jeffergray

There Are Better "Natural Catastrophe" Books Out There, May 29 2004

With all these other comprehensive, excellent reviews around, is there a need to say anything more? Perhaps, if it can be said somewhat more concisely than the other reviewers have done. The central disappointment I experienced with Winchester's book was that I came to it expecting another good read in the "Natural Catastrophe" genre - you know, the books that followed in the wake of Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" and Sebastian Junger's "The Perfect Storm." (I suspect the popularity of the movie "Titanic" was also partly responsible for turning this type of book into a hot publishing sub-category.) The essence of this genre's appeal, of course, is the same as that of the 1970's disaster… Read more

Intermittently Entertaining, But Overrated, July 18 2003

I very much enjoyed William Dalrymple's "From the Holy Mountain," but this book was a disappointment. It was Dalrymple's first book, and if you consider it as a novice's starting effort and read it with an appropriately moderate level of expectations, you probably won't be disappointed. But the book was overpraised by the British press, and the effusive blurbs on the cover and inside led me to expect something significantly better than what Dalrymple actually produced.

"In Xanadu" recounts a 12,000-mile journey, four-month journey from Jerusalem to Beijing that Dalrymple took in the summer of 1986. That bare description of the trip should alert you to one of the book's main problems… Read more

A New Yorker (Belatedly) Discovers America, April 3 2003

I came to this book with anticipation, but also with some reservations. The anticipation derived from my admiration for Zinsser's elegant small classic, "On Writing Well." I thought it would be interesting to see this well-known writing instructor show what he could do in recounting visits to a series of "iconic" American natural or historic sites.

My reservations stemmed from the basic premise underlying the book - Zinsser's decision to visit, for the first time in his life, 15 sites that are widely considered to reflect something fundamental about America's sense of its national identity. I knew enough about Zinsser to guess that in 1990-91, when he made the trips described in this… Read more