The World: Travels 1950-2000

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.)

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.