ON THE SHORES OF THE MEDITERRANEAN by Eric Newby

A classic travel book by a legendary travel writer. This is used book in average condition: it has bee read several times; pages are clean but browning with age; cover shows age and wear; looks a bit worn but perfectly readable and cheap. See photos for cover blurb and sample pages. The book in the photos is the actual book you will receive - enjoy!

Amazon blurb: A journey clockwise round the entire length of the Mediterranean littoral, starting and ending with Naples, resulted in this splendid record, packed full of history, topography, offbeat encounters and musings on past travels. It has all the characteristic exuberance and humour of his classic A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. (Kirkus UK)

Veteran travel writer Newby makes a witty and engaging tour guide to the port cities and coastal regions of the Mediterranean, but all too often he turns off his personal voice and reads canned material we could find in Baedeker, Michelin, or even Fielding. He's at his best in Italy (Naples, Venice), where he speaks the language and knows his way around. His prose, which is always crisp and serviceable, takes on a specially earthy verve when he describes his (mis)adventures in Naples, with its homicidal drivers, its Autonomous Collective of Smugglers, its splendid horse-drawn funeral coaches, its innumerable whores (some of whom, hard-pressed by competition from male prostitutes and transvestites, have business cards pinned on their doors with the inscription PUTTANA VERA - genuine prostitute). Once outside Italy, Newby has his ups and downs. His trip through Yugoslavia and Albania is often engrossing (the colorful, highly alcoholic burial of an old lady in Slovenia, a nervous confrontation with an Albanian tour bus driver, who is actually a powerful and nasty Party spy); but thereafter, in Greece, Turkey, Israel, Tunis, Morocco, and Spain, he pads unmercifully. He inserts set pieces on the life of Ali Pasha, the bazaar in Istanbul, the harem at Topkapi, the excavations at Troy, the Pyramids, the Punic War, the Holy Week rituals in Seville, etc. As if straining to meet a page quota, he pours out information, sometimes lively, sometimes quite flat and derivative, and not always reliable (Alexander the Great did not reach "the borders of China and Tibet," Ashkenazim are not all "ultra-orthodox" or "usually poor"). Still, even in the duller sections Newby will show flashes of his cranky, amusing, sharp-minded self.

Book Details

Code: SKU467

Condition: See notes and photos below

Binding: Paperback

Pages: 447

Published: 1984 by Harvill Press

ISBN: 0330288261

Postage: $6.90

Price: AUD $5.00