Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece (Hardcover)

by Robert D. Kaplan (Author) "Divinity exists in beautiful memories: leaves like weightless bronze, engraved with the year, falling amid the trees of Rodin's sculpture garden in Paris..." (more)
Key Phrases: demarcation ditch, North Africa, Mount Athos, World War (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Many recent travel memoirs have focused on the personal minutiae of a journey, but Atlantic Monthly correspondent Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts) is a breed apart. Similar to classic writers like Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller, Kaplan relates only a scant amount of detail about himself and why he's traveling. Particulars about quirky characters and minor annoyances are rare. Instead, he uses graceful prose to describe the history of the ground on which he walks and his absorption with events that happened centuries before he bought his first plane ticket. A visit to Carthage isn't merely a cozy ride through a pleasant landscape; as his train surges forward, he summons up the first foreign invasion from the Phoenician city-state of Tyre. With his lyrical writing style, Kaplan makes factual summations into slowly unraveling, luxurious tales. "The founding of Carthage is clothed in sumptuous myth," he writes. Sometimes, however, this approach interferes with coherence. The richness of the prose and the depth to which Kaplan delves into the past can make his actual travel experiences somewhat jarring. (When he collects a $40 check for freelance work from the Christian Science Monitor, it's as if Hannibal had suddenly strolled into the American Express office.) But generally, the discord between Kaplan's everyday reality and his intellectual wanderings makes for a sweet mix. And because he dips so liberally into history and goes into such detail about ancient peoples, it doesn't matter that Kaplan's visits to the Mediterranean actually took place in the 1970s. His love for antiquity, much like his writing, is timeless.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Kaplan was an unknown freelance writer 28 years ago when, fresh from college, he embarked on the journey this volume chronicles. The author has since worked his way to the summit of the travel-writing business through such works as Eastward to Tartary (2000). The newness of the travel experience, and discovering ways to best digest it, is, therefore, a theme in Kaplan's recollection of this formative trip, which runs parallel to his description of people and places. Unerring avenues into a locale's historical and contemporary personality are works by other travelers. Thus allusions to titles ranging from antiquity (Sallust's Jugurthine War) to the present are interwoven with Kaplan's itinerary, which culminates in meeting, in a remote part of Greece, with British travel author Patrick Leigh Fermor. Kaplan observes that "real adventure is not about risk but the acquisition of knowledge." That comment may well stand as the precept of this mellow, evocative tour of the Mediterranean in the off-season. Sure to delight Kaplan's many fans. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (February 3, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 037550804X
• ISBN-13: 978-0375508042
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #634,927 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining, thought-provoking and intelligent., July 27, 2004

By	Mark E. Baxter "Inquirer" (Layton, UT United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is travel writing the way it was meant to be - Informative, concise and illuminating.

Kaplan relives his journeys from many years ago as he first travelled through the Mediterranean struggling with being a free-lance writer. Most of the book is recollections from more than 20 years ago although there are comments from recent trips back to some of the locations and a wonderful recent interview with Patrick Leigh Fermor, author of A Time of Gifts, and other well-known travel books.

The down-side of reporting on these decades-old journeys is that some of the spontaneity and opinion is lost. I find that sometimes I learn more from disagreeing with a travel writers' hasty opinion than in boring, well-edited neutral reporting. However, in this case, I think that the elapsed time has given this account nuances and a filtered content that add to the writing. It's as if the ensuing decades have concentrated the meaning and subtleties of the journey.

The part on Tunisia was replete with history of the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Berbers, and Carthaginians. Sicily was filled with the Greek influences on this place. Dalmatia, in previous Yugoslavia, and Greece were well-represented.

I confess I particularly enjoyed the recent encouter with Patrick Leigh Fermor who in his 80's is working on the last book of the trilogy about his travels in the 30's on foot from Holland to Constantinople. If you haven't read his first two, you need to.

Kaplan also includes a list of books that he considers essential to understanding these regions. It is excellent and is a good start to understanding these areas in depth.

Overall, excellent and gripping - which is hard in travel writing.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mediterranean Marvel, June 16, 2004

By	R. R. de Villiers "supercane" (Miami, Florida) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have become quite accustomed to reading insightful and throught provoking works by Robert Kaplan, but this one caught me by surprise. This work is an amazing achievement. Technically the book chronicles Kaplan's first venture into the Meditteranean, but it does much more than that. We see the Mediterranean through the eyes of a young man on eager to discover the world. What we also get however is the insight of a man who made this region his base for many years. The prose of journalist who has honed his craft for over twenty years. The reflections of a scholar who seems to have absorbed everything ever written in the english language about the places he visited.

