The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrims' Progress: Being Some Account of the Steamship Quaker City's Pleasure Excursion to Europe and the Holy Land (The World's Best Reading) - Hardcover

Twain, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0895773392 ISBN 13: 9780895773395

Publisher: Reader's Digest Association, 1990

Synopsis

Based on a series of letters Mark Twain wrote from Europe to newspapers in San Francisco and New York as a roving correspondent, The Innocents Abroad (1869) is a burlesque of the sentimental travel books popular in the mid-nineteenth century. Twain's fresh and humorous perspective on hallowed European landmarks lacked reverence for the past-the ancient statues of saints on the Cathedral of Notre Dame are "battered and broken-nosed old fellows" and tour guides "interrupt every dream, every pleasant train of thought, with their tiresome cackling." Equally irreverent about American manners (including his own) as he is about European attitudes, Twain ultimately concludes that, for better or worse, "human nature is very much the same all over the world."

About this title

From the Publisher:

14 1.5-hour cassettes

From the Inside Flap:

The Innocents Abroad is one of the most prominent and influential travel books ever written about Europe and the Holy Land. In it, the collision of the American "New Barbarians" and the European "Old World" provides much comic fodder for Mark Twain--and a remarkably perceptive lens on the human condition. Gleefully skewering the ethos of American tourism in Europe, Twain's lively satire ultimately reveals just what it is that defines cultural identity. As Twain himself points out, "Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." And Jane Jacobs observes in her Introduction, "If the reader is American, he may also find himself on a tour of his own psyche."

About this edition

• Publisher: Reader's Digest Association
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0895773392
• ISBN 13: 9780895773395
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432