Eothen: Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East [Paperback]

A brilliant descriptive writer, Kinglake tells you every detail about what he's viewing along the way, along with the emotional side of traveling through history. Standing on a hilltop, possibly the precise spot where Homer did, that inspired his works, Kinglake takes you there with him, describing unchanged landscape and the flood of emotions that will definately touch you. When he arrived at the Holy lands, it left me in tears, and a great yearning to plan my own pilgrimage there.

It amazed me that this man made it through his travels safe and sound. He survived the plague which was rampant at that time. It was frightening to read about, let alone live through it! Which he tells about in depth. The extreme fear everyone lived in. Yet despite all the precautions taken, it still managed to seek you out and take you into it's unimaginable numbers. Day after day, he watched cavalcades of funeral processions pass through the streets, from sunrise to well beyond sunset. How he fooled it, I'll never know. He always seemed to be in contact with plague stricken people, and even thought for a time that he too had fallen victim when symptoms began to appear.

Through this journal you'll learn about the people of this era and before. The Ottomans, Bedouins, Monks, Jews, Catholics, and Christians. Aristocrats, such as Lady Hester, Sheiks, and Pasha's. Most interesting was Kinglake himself. Just who was this man? He tells little about his own background. But as you read, this intelligent, confident, diplomatic Englishman unfolds before you. With a sense of humor few can match!

This book was gifted to me, and sparked the desire to be a part of what Kinglake and others knew about life. Not to let each day pass by caught up in mundane routines, but live each one to the fullest.

Full of humour, the book is as British as they come with such sensitive nuances about the subject matter including disease, women, customs and issues of religion in the holy land.

I'm still looking for this brand of hero inside and out but don't think he's that common except as a carricature. Did Kinglake's world and attitude really exist?

The gruff reply was "More Kinglake." This rather puzzled our aspiring author -- Kinglake's only other book was his two-volume "Invasion of the Crimea."

After a casual search of more than twenty years, I finally located this two-volume set through Amazon, and -- guess what -- it's terrific. It's even better than Eothen, because it has a serious purpose. It is marvellously written, and numinously intelligent. It needs to be brought back into print.