Language | English |
---|---|
ISBN-10 | 0330462679 |
ISBN-13 | 9780330462679 |
No of pages | 262 |
Font Size | Medium |
Book Publisher | Picador |
Published Date | 08 Jul 2008 |
George Eric Newby CBE MC (December 6, 1919 – October 20, 2006) was an English author of travel literature.
Newby was born and grew up near Hammersmith Bridge, London, and was educated at St Paul's School. His father was a partner in a firm of wholesale dressmakers but he also harboured dreams of escape, running away to sea as a child before being captured at Millwall. Owing to his father's frequent financial crises and his own failure to pass algebra, Newby was taken away from school at sixteen and put to work as an office boy in the Dorland advertising agency on Regent Street, where he spent most of his time cycling around the office admiring the typists' legs.
Fortunately, the agency lost the Kellogg's account and he apprenticed aboard the Finnish windjammer Moshulu in 1938, sailing in what Newby entitled The Last Grain Race (1956) from Europe to Australia and back by way of Cape Horn (his journey was also pictorially documented in Learning the Ropes). In fact, two more grain races followed the 1939 race in which Newby participated, with the last race being held in 1949.
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This 50th anniversary edition of one of our greatest travel classics includes never-before-seen photographs and a newly commissioned epilogue from Eric Newby’s travelling companion, Hugh Carless When Eric Newby, improbably earning his living in the London haute-couture trade, sent his fateful cable–Can you travel nuristan june?–it was the first step on a legendary journey from Mayfair to Afghanistan and the mountains of the Hindu Kush, north-east of Kabul. Ill-prepared and inexperienced, Newby and Carless endured a month of hardship with great good humour in one of the most beautiful wildernesses on earth.
The most successful travel writer of his generation. It’s impossible to read this book without laughing aloud. Observer ‘Tough, extrovert, humorous and immensely literate’ Times Literary Supplement 'Full of serendipity and surprise' The Economist 'A total success' New Yorker.