AA Gill is Away [Paperback]

A.A. Gill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 11, 2005

A. A. Gill is one of the most feared writers in London, noted--according to the New York Times--for his "rapier wit." Some even consider the mere assignment of a subject to Gill a hostile act. But when the notice "AA GILL IS AWAY" runs in the Sunday Times of London, the city can rest peacefully in the knowledge that the writer is off traveling.

"My editor asked me what I wanted from journalism and I said the first thing that came into my head--I'd like to interview places. To treat a place as if it were a person, to go and listen to it, ask it questions, observe it the way you would interview a politician or a pop star," Gill writes.

Upon his return, readers are treated to an account of his vacations to places like famine-stricken Sudan, the pornography studios of California's San Fernando Valley, the dying Aral Sea or the seedy parts of Kaliningrad.

The result is one of the most fascinating, stylish and irreverent collections of travel writing.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Imagine Evelyn Waugh reborn as one of Nick Hornby's endearingly superficial protagonists, and you have London's Sunday Times television and restaurant critic Gill: droll, astute, irritable, irritating and always cleaver-sharp. Moving from Hiroshima to Kyoto, Gill carps about the Japanese, with their ways that differ greatly from Gill's own, being "the people that aliens might be if they'd learnt Human by correspondence course and wanted to slip in unnoticed." He barnstorms through Ethiopia, Russia, Argentina and elsewhere before heading home to England. The anthology of travel essays opens with arguably Gill's finest section—on Sudan, whose current horrors make his root-cause impressions from 1998 required reading—arguing how even those who care about mass suffering are "protected by the one-way mirror of news." In Los Angeles, he makes a porn film: life on the set teaches him argot like "kung fu death grip" and some unusual uses for pineapples. Compilations inevitably draw episodes against one another, and this one is no different. Yet it maintains a high batting average from start to finish. Gill's aim isn't always on (only a Brit would search for authentic barbecue in California), but usually it's his bald foreignness that makes him such a skilled marksman. That, and the fact that he himself is such an original.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* A self-described "mongrel Scot"--part English, part Indian, born in Edinburgh--Gill has here collected 21 essays (dating from 1995 to 2001), presumably from his work as a columnist for the Sunday Times of London, "AA Gill Is Away" being the notice the paper runs when Gill is out on assignment. His interests are omnivorous and take him places as diverse as Sudan, India, Cuba, Bethlehem, Japan, and even the San Fernando Valley, where the author helped create a porn film. Gill can be mischievously funny, as when he describes Westerners who do yoga in India as exercise, "which is a bit like walking the Stations of the Cross as aerobics." Yet he can write with the most penetrating tenderness and humility, as when he shares his visit to the most destitute part of Sudan: "It is not staring at the face of starvation that thuds like a blow to your heart, it is having starvation stare back at you." This is not conventional travel writing--not that of the newspaper travel section, or even that of such classic writers as Simon Winchester, Pico Iyer, and Jan Morris (see By the Seat of My Pants, reviewed on p.24). It somehow feels more interactive, riskier, and more enduring. Alan Moores
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; Original edition (October 11, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743276671
• ISBN-13: 978-0743276672
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #424,655 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars one of the best writers around, September 26, 2003

By 

Author Brian Wallace (Mind Transmission, Inc.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Aa Gill Is Away (Hardcover)

This sorely underappreciated book needs to be read. This guy is one of the funniest and most illuminating writers around, worthy of the highest esteem.

Fresh, intelligent and exciting work.

His piercing, amusing perspectives stimulate emotions the way writing is intended to.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars recommended in seattle, February 6, 2006

By 

T. Doherty (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: AA Gill is Away (Paperback)

I was recently on a business trip to seattle and ended up at a bookstore with a large wall of recommended books. I was just finishing A Walk in the Woods, the first "travel" book I had read. It was so good, I caught the bug and set off to find other travel writers with irreverent styles and sharp wit and I found AA Gill. The book is geniously designed, concise, and well-written. I had not heard of AA Gill before and so these newspaper columns were all new to me and I picked through them one at a time glimpsing places from around the world like postcards. There is a - how to use this book - segment at the start following the foreward. I studied fiction writing for two years in graduate school and wish greatly that someone, anyone, would have assigned this book to me or at least recommended it. The how to use portion of the book holds secrets and insights into writing that some people might never discover but that any reader upon picking up this book can hold within a few minutes. Highly recommended.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I hope Mr. Gill goes away again, December 31, 2006

By 

A. V. Fernando (North Carolina) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: AA Gill is Away (Paperback)

I generally like travel essays. Unfortunately, this is perhaps one of the sparsest sections of the bookstore (especially once you remove the volumes written by Americans pretending to be expats in Italy).

I read this book in one sitting. I read fast, but even so that's not all that common, and is normally something I can say only about an excellent novel. I was sorry for this book to end.

What is presented in this book is a set of travel essays which range in subject from the Sudan to California, Monaco to the British Army's Sniper school. The author's style is as readable as Bryson or Cahill. The author is a bit pretentious (as noted by other Amazon reviewers) in his forward and in his introductory sections for the broad categories of his pieces (North, South, East, and West), but that pretention does not tend to flow into the columns themselves. Gill is perhaps the travel writer for the rest of us, who suggests that you should go see the Taj Mahal, or Havanna, even if it's been done to death because the places are worth going to, even though they are popular. (Reworded then, that they are correctly identified as places worth going to, and that is why they are popular.)

I hope Mr. Gill continues his travels, and that another volume may be published some day.