We learn a great deal in this book. As is always the case with Kaplan we get an historical understanding for why a certain people are the way they are. It is astounding how much is commented upon and discussed in this slender volume. Kaplan has packed every page with his observations and reflections and while they are complex and replete with references to other works he somehow manages to keep his prose light and fluid. It is difficult to explain, but if you buy the book you will know what I am talking about.

Read this if you love the Mediterranean. Read it if you are fascinated by history or if you really enjoy profound lyrical prose.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Landscape Companion, April 2, 2005

By	Izaak VanGaalen (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Robert D Kaplan's latest book, "Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece," is written in the tradition of what was known in the 1930's as "landscape companions." The most well-known practitioners of this lost art were Robert Byron, David Talbot Rice, Lawrence Durrell, and Patrick Leigh Fermor.(They were all children of the British Empire.) This book recounts a journey Kaplan took shortly afer graduating from college in the mid 1970's. Kaplan writes: "With this journey, I acquired the habit of searching books linked to landscapes and seascapes through which I traveled. Reading became surgery; a way of dissecting the surrounding landscape and may own motivations for being there."

This is not the tourism of our present age, which is an escape from the drudgery of work; this is travel as work. Every landscape, every ruin suggests a book or an author. Every train trip or boat ride fills another notebook with observations and reflections. Travel teaches us about history - the rise and fall of civilizations, the ebb and flow of empires.

Kaplan's prose is on overdrive when travels through northern Tunisia. He recalls on a bus trip: "...the sculpted, liver-hued steppe of northern Tunisia and the pinks of the southern deserts, with their vast blotches of salt; interior tablelands racked by lonely, bone-chilling winds and the grave, museum light of late afternoons; the smoking and hacking coughs of the other passengers wrapped like ghosts in their caftans in the pre-dawn darkness, drooping woolen sleeves concealing their hands; the comforting smell of tea, fresh bread, sharp cheese, and harissa at half-empty cafes where the bus stopped after sunrise, with their loud music, scabby walls, and bitter espresso served in whiskey glasses only a third full; the just-boiled eggs that would keep my hands warm in the bus, bought at a cafe or given to me by a friendly passenger with whom I might share may sunflower seeds."

Kaplan has said elsewhere that waited until middle age to write this book in order to avoid the purple prose of youth; however, there are some delightful moments of recidivism.

In Tunisia, Kaplan uncovers the layers of history of this north African country, focusing mainly on the Carthaginian era and the subsequent conquest by Rome. Rome is still everywhere present in the landscape of Tunisia, from the roads and aqueducts to the Colosseum at El Djem, and Kaplan illustrates this vividly.

Also fascinating is his journey through Sicily. In Sicily, he sees the legacy of the Crusades. In the 1100's, two brothers from Normandy, Robert and Roger of Hauteville, conquered Moslem Sicily and created a modern multicultural state, in which Normans, Latins, Greeks, and Arabs could live together and prosper. The historian John Julius Norwich describes this era in depth in "The Kingdom in the Sun."

Kaplan then travels to Tivoli, east of Rome, where he explores Hadrian's Villa. "Hadrian's Villa was the Versailles of the ancient world." This was the subject of Eleanor Clark's 1950 book, "Rome and a Villa." To his villa, Hadrian brought thousands of books, statues, and reconstructed landscapes to remind him of all the cherished moments of his past. Kaplan compares him to Jefferson and his Monticello.

After leaving Tivoli, Kaplan sails to Split on the Dalmatian coast. Here he ponders the life and times of the emperor Diocletian, while walking through his palace: "If Hadrian was a romantic aesthete who encouraged the arts, Diocletian who ruled the Roman Empire 150 years after him, was a nuts-and-bolts pragmatist who spent most of his life in military camps." Diocletian was the first Roman emperor to rule the empire from the Balkans. It was not long until Rome was sacked in 476 and the Balkans were annexed by Justinian to the Byzantine Empire. After Byzantium, there were invasions by the Slavs and the Turks. Kaplan is very good when describing the mixture of people and civilizations that inhabit this part of the world; it was the subject of one of his previous books, "Balkan Ghosts."

The book ends with an entertaining visit to a spry 88-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor, a fellow literary traveler and adventurer, living on the Peloponnesian Peninsula. "The last pascha of the Mediterranean" was working on the third volume of his memoirs of a journey on foot from the Hook of Holland to what is now Istanbul. We can only hope that Kaplan is still traveling and writing when he reaches this stage of life's journey.