- Hardcover: 202 pages
- Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (April 19 2010)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0393076407
- ISBN-13: 978-0393076400
- Product Dimensions: 21.6 x 14.7 x 1.9 cm
- Shipping Weight: 381 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #771,078 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
The most delightful, intelligent, perception collection of human observations I've ever read: I don't know of anything like it.--Alberto Manguel, author of "A Reader on Reading"
Product Description
With her travel chronicles unparalleled in twentieth-century literature, Jan Morris s legendary books on Venice, Manhattan, and Trieste have made her one of our most beloved writers. Now reflecting back on over half a century, Morris has decided to write not about the destinations but about the people she has encountered. Whether writing as James or later as Jan, Morris introduces us to a panoply of memorable characters the Sherpa guide who first scaled Mt. Everest, the lascivious Manhattan cabbie, and the proverbial spy in the raincoat. She provides insightful portraits of the famous, such as Harry Truman and Jordan s King Hussein, and glimpses of the infamous, including Adolf Eichmann. Recalling human encounters on six continents, she paints a vibrant, funny, and moving picture of humanity. Ultimately, no figure comes into clearer focus than Morris herself, an astonishing chronicler of the human spectacle. Contact! is one book you ll want to carry with you wherever you go.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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4.0 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Far and away the best waiting room companion and thumb-twiddling preventer ever, Mar 29 2012
By Sharon Isch - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Contact!: A Book of Encounters (Hardcover)
Jan (formerly James) Morris is probably the best read travel writer in the world today. Over the years, her keenly observant eye has caught and her pen captured lots and lots of small but interesting little vignettes--some she's participated in, some just observed from a distance. This book is a compilation of hundreds of them--some just a few lines long, none longer than a page. Read one, stop, stare off into space and think about it a bit, move on to the next, then think on it too. Chances are, every now and then, one of Morris's encounters will bring to mind something equally interesting but long forgotten from your own past. And maybe you'll go home and write it down and before long you'll be well into creating your own journal of encounters...a reminder that your own life's been an interesting one, too.One of the most useful things about this otherwise randomly assembled collection, particularly for travelers, is the index. Just pick a topic and you'll find the page numbers for all encounters that touch on that topic. For example, here's one titled Only in London: "I was sitting over my croissant and the morning paper in a coffee shop in Marylebone High Street when a tall elegant man in late middle age walked stiffly in and ordered a cup of coffee. He wore a long dark coat and a trilby tilted over his brow, and I rather think spectacles were inclined towards the end of his nose. He looked to me as though he had enjoyed perhaps rather too good a dinner the night before, but he emanated an air of unconcerned, if not actually oblivious, composure. I put him down for some mildly eccentric and very likely scholarly earl, of the Irish peerage, perhaps, and thought to myself that only in London could one still see such a genial figure, at once so urbane and so well used, more or less direct from the eighteenth century. 'Know who that was?' said the proprietor, when the man had walked perhaps a little shakily out again. 'That was Peter O'Toole. Remember him in Lawrence of Arabia?'"
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Any who have enjoyed her nonfiction will relish this!, Aug 8 2010
By Midwest Book Review - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Contact!: A Book of Encounters (Hardcover)
Contact! A Book of Encounters offers moments of prose that capture moments of travel encounters in a paragraph or two. From Harry Truman to an Indian civil servant and an Egyptian beggar, any interested in either travel or the human condition will find this a fine survey of Jan Morris' many encounters on the path to exploring world cultures. Any who have enjoyed her nonfiction will relish this!
4 of 7 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
Short encounters, April 27 2010
By wogan "the book reader" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Contact!: A Book of Encounters (Hardcover)
Jan Morris has lived an interesting life, she is a gender re-assigned woman, who published under her former name, "James Morris" until the 1970s. She writes in 'Contact' that she has written little of people, so this book is her remembrances. There is no chronological or geographic order which creates a jumpy reading and thought processes.Most of the very short writings tell of encounters, but there seems to be a condescending attitude to most that she encounters. There is nothing in each description of the essence or atmosphere that a reader can identify with.
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