A Long Way from St. Louie - Softcover

McElroy, Colleen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566890594 ISBN 13: 9781566890595

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 1997

Synopsis

"Grandmother Anna Belle Lee: 'Chile, they got some of us everywhere.' Thus began my wanderlust."

About this title

Review

Colleen McElroy's travel memoir covers a lifetime of wanderlust, from driving to California on Route 66 as a child, to motorcycling across the Australian desert in her late fifties. With a poet's precision and lyricism, McElroy describes her actions and reaction to the various landscapes and people episodically, rather than presenting the details of her visits in a straight narrative, as done in more conventional travelogues. This strategy of presenting short vignettes is most effective when she winds her journeys around her most personal thoughts to those of her family, her creative life, or her race - when she, for example, moves back and forth in time and place to explore her love of dancing. However, the frequent leaps often leave us wanting more, such as in the case of her romance in Yugoslavia, which is compellingly begun but then is quickly curtailed and summarized in order to move on. Nevertheless, we are in skilled hands as McElroy contemplates, for instance, the many different cab rides in dozens of countries, threading together quite inventively commonalties and distinctions. Or her outrage at an American couple in Japan whose vicious insensitivity goes beyond the "ugly American" stereotype. An extremely sympathetic and engaging writer, McElroy begins to inject some of her own wanderlust into us. -- From Independent Publisher

McElroy's travel memoirs presents a black woman's experiences with world travel, creating not a dry observational piece but a spirited focus on a heritage of travel and a woman's search for adventures and cultural insights. The result is unique to travel literature - and contains much food for thought. -- Midwest Book Review

From Kirkus Reviews

A lovely, lyrical memoir of an African-American woman's travels through life. McElroy (Queen of the Ebony Isles, etc.; English/Univ. of Washington) is a professor and poet with a yen for travel that goes back to her youth as an army brat and has continued throughout her life. Looking back at that life now, McElroy finds much that is amusing, thought-provoking, poignant, and above all beautiful to relate to her readers. This is not so much a travelogue, as the author herself admits, as a rumination, a meditation, a poem. McElroy tells us about learning to dance in St. Louis, about her experiences as a university student in postWW II Germany, her encounters with butterflies and intestinal ailments in Mexico, the limitations of tour groups and guides (``Here is the burial place of Saint What's-his-halo, and in that crypt, What's-his-sword the Great''), the difficulty of getting to Ulcinj in Yugoslavia (``An interesting place . . . but no one ever goes there''), and the importance of a smile in Japan (``a land where everything was compact and space was at a premium''). She writes prose poems about the midnight market in Lima, Peru, and a series of lyrical pieces, ``The Moon and Malaysia,'' that flow in and out of time and space. And through it all, McElroy's marvelous sense of humor shines out and her deeply felt sense of her otherness--as an American abroad and as a black woman everywhere--colors her musings, giving them texture and depth. This is a stunning piece of writing, and a fitting summary of a life led to the fullest. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 1566890594
• ISBN 13: 9781566890595
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200