The World: Travels 1950-2000 [Hardcover]

Jan Morris (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2003

Ranging from Manhattan to Venice, and Oxford to the Middle East, this portrait of the 20th-century contains Jan Morris's eyewitness accounts of such seminal moments as the first successful ascent of Everest, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the historic Eichmann trial.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This collection of essays and excerpts from the globe-spanning career of Morris, one of the most admired and imitated travel writers alive, is fantastic in its depth and breadth. But whether it also succeeds as a portrait of the world in the years 1950-2000 depends on readers' response to Morris's impressionistic style. Morris had the good fortune of beginning her career (when she was still James Morris) writing for two great British newspapers, the Times and the Guardian, when the British Empire still spanned the world, and she's spent much of her career writing about former colonies. But she is much more than a chronicler of empire. This work finds Morris in Atlanta, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Capetown, Kyoto, Odessa, La Paz, Sydney and Addis Ababa, to name just a few cities from which she files reports in the first two decades of the period alone. Her style of reporting, increasingly abstract as time passes (and increasingly joyous following her sex-change operation in Morocco, a story she tells from a touchingly wry distance), finds her ignoring politicians and celebrities in favor of the wisdom of cab drivers and the tone of street signs. Her job, as she writes, is "simply to grin like a dog and run about the city." A brief, pessimistic epilogue aside, Morris likes what she has seen in the world. Inevitably, her many devoted readers will be disappointed by the necessary brevity of most of the excerpts here (she has written more than 30 books), but as an introduction to the writer's luminous prose, there is no better place to start. 6 illus.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Morris is one of the world's most preeminent travel writers, having been at it for a half-century. The author of several books, this Welshwoman has nevertheless made the travel essay an important aspect of her oeuvre. Her talent in the short-space evocation of place is given ultimate tribute in this magnificent collection of her essays, arranged chronologically, which span not only the world, as the title indicates, but also--as the subtitle reveals--her entire writing career. Jan Morris began life as James Morris, and her sex-change operation is discussed nearly halfway through the book in the essay "Casablanca: A Change of Sex." Before that, she was James and wrote as James; indeed, the very first essay in this collection is about the first ascent of Mount Everest, by Edmund Hilary in 1953, with whose expedition James Morris served as the only accompanying reporter (for the Times of London). Morris' immaculate and well-turned prose emphasizes her self-appraisal: "I am by nature an outsider, by profession an onlooker, by inclination a loner, and I have spent my life looking at things and happenings, and observing their effect on my own sensibility." Her eye for the telling detail is stiletto-keen, and her sensitivity to calling things as they are but never doing so in a condescending fashion remains undiminished. An important book for all travel collections. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (November 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393052087
• ISBN-13: 978-0393052084
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #385,301 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A journey through time and place, July 2, 2004

By 

Jerry Sanchez (New York) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The World: Travels 1950-2000 (Hardcover)

This book is excellent. The author's descriptions of the locations she visited over the past fifty years as a journalist are insightful and, in my mind, fairly accurate. She is more than a travel writer. Morris is an artist, taking what she sees in the places and people of foreign places and turning them into vivid expressions on the page for the reader to both visualize and experience. Morris also does a great job at not only explaining the places she writes about as she sees them, but also at explaining the history behind where she is and the significance of it all. This book not only is a journey across the vast world we live in but is a great way to study the history of the post-modern twentieth century world. The only confusing part, however, is the sex change she underwent in Morocco in the 1970s. I wish I would have known that going into the book because the photo of the author on the back flap undeniably shows a woman, but for the first half of the book the author was constantly referred to as a man. The whole thing had me confused, but became more understandable after Morris' trip to Casablanca where he/she came out of a surgeon's basement literally a new . . . uh, person. (an interesting chapter in the book). Despite the interesting surgery, though, this is a well-written book worth reading.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pure joy, July 31, 2004

By 

B. Schilling "Barbara Holland" (Bluemont, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The World: Travels 1950-2000 (Hardcover)

I stalled on coming to the end of this, but consoled myself that I can start over again tomorrow.

Jan/James Morris is the next-best thing to having been everywhere myself. He/she tells us everything we want to know and nothing we don't, concentrating on people, food, drink, buildings, scenery, bars and a splash of history, everything we would have noticed if we too had been there at the right time. What a wonderful way to see the world.

(Warning: the squeamish may want to skip the chapter called Casablanca.)