AA Gill is Away (The Hungry Student) - Hardcover

Gill, Adrian

4.18

788 ratings by Goodreads

9780304362158: AA Gill is Away (The Hungry Student)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0304362158 ISBN 13: 9780304362158

Publisher: W&N, 2002

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A A Gill is probably the most read columnist in Britain. Every weekend he entertains readers of the Sunday Times with his biting observations on television and his unsparing, deeply knowledgeable restaurant reviews. Even those who want to hate him agree: A A Gill is hopelessly, painfully funny. He is one of a tiny band of must-read journalists and it is always a disappointment when the words �AA Gill is Away� appear at the foot of his column. This book is the fruit of those absences: 22 long travel pieces that belie his reputation as a mere style journalist and master of vitriol: this is travel writing of the highest quality and ambition.

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Review:

AA Gill: waspish restaurant critic and destroyer of schlock TV, a figure who never comes across as a sensitive soul in his columns for the Sunday Times and GQ. His new collection of travel reportage, AA Gill is Away, frequently warns against travelling with preconceptions, though, and so it is no surprise to peel off that veneer and find a different sort of writer in this book.

Gill's assignments have taken him around the world in pursuit of the great stand-first: a visit to the worst place in the world (the Aral Sea), how to write a porno film in a weekend and the joys of owning a Rolls Royce. In accordance with what is clearly a whistle-stop lifestyle, his book takes us all over the world: to Sudan, Bethlehem, Los Angeles, Patagonia--and Wilmslow in Cheshire. His writing is usually acute and provocative, and the various African articles are particularly sharp as he rails against the creeping colonialism perpetuated by aid agencies and international finance, and the crass priorities of drug companies whose profits are in Prozac and not cures for malaria or sleeping sickness.

Inevitably with a ragbag collection of this sort, the quality of the pieces vary. At times, you feel that Gill has dragged out his copy for his editors, and at others there is a surfeit of metaphors in which Gill tries too hard to be funny. But his trademark fury polishes his prose, which usually retains its sharpness and succeeds in conveying the thrill of immediacy without which no travel writing can sparkle. --Toby Green

Review:

His reporting here is spot-on: clear-eyed, informative and compassionate ... His work is always ... surprising, original, stimulating and, for that reason, always worth reading (Lynn Barber SUNDAY TELEGRAPH)

It was when he was away that he was at his best ... His walkabouts around the world were driven by an insatiable curiosity to explore and acquaint himself with cultures he knew nothing about, to rejoice in the diversity of the extraordinary world we live in, and to use his writing as a tool for change ... If A. A. Gill is to be away for a while, we should all take up the baton he has left behind and make sure we are richer, not poorer, for his absence (Stephen Daldry)

'In this collection of twenty-four accounts of trips abroad he comes across as both funny and compassionate' (DAILY EXPRESS)

'Imagine Evelyn Waugh reborn as one of Nick Hornby's endearingly superficial protagonists, and you have London's Sunday Times television and restaurant critic Gill: droll, astute, irritable, irritating and always cleaver-sharp . . . it's his bald foreignness that makes him such a skilled marksman. That, and the fact that he himself is such an original' (PUBLISHERS WEEKLY)

'Sometimes shocking, usually smart, always entertaining' (KIRKUS REVIEWS)

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