Book description
One of the great derisive monuments to the imbecilities of the
tourist experience, Mark Twain's (1835-1910) account of his tour with
a group of fellow Americans around the sights of Europe is both
hilarious and touching, Twain's exasperation and dismay at the phoney
and exploitative being matched by his excitement and pleasure in the
genuinely beautiful.
Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and
back through the centuries but also back into ideas and worlds
frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few
reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers
who saw astounding things: Great civilisations, walls of ice,
violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of
birds and flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the
world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite
strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts
and in which so much was still to be discovered.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), better known by his pen name
Mark Twain, was an American humorist, novelist, writer and lecturer.
Twain's greatest contribution to American literature is generally
considered to be his novel The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn
.
