Remembering Jan Morris, 1926-2020


    • Morris, Jan
      In my mind’s eye : a thought diary
      Summary:“Ranging widely from the idyllic confines of her North Wales home, Morris offers diverse sallies on her preffered form of exercises (walking briskly), her frustration at not recognizing a certain melody humming in her head (Beethoven’s Pathétique, incidentally), and her nostalgia for the erstwhile ‘essential niceness’ of small-town America.”–Inside dust jacket.



    • Morris, Jan
      The world : travels 1950-2000
      Summary:“The career of Jan Morris began auspiciously enough fifty years ago “with an imperial exploit” that burst like a salvo into newspapers throughout the world. Assigned by The Times of London to cover the first successful ascent of Mount Everest, “the supreme mountain of the world,” Morris was the only reporter allowed on Sir John Hunt’s expedition. Morris’s great “scoop,” published in London on June 2, 1953, the very morning of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, not only marked the beginning of a “new Elizabethan age,” but also established the twenty-six-year-old as the foremost travel essayist of the age.” “Fifty years later, we now have The World, which provides us with as complete an overview of Morris’s work as we will ever see. Dividing the volume into five decades, Morris presents history with an unparalleled dramatic flair, creating a riveting portrait of the twentieth century, from the political idealism of the postwar years to its more recent tensions and excesses.”–BOOK JACKET



    • Morris, Jan
      Contact! : a book of encounters
      Summary:The travel writer presents tales of the people she’s encountered in the places she’s visited over the years, including a Sherpa guide who scaled Mt. Everest, a lascivious Manhattan cabbie, and a spy wearing a raincoat.



    • Morris, Jan
      Fifty years of Europe : an album
      Summary:Is there really a new Europe? Have the extraordinary transformations of the last half century – the rise and fall of the Eastern Bloc, Germany’s reunification, ethnic warfare, even the ongoing creation of a common parliament and currency – rendered our culture not only unrecognizable but unimaginable? These are among the myriad questions posed by Jan Morris in Fifty Years of Europe. Morris, one of our era’s most engaging historians and celebrated travelers, revisits the continent she’s long known so well and tries to discover whether she now knows it at all. How she contrasts her European experiences today with those of two generations past makes for an insightful and highly personal study.



    • Morris, Jan
      A writer’s house in Wales
      Summary:“Journalist, historian, travel writer, novelist, Jan Morris has guided countless readers through faraway places with her keen eye and eloquent turns of phrase. In this intimate and fascinating memoir, she invites us into her own home in the magical heartland of Wales.” ‘Wales is a realm unto itself, ancient, unique, and unforgettable. In this craggy country lashed by the Atlantic dwell the last of the original Britons, a people with a colorful history and a language all their own. Long before English was spoken, Welshmen – cymry, in their native language – were composing epics in their lilting Celtic.’ “Morrises have inhabited this far western corner of Britain for centuries, and Trefan Morys – Jan Morris’s house between the sea and the mountains – is the eighteenth-century stable block of her former family home nearby. Morris regards this modest building not only as a reflection of herself and her life but also as epitomizing Wales, which has for centuries defiantly preserved its own identity.”–BOOK JACKET.



    • Morris, Jan
      Trieste and the meaning of nowhere
      Summary:One hundred years ago, Trieste was the chief seaport of the entire Austro-Hungarian empire, but today many people have no idea where it is. This fascinating Italian city on the Adriatic, bordering the former Yugoslavia, has always tantalized Jan Morris with its moodiness and melancholy. She has chosen it as the subject of this, her final work, because it was the first city she knew as an adult — initially as a young soldier at the end of World War II, and later as an elderly woman. This is not only her last book, but in many ways her most complex as well, for Trieste has come to represent her own life with all its hopes, disillusionments, loves and memories.



    • Morris, Jan
      Hav : comprising last letters from Hav of the Myrmidons
      Summary:“… part erudite travel memoir, part speculative fiction, part cautionary political tale… transports the reader to an extraordinary place that never was, but could well be”–From publisher description.



    • Morris, Jan
      Battleship Yamato : of war, beauty and irony
      Summary:“An extraordinary–and strikingly illustrated–reflection on the meaning of war from one of our greatest living writers. The battleship Yamato, of the Imperial Japanese Navy, was the most powerful warship of World War II and represented the climax, as it were, of the Japanese warrior traditions of the samurai–the ideals of honor, discipline, and self-sacrifice that had immemorially ennobled the Japanese national consciousness. Stoically poised for battle in the spring of 1945–when even Japan’s last desperate technique of arms, the kamikaze, was running short–Yamato arose as the last magnificent arrow in the imperial quiver of Emperor Hirohito. Here, Jan Morris not only tells the dramatic story of the magnificent ship itself–from secret wartime launch to futile sacrifice at Okinawa–but, more fundamentally, interprets the ship as an allegorical figure of war itself, in its splendor and its squalor, its heroism and its waste. Drawing on rich naval history and rhapsodic metaphors from international music and art, Battleship Yamato is a work of grand ironic elegy.”–Provided by publisher.



    • Morris, Jan
      Lincoln : a foreigner’s quest
      Summary:“With her iconoclasm and humor and marvelous sense of place, Morris seamlessly blends travel narrative, history and biography with transatlantic insights into the origins of the American Empire to reveal the real Lincoln – maverick, artist, oddball, natural aristocrat.”–BOOK JACKET.