The Bottom Line
- The book to get your travel juices flowing
- Mayes gives you a great sense of place
- Not everyone has the money or resources to travel like this
Description
- Get a sense of what it's like to get to know a place on the map.
- Perhaps you'll find a destination you'll cherish after reading A Year in the World
- You'll feel like you're there, even if you can't afford going off to Europe for a year.
Guide Review - A Year in the World: Journeys of a Passionate Traveller Review
A Year in the World is a collection of essays on places visited at different times, involving lot of slow travel. Slow travel means staying rooted for a while so that culture can seep slowly into one's veins. It's not difficult, but it's a completely different mind set than I see almost everyday in my e-mail. Way too many of you demand assistance in planning the perfect two day trip to see everything you have to see in Italy or the Iberian Peninsula. Really want a place to enchant you? Slow down. Be like Frances Mayes--rent a house for a week or more. Sit down and probe the book's intro if you still are unsure. If you have the same feelings about travel as Ms. Mayes, buy the book--and a very small suitcase.
Mayes entices us with stories of what makes the locals different from us--from the use of the corno to provide protection against the malocchio, the evil eye, to the story of how the Arab trade routes brought coffee to Italy from Africa.
Mayes not only captures a fine sense of places she's visited, but fills our heads with little ditties we'll soon be recalling--travel facts, connections, and anecdotes we'll remember and think about the next time we travel.
And we will travel. Won't we?
