Something Sensational

This is a book of travel essays, but it is not about what is commonly meant today by "travel," e.g. package tours for middle-aged, middle-class tourists who pile in and out of airconditioned buses around the world for their hour at the obligatory sights-- passive entertainment. These essays are about travel, warts and all, the "agony and the ecstasy" of a do-it-yourself process: from traffic jams in southern Italy to swiftly gliding dream trains in northern Germany and quite a bit in between. They depict a passionate quest for art, music, beauty; journeys to that realm of supreme aesthetic experience which is to be found in front of paintings by the masters and at great performances of operas in Tyrolian villages; epiphanies in dusty Italian squares or in Imperial palaces. They describe an immersion in the history, the landscape and the daily life of other countries. They also describe the "complex fate" of being an American in strange lands. They sometimes toy with the Jamesian question: where can Americans possibly, truly belong?