Customer Reviews

Mark Twain on Travel

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Writer Mark Twain is best known for his children's adventure books and his spirited humor, but Mark Twain On Travel offers a different set of insights, gathering under one cover his travel experiences and writings and revealing his colorful encounters with characters around the world. These spirited literary pieces are powerful travel observations which come from a range of publications and sources and together provide an excellent survey of Twain's wit and wisdom.

As a Mark Twain fan, I ordered this book on blind faith. It turned out that the best part of this volume was the introduction by the editor explaining why most of Mark Twain's travel books aren't very good. Indeed while I have read "Roughing It" a couple of times and enjoyed "Life on the Mississippi," I found Twain's other travel books, such as "Innocents Abroad," unreadable. I had hopes that this volume contained gems that had been mined from Twain's otherwise intractable travel volumes. Alas, this is not the case. This book only demonstrates further that most of Twain's travel writing isn't very good. Save your money for other Twain books, such as "Huckleberry Finn" or his "Autobiography," that have stood the test of time.

If you don't have the time to read all of Twain's travel books yet would like to experience his entertaining wit and keen perspectives, read this book. This is a collection of probably his best written travel experiences and proves to be very informative, humourous and thought-provoking. He's an honest writer and his non-fiction always sets me on a path to a new leg of personal research about a given subject. I was completely surprised that this would be such a fabulous book since I couldn't imagine a travel log being very interesting. It's a shame that some books don't make it to the bestseller list as this one should have and other crappy books do.