The Innocents Abroad or the New Pilgrims’ Progress
by Mark Twain, originally published by Mark Twain in 1869, Kindle Version,2011, Digireads.com Publishing
This book was on the reading list for our upcoming trip to Israel, Jordan, and Egypt so I decided to read it. Most of the other books were travel guides, art history books, or dealt with some other cultural aspect of these countries. I recall reading some pretty interesting books prior or during our trip to the Greek Isles and Turkey so I thought this would be interesting.
The book is a travelogue of Twain’s trip that he took in 1867 with a number of other individuals. His voyage started in New York and they stopped in the Azores before landing in Gibraltar. He then proceed to spend time off the ship in France and Italy before rejoining the ship and then travelling to Greece, Constantinople, Russia on the Black Sea, thence to Syria and Holy Land.
The book is pretty fascinating as it depicts how travel was done at that time but it bogs down and becomes a bit of a slog to read. Also, Mark Twain did not mince words about the pitfall conditions and people he encountered, particularly in Palestine, but just about everywhere he traveled. He also goes off on tirades sometimes as when he wrote about Lake Tahoe in comparison to a lake he encountered on his trip. The books is 409 pages and, if he had had an editor, it probably would have been a lot shorter.
Twain’s humor and satire do come through, but it becomes a little tiresome at times.
Overall, I am glad I read it as it covered a lot of the areas that we will be visiting next spring. I do wish I had referred to a map when he was traveling around the Holy Land as he constantly referred to the events in the Bible that occurred in these various places.
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