Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese [Hardcover]

Patrick Leigh Fermor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1989 | ISBN-10: 0844662631 | ISBN-13: 978-0844662633

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

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"[Mani and Roumeli are] two of the 20th Centuries most celebrated travel books" -- Independent on Sunday 20030622 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? -- The Spectator 20030622 Mani and Roumeli: two of the best travel books of the century -- Financial Times 20030622 Quite outside the range of normal accounts of travel ... 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 20030622 "a man recognised as one of the greatest travel writers of his generation!considered by many to be the finest travel books ever written" -- Manchester Evening News 20030622 "with a heady mix of scholarship, history and imagination and a magical turn of phrase from Paddy Fermor" -- Manchester Evening News 20030603 " A natural hero" -- Manchester Evening News 20030603 " Not to be missed, Yammas!" -- Manchester Evening News 20030603 Mani is an extraordinary book of adventure and encounter, fantasy and learning, observation and experience ... it is a wonderfully rich book, richer for the warmth of the Philhellenism which Leigh Fermor betrays throughout. -- Sunday Times 20030603 "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 20030603 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Patrick Leigh Fermor now lives in Greece with his wife in a house he designed and built. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Peter Smith Pub Inc (June 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0844662631
• ISBN-13: 978-0844662633
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,574,260 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