AA Gill Is Away [Import] [Paperback]

AA Gill (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: PHOENIX (ORIO); New Ed edition (March 6, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0753816814
• ISBN-13: 978-0753816813
• Product Dimensions: 1 x 5 x 7.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,996,208 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
(REAL NAME)   

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.