shows us the way we were—and the way we have changed around the world. Morris presents an agreeably eclectic and untidy omnibus of articles written for The Manchester Guardian, Rolling Stone, etc. Starting with her scoop on the conquest of Everest and an early salute to Manhattan (comparable to E.B. White’s classic), the early reportage recalls the excellent WPA Travel Guides on a later, wider scale. Dispatches come from an aircraft carrier, a racetrack in Darjeeling, London of the performing arts, down under in Sydney, Ottawa in a Ruritanian mode, and a Welsh community in Patagonia. From city to savannah, Caribbean to Katmandu, Swiss chalet to West Point, the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem to the Gary Powers show trial in Moscow, she examines the values of the governments, the character of the people, the very intentions of the places themselves. If Pittsburgh is moved to Ohio or South America is demoted to a subcontinent, it matters not a whit, for impressions are better than dry fact and Morris has a canny eye for the diverting and telling detail that’s emblematic of places we may or may not know. When the early essays were written, Jan Morris, now a cosmopolitan lady of certain age, was James Morris. She challenges readers to find a difference in prose style after "what is vulgarly known as a sex change," citing a page that marks the metamorphosis. As the decades pass, pieces tend to more length, with a vague, understandable sense of foreboding. Still, Morris maintains her ironist’s accreditations.An acute, idiosyncratic collection, full of what the author, at home at last, always liked best: fizz.

Kirkus Reviews

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