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The author who unforgettably captured the experience of starting a new life in Tuscany in bestselling travel memoirs expands her horizons to immerse herself--and her readers--in the sights, aromas, and treasures of twelve new special places. A Year in the World is vintage Frances Mayes--a celebration of the allure of travel, of serendipitous pleasures found in unlikely locales, of memory woven into the present, and of a joyous sense of quest. An ideal travel companion, Frances Mayes brings to the page the curiosity of an intrepid explorer, remarkable insights into the wonder of the everyday, and a compelling narrative style that entertains as it informs. With her beloved Tuscany as a home base, Mayes travels to Spain, Portugal, France, the British Isles, and to the Mediterranean world of Turkey, Greece, the South of Italy, and North Africa. In Andalucia, she relishes the intersection of cultures. She cooks in Portugal, gathers ideas in the gardens of England and Scotland, takes a literary pilgrimage to Burgundy, discovers an ideal place to live in Mantova, and explores the essential Moroccan city of Fez. She rents houses among ordinary residents, shops at neighborhood markets, wanders the back streets, and everywhere contemplates the concept of home. While in Greece, she follows the classic Homeric voyage across the Aegean, lives in a bougainvillea-draped stone house in Crete, and then drives deep into the Mani. In Turkey with friends, she sails the ancient coast, hiking to archaeological sites and snorkeling over sunken Byzantine towns. Weaving together personal perceptions and informed commentary on art, architecture, history, landscape, and social and culinary traditions of each area, Mayes brings the immediacy of life in her temporary homes to the reader. An illuminating and passionate book that will be savored by all who loved Under the Tuscan Sun, A Year in the World is travel writing at its peak.
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When I saw this book was being published, I immediately put it on my must-read list. I ordered it and decided to make it my entree for summer reading. By nibbling on it and picking off pieces of it, I've managed to make it last for over a month. In many ways, it was a perfect summer read, for a person who couldn't travel herself. Mayes took me to places I've always wanted to go, Portugal, Spain, Greece, even Turkey and North Africa.
But the book annoyed me, too. Mayes seemed hypercritical, judgmental off-and-on about her accomodations and her meals. She jumped around while describing her setting so that I felt like I was looking at her world through the eye of a jerky video camera.
Yet she also wrote poetically at times, describing foods she ate and places she visited so beautifully that I felt I'd eaten, too, that I'd travelled with her. The last chapter is a wonderful summing up of the need to travel that could equally well apply to the need to read as well. Mayes reminds us of T.S. Eliot's idea that in voyaging, we come back to our beginnings and understand our own world for the first time. A good reason to travel. A good reason to read.