Product Description

An unconventional and entertaining account of travels through German, the Alps and Italy

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #937923 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.com Review
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.

Review
"In my opinion the omitted chapters are strained in theft humor and contain much superfluous or irrelevant matter." So here is Twain's 1880 European travel book with nine of its chapters removed, eight others pared down, and all the punctuation modernized - "without inserting any language of my own, not even the briefest conjunctions." Very commendable. But what Neider has inserted is his own taste and network of expectations, a mind-set that has him reaching for the blue pencil whenever he finds Mark's "artistic conscience to be dozing more than usual." Legends, for instance. Twain seemed to be fascinated by them, retelling them, musing on their development; filler, says Neider, so good-bye Lorelei, Dilsberg Castle, and the Cave of the Specter. Likewise Mark's interest in natural history (glaciers and other boring stuff like that). And when Mark gets "silly" about the pretentious use of foreign words - as he does, with some delightful results, in the omitted "Harris Climbs Mountains for Me" - Neider gets itchy and A Tramp Abroad gets shorter. The issue, of course, is not whether Neider's taste is good or bad, but that any reader of a collection of pieces has the ability - and the inalienable right - to skim or skip or, just possibly, settle down with something as un-Mark-Twain as the Lorelei; no one interested enough to pick up A Tramp Abroad needs Neider's help in finding its goodies, and Mark Twain doesn't need his lapses, if lapses they be, swept behind the typesetting machine. "If I may venture to say it myself, this edited version of the Tramp is now a thoroughly delicious book free of the padding demands of subscription publishing. . . ." What next? How about those boring stretches going on and on about fog in Bleak House? After all, Dickens had those incredible padding demands of serial publishing to contend with, and. . . . (Kirkus Reviews)

Review
"This new collection of the works of Mark Twain, complete with thought-provoking introductions by more than two dozen of our finest contemporary writers, is destined to become a modern-day classic."--The Oregonian

"The season finds no lack of major literary works. The most inpressive debut must be the new 29-volume Oxford Mark Twain. This is a wonderful set."--The Houston Chronicle

"The most impressive gift for book lovers this Christmas has to be The Oxford Mark Twain, a 29-volume collection of works by the writer may consider the central figure in American Literature."--The Kansas City Star

"Now a major publishing event puts Twain in the spotlight again."--The Lexington Herald-Leader

"For its beautiful design, its thoughtfulness, and its inclusion of virtually everything of importance by this great, great writer...I cannot praise it too highly."--Ihe Toronto Globe and Mail

"The Oxford Mark Twain offers many days' worth of almost undiluted reading pleasure--as well an an effective rebuke to the agenda-burdened know-nothings who want Huckleberry Finn excised from the curriculum."--Kirkus Reviews

"The family Christams gift of the year."--The Memphis Commercial Appeal

"In compiling this impressive stack of works by Twain, Fishkin matched each volume with an American writer and asked them to pen a personal introduction to the work. The list reads like a syllabus from an American contemporary lit class, including such imaginative pair-ups as Arthur Miller on Chapters from My Autobiography.--St. Petersburg Times

"The Oxford Twain is the real thing."--Washington Post

"What draws you into these books and keeps you there is Twain's very American but very indivdual voice: deadpan, wry, sly, and animated by a plainspoken honesty that's several miles down the river from respectability."--Entertainment Weekly

Customer Reviews

Disappointed after liking "The Innocents Abroad"
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.

Don't be suprised!!!
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.

As an American living in Germany, this was a HILARIOUS read
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.