Mani [Paperback]

Patrick Leigh Fermor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 19, 2004

This is Patrick Leigh Fermor's spellbinding part-travelogue, part inspired evocation of a part of Greece's past. Joining him in the Mani, one of Europe's wildest and most isolated regions, cut off from the rest of Greece by the towering Taygettus mountain range and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, we discover a rocky central prong of the Peleponnese at the southernmost point in Europe. Bad communications only heightening the remoteness, this Greece - south of ancient Sparta - is one that maintains perhaps a stronger relationship with the ancient past than with the present. Myth becomes history, and vice versa...Leigh Fermor's hallmark descriptive writing and capture of unexpected detail have made this book, first published in 1958, a classic - together with its Northern Greece counterpart, Roumeli.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'An extraordinary book of adventure and encounter, fantasy and learning, observation and experience' -- Sunday Times 'From the Mani he has brought back riches. How can one do justice to the fascination and poetry of this book, its generosity and its learning - its love?' -- Spectator 'He supercharges his narrative with a combination of tenderness and high spirits appropriate to his past achievements as a guerrilla leader in Crete' -- Daily Telegraph 'Mani and Roumeli: two of the best travel books of the century' -- Financial Times 'John Murray is doing the decent thing and reissuing all of Leigh Fermor's main books ... But what else would you expect from a publisher whose commitment to geography is such that for more than two centuries it has widened our understanding of the world?' -- Geographical Magazine 20040801 'Bringing the landscape alive as no other writer can, he uses his profound and eclectic understanding of cultures and peoples ... to paint vivid pictures - nobody has illuminated the geography of Europe better' -- Geographical Magazine 20040801 'Extraordinarily engaging ... thanks to Leigh Fermor's ability to turn an insight into a telling phrase ... a compelling story' -- London Review of Books 20050818

About the Author

After his famous walk across Europe - recounted in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water - Patrick Leigh Fermor lived and travelled in the Balkans and the Greek Archipelago. In the Second World War he joined the Irish Guards, became a liaison officer in Albania and fought in Greece and Crete - living disguised as a shepherd in the mountains for two years organising resistance activities. He was awarded the DSO and CBE, and a knighthood in the 2004 new Year Honours List. His writing career, spanning over fifty years, includes six other titles available in John Murray paperback. He lives in Greece, in a house he designed and built.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Hodder Hb (July 19, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0719566916
• ISBN-13: 978-0719566912
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.9 x 7.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,013,211 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Read, but dated., March 25, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (Hardcover)

Patrick Fermor writes about the section of Greece called the Mani (both Inner and Outer) in great detail. There is no better reference for the Mani between the time of the second world war and about 1968. His mastery of both the culture and history of the Mani is second to none.

He is a wonderfull writer, with a story telling style that makes it hard to put the book down. He has a love of the area that shows thorugh in all he writes. (He has now, by the way, made the area his permanent home.)

If you want background on the Mani, this book is a "must have".

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A WORLD OF NOW-VANISHED WONDERS, July 31, 2004

By 

Alekos (Cancun, Quintana Roo Mexico) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (Hardcover)

MANI ... It is not for nothing that Patrick Leigh Fermor is generally considered the greatest living travel writer in English. Reading any one of his books, always a smooth, elegant and intellectually exciting undertaking, is to accept an invitation to the private world of a master observer of places and manners who is also pretty sharp in such areas of human endeavor as history, architecture, music, theology, psychology, mythology, and languages both classical and modern. He is extremely erudite - an autodidact, he says - and his approach to travel writing is strictly literary and sometimes sublimely so. This book, doubtless conceived as a companion volume to ROUMELI, which deals with Northern Greece, takes us to the southernmost part of the Peloponnesus. Unfortunately, the world of rocks and rustics and supreme beauty it describes is now largely vanished, so it is therefore of great value to have a traveler's vision and memory of it as it was about sixty years ago. Always subtle and elegant, the story takes on a heightened aesthetic and intellectual intensity at certain points and in particular locales. For example, the opening paragraph of the book's final chapter describes the writer's arrival at Gytheio by means of an extended metaphor comparing entrance into a city with the act of coitus, and if any reader should miss this metaphor let me point out the author's use of such words as maidenhead and deflower. A further adornment of the metaphor, conceptual and literary, is provided by the revelation that the little island a few yards off the coast, now named Marathonisi and now connected to Gytheio by a causeway, but called Kranae by Homer, is in fact the island where Paris and Helen spent their fist night after the famous elopement. At another point the reader is invited to watch the dolphins scull down at exactly the imaginary line in the Adriatic where the filioque drops out of the creed. We are allowed to eavesdrop on a group of centaurs on the Pelion Peninsula, and a passing reference to Henry Miller and George Katsimbalis develops into a chain reaction of crowing roosters around the world and back again. There s an excellent chapter on the peculiar little village of Areopolis, the gateway to the Inner Mani, where the author attempts an interpretation of the ancient carvings on churches and houses. This marvelous book will be of interest to anyone who feels attracted to the beauties of Greece and its people, but also to those who enjoy supremely well-written prose.

5 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mani, June 18, 2000

By 

"tropeon" (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (Mass Market Paperback)

This book is an in depth look at one of the most fascinating regions of Greece. Fermor's knowledge of the Hellenic people seems boundless