They Went: The Art and Craft of Travel Writing (The Writer's Craft) - Hardcover

Frazier, Ian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395563364 ISBN 13: 9780395563366

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1991

Synopsis

Six renowned travel writers describe the creative process involved in this popular form of narrative, drawing on their own works to reveal how to create a sense of place

About this title

About the Author

Ian Frazier is the author of On the Rez, Great Plains, Family, Coyote v. Acme, and, most recently, Dating Your Mom.

From Publishers Weekly

These essays, which originated as a series of lectures at the New York Public Library, have been carefully edited by Zinsser ( On Writing Well ) so as to preserve the energy and liveliness of the writers' speech. Although the authors entertain with travel anecdotes, some charming, some hair-raising, their insights into the genre of travel writing are unextraordinary. For Mark Salzman, who taught English in China, a "bleak or beautiful" landscape means nothing "until a person walks into it, and then what interests me is how a person behaves in that place." On a more practical note, Ian Frazier concludes that the only acceptable mode of transportation for seeing the U.S. is a car, even though his driving tour through the Great Plains "sent two and a half tons of carbon into the sunny skies." Because the authors have written elsewhere about their travels, the references here to their experiences feel truncated. Still, these fragments can be engrossing, particularly Tobias Schneebaum's account of a tribe of cannibals in Indonesia. Set down in their midst by helicopter--stark naked so as to better assimilate--Schneebaum knew not whether he would be welcomed and fed or welcomed and eaten.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0395563364
• ISBN 13: 9780395563366
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 184