This Paperback Book item from Penguin Classics was reviewed on 7-Oct-2008.
Search ISBN:0140436081 offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. A Tramp Abroad (Penguin Classics) Reference Book. Classifications : General Biographies & Memoirs Subjects Books General Twain, Mark ( T ) Authors, A-Z Literature & Fiction Subjects Books Paperback Twain, Mark ( T ) Authors, A-Z Literature & Fiction Subjects Books 19t . Click the following link to view the cover of A Tramp Abroad (Penguin Classics). Related topics: General. Subjects. Books. General. Twain, Mark. ( T ). Authors, A-Z. Subjects. Books. Paperback. requestid: 3c02975a-0f7d-4800-8d94-db7b264fc147
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1) Paperback Book A Tramp Abroad (Penguin Classics) by Penguin Classics. Certain books never get old and can be read again and again. This is one of them!¤ 2) Paperback Book A Tramp Abroad (Penguin Classics) by Penguin Classics. I listened to the audio version of both books, and will admit up front that the narrator for this one is not one of my favorites, but I got past that after a while.
Twain seemed to be "padding" the narrative with an awful lot of folktales and legend, rather than his own experience. There´s a lengthy (and highly annoying) "fantasy" sequence - I suppose he was trying for parody - as well. I found myself fast-forwarding through almost a full cassette of a gory description of two deuls (near the beginning); he delights in recounting grisly mountaineering stories later on during the novel. The storyline ended abruptly at the end of cassette 11 of 13; the last two were the appendix, which I skipped.
I really liked "Innocents" and am planning on purchasing "Following the Equator" (I looked through it at a bookstore and it seemed pretty interesting), but I wish I´d skipped this one. Three stars for the humor when he actually describes his own experiences.¤ 3) Paperback Book A Tramp Abroad (Penguin Classics) by Penguin Classics. This is a single book, not the whole set and the book is in less then usable quality. The seller was to send return address materials and has not as of 12/19.¤ 4) Paperback Book A Tramp Abroad (Penguin Classics) by Penguin Classics. It´s fascinating to compare my own experiences, having lived now 3 years in Germany, to those of an American from 125 years earlier. I´ve been learning to speak German, and his Appendix on the "awful" German language was hilarious. In poking fun at German grammar (e.g., long sentences), he purposely commits the same errors in his own writing. The scene "riding" the glacier down the Alps was so funny I had tears running down my face. It´s amazing to think that it was written in 1879, when America was barely a century old, and the insights and perceptions then can be incredibly, eerily similar to either my or "typical" American´s attitudes today.
I´d recommend it to anyone, but particularly to anyone visiting or living in Europe. It´s way funnier than his "Innocents Abroad", which is also a good read on travel in Europe.¤ 5) Paperback Book A Tramp Abroad (Penguin Classics) by Penguin Classics. A Tramp Abroad is the third and least successful of the travel books written by the pen of Mark Twain.
In this book we follow Twain as he tours Germany, Italy, France and Switzerland. I found the early chapters chronicling his visit to Heidelburg University; hilarious visits to opera houses and tale tales such as the Blue Jay yarn to be well done.
The longest section of the book deals with Twain´s alpine climbing adventures in Switzerland. This material is interesting but goes on a bit too long for the modern reader.
This is a fine book and deserves to be read and enjoyed by a wider readership that better known but lesser Twain novels and
travel writing,
I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys listening to a great author recount his peregrinations through Europe in a leisurely and informative manner.¤ 6) Paperback Book A Tramp Abroad (Penguin Classics) by Penguin Classics. If any one writer stands at the heart of American literature it is Mark Twain. With his wild head of hair, thick mustache, and brilliant white suit, he is more recognizable than any living writer, and in his time he was, as he himself put it, "the most conspicuous person on the planet." He is certainly America´s most popular writer--arguably the most popular American writer the world over--and the greatest humorist we have ever known, a marvelous teller of tall tales, a genial entertainer, a consistently quotable sage. He is also one of our finest satirists, who penned withering attacks on hypocrisy and corruption (he once said he wrote with "a pen warmed up in hell") and in his most serious works, such as Huckleberry Finn and Pudd´nhead Wilson, he cast a profound light on the darkest recesses of the nation´s psyche.
