Around the World With Mark Twain - Hardcover

Cooper, Robert

3.85

27 ratings by Goodreads

9781559705226: Around the World With Mark Twain

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1559705221 ISBN 13: 9781559705226

Publisher: Arcade Publishing, 2000

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Chronicles the author's international odyssey from Cleveland to Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Afria as he followed Mark Twain's 1895 journey around the world at a time in which Twain faced financial ruin, personal loss, and a fading career. 15,000 first printing.

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About the Author:

" Robert Cooper is an American writer who retired as professor of sociology and education at the Hebrew University. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife, who accompanied him for most of his journey in pursuit of Mark Twain."

From Kirkus Reviews:

A serviceable travelogue of a circumnavigation in search of Samuel Clemens.In the summer of 1895, desperately ill and nearly bankrupt after his publishing company failed, the 60-year-old writer Samuel Clemens, alias Mark Twain, decided to fall back on his storytelling skills and make a fortune anew by traveling around the world giving public readings. The lecture circuit was extremely lucrative in the 19th century, and Twain no doubt had the examples of Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde (who both reaped small fortunes off their reading tours) in mind. In the end, although it took a further toll on his health, it was a shrewd decision: not only did Twain gather material for several books and hundreds of newspaper articles while barnstorming across the South Pacific, Australia, India, and South Africa, but he also cemented his reputation as an international celebrity. An American journalist living in Jerusalem, Cooper had the happy notion of retracing Twain's footsteps, an idea that suffers somewhat in the execution only because Twain's accounts, often outrageously tongue in cheek, are so much livelier and better written than Cooper's. The latter has an unfortunate habit of casting his narrative in the present tense--We gaze at a log with the bones of victims stuffed into the crevices, or We return to the car and continue slowly along the secluded track--and employing mawkish mood-setting devices better suited to a television travel documentary than to a prose work. In the main, however, he is a reliable and sympathetic narrator whose journey, although unremarkable on its own, provides a vehicle for uncovering lesser-known aspects of Twain's life and work. If nothing else, readers may be inspired after reading Cooper to turn to Twain's own writings on his voyage, especially Following the Equator, with its sharp observations on the world of a century ago. Well conceived but imperfectly executed, Cooper's narrative suffers from the inevitable comparison to Twain's own--but he is well worth the cost of his passage all the same. -- Copyright � 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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