The Happy Ant-heap and Other Pieces - Hardcover

Lewis, Norman

4.03

33 ratings by Goodreads

9780224051712: The Happy Ant-heap and Other Pieces

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224051717 ISBN 13: 9780224051712

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1998

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This collection of journalism and essays, escapism, bred in a confined childhood, is responsible for his incurable taste for the exotic. Many of the pieces here have been published before, and Norman Lewis recalls some of the extraordinary journeys he has take in the course of his life: to Liberia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Spain, Greece, Austria, Burma, Cuba, New Guinea, India and Italy. He pays his respects to a smoked ancestor in Italian Jaya, watches a trial by red-hot iron in Liberia, recalls his part in the shambolic American invasion of Italy in September 1943, meets a Gestapo chief in Austria, describes his friendship with the anti-Mafia crusader Boris Giuliano, and encounters a born-again astronaut in the Honduras.

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Review:

This retrospective collection from Norman Lewis is culled from over 70 years of travel. Containing new as well as previously published work, it recalls some of his most memorable journeys throughout Europe, South America, Asia and the Pacific. With such an astonishing reach, both in terms of time and distance, Lewis convincingly provides the reader not only with a magical diversity of geography, but also with a comprehensive slice of history. His vast experience inevitably means that one story sparks off another. Investigating aphrodisiacs in Liberia reminds him of Ernest Hemingway's impotence for instance, and this discursive approach, along with his unquenchable human interest in his subjects, is one of the great pleasures and strengths of the book. Whether he is charting the despoliation of a Spanish fishing village by the arrival of mass tourism, chronicling the trials of Mafioso in Sicily or claiming to be one of the few people to have been tipped by a taxi driver in Burma--"an unforgettable moment of illumination between the cultural and spiritual divide between east and west"--his responses remain fresh and undulled. And all this despite the fact Lewis, more than anyone, can legitimately claim to have "been there, seen it" a hundred times over. Although one, of course, doubts that he ever bought the T-shirt. --Nick Wroe

Book Description:

This is the perfect book to go travelling with this summer: off-beat, uninhibited and wise' Robert McCrum, Observer

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