The twenty-nine-volume Oxford Mark Twain is a major literary event. In addition to gathering together a superb collection of Twain´s works, editor Shelley Fisher Fishkin has commissioned some of our most eminent living writers to introduce each volume with their personal insights and experiences of Twain. Readers will find, for instance, Toni Morrison reflecting on Huckleberry Finn, Kurt Vonnegut on Connecticut Yankee, Arthur Miller on Twain´s Autobiography, Roy Blount Jr. on The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, E.L. Doctorow on Tom Sawyer, Willie Morris on Life on the Mississippi, Garry Wills on Christian Science, and Cynthia Ozick on The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays. Other writers include Gore Vidal, Ursula K. Le Guin, George Plimpton, Ward Just, Russell Banks, Bobbie Ann Mason, Malcolm Bradbury, Nat Hentoff, Sherley Anne Williams, Justin Kaplan, Walter Mosley, Erica Jong, Judith Martin ("Miss Manners"), David Bradley, Frederick Pohl, Mordecai Richler, Lee Smith, Anne Bernays, Charles Johnson, Fred Busch, and actor Hal Holbrook (who introduces Twain´s collected speeches). And each volume includes an afterword by a noted scholar--such as Louis J. Budd, Victor A. Doyno, Leslie A. Fiedler, James A. Miller, Linda Wagner-Martin, Forrest Robinson, M. Thomas Inge, Fred Kaplan, Susan Harris, and David L. Smith--who place the work in the context of Twain´s career and the literary and social climate of the time. In effect, the set gathers together an literary who´s who, all of whom reflect on what Mark Twain´s work means to them as writers and scholars, and what he means to our literary history and to our culture as a whole. Taken together, these introductions and afterwords provide a major reevaluation of Twain, allowing readers to see his work in fresh ways.
But of course the most important thing is the work itself. Here is the full range of Twain´s remarkably prolific career, including The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Tramp Abroad, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur´s Court, The Tragedy of Pudd´nhead Wilson, The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg, The Million Pound Banknote, Following the Equator, and Extracts from Captain Stormfield´s Visit to Heaven. Readers will find freewheeling parodies and burlesques, Twain´s inimitable travel pieces, rich and complex portraits of childhood along the Mississippi, ghost stories and detective stories, irreverent lampoons of corrupt politicians, dark ruminations on the nature of humanity, and sharp-tongued editorials on the events of his day (such as Belgian imperialism in Africa or anti-Semitism in Vienna). Many of the works included here--such as Sketches, New and Old, A Tramp Abroad, The American Claimant, Is Shakespeare Dead? and Joan of Arc--have not been readily available for decades.
Equally important, The Oxford Mark Twain is a facsimile of the first American editions of Twain´s work, and includes all the original illustrations, some of which were drawn by Twain himself, and many of which have not been seen since these editions went out of print. Moreover, in each volume containing art, Fishkin has commissioned an essay on that volume´s illustrations and the artists responsible. Captivating in themselves, these illustrations add an extra dimension to the narratives that has been missing for a hundred years. Each volume also includes, as its frontispiece, a specially selected photo of Twain around the age he was when he wrote the book at hand.
The Oxford Mark Twain is an unprecedented undertaking and a cause for celebration. Colorful, irreverent, romantic, skeptical, a master of comic asides, a bittersweet humorist, and an unflinching critic of human pretensions, Mark Twain speaks to us across time with verve and wisdom. Combining the works themselves, reflections on Twain by some of our leading writers and scholars, and the original illustrations--all at a very affordable price--this superb twenty-nine-volume set will be treasured by everyone.¤ 7) Paperback Book A Tramp Abroad (Penguin Classics) by Penguin Classics. Nearly nine decades after his death, Mark Twain remains an international icon. His white-maned, mustachioed image is instantly identifiable throughout the world, the very picture of probity and high spirits (which explains why he´s become the poster boy for products as diverse as beer, billiard tables, sewing machines, pizza, and real estate). Perhaps more importantly, Twain´s books have retained all their power to amuse and enrage. How is it possible for the creator of a 19th-century "boy´s holiday book" (Twain´s own description of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) to raise so many contemporary hackles? The answer is that Twain is a contemporary writer. Not, of course, from a chronological point of view--he was born in Missouri in 1835 and died in 1910 (having insisted that "annihilation has no terrors for me"). But Twain was the first writer to elevate the American vernacular to a high art. Sidestepping the starched-shirt diction of his peers, he created an idiom that resembled (but did not precisely duplicate) the wayward, slangy, ungrammatical music of American conversation. No serious reader of Twain will want to do without the Oxford Mark Twain. This 29-volume leviathan includes not only the major works but also a treasure trove of essays and short pieces, many of them unavailable for decades. Throw in the introductions to each volume (by such heavyweights as Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Cynthia Ozick, Gore Vidal, George Plimpton, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Walter Mosley), as well as the original illustrations, and you´ve got the book bargain of the millennium.¤ Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 4-Nov-2008, 01404360819780140436082, 810-310-440-2X0-040-540-880-590-8 
A Tramp Abroad (Penguin Classics), Book, Image © Penguin Classics
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