World [Hardcover]

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.

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
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"Perhaps the best descriptive writer of our time.

THE WORLD is a magnum opus by the finest travel writer in the world. Ranging from Manhattan to Venice, Oxford to the Middle East, and Paris to South Africa, the book provides Jan Morris's eyewitness accounts of such seminal moments as the first successful ascent of Everest, the historic Eichmann trial, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the handover of Hong Kong. Dividing the volume into five decades, Morris presents history with an unparalleled dramatic flair, creating a riveting portrait of the twentieth century, from the political idealism of the postwar years to its more recent tensions and excesses. As much a celebratory book as a swan song that puts Morris's extraordinary career in a unique historical perspective, The World promises to create an entirely new generation of Jan Morris readers.