Travels

Starred review from September 15, 2011
Bowles (191099) was an American writer and traveler known famously for his prolonged residence in Morocco and for using the exoticism of that locale as a major setting for his fiction, including his most famous novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949). It seems that one who is both writer and traveler is compelled, if not obligated, to write travelogues, and more than 40 of Bowles' travel pieces are gathered together in this omnibus for the first time. In all of his writing, Bowles was the last word on elegance and sensuality; such writerly properties were natural to him, those two traits imbuing every noun, verb, and modifier he put to paper. As this book's subtitle indicates, these pieces range chronologically over nearly a half century, but the high quality of observation and expression remains consistent throughout. Times in North Africa as Bowles witnessed them changed slowly, and in an article written for Holiday magazine in 1950, about the Moroccan town of Fez, Bowles could honestly say, There are elderly men in the town who have never to this day seen an automobile. But in a piece written about Tangier for the Independent in 1990, he finds that with that city's increase in population and construction of new buildings, The Tangier I know exists only in memory. A special book for all travel-literature collections.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)