A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

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urn:oclc:867469805 Republisher_date 20120831082856 Republisher_operator [email protected] Scandate 20120825044406 Scanner scribe1.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Worldcat (source edition) Before falling asleep, having long since lost all sense of time, I looked at the calendar in my diary. The date was the twenty-third of July. Only fourteen days had passed since we had set off from Kabul. It seemed like a lifetime. p.208 A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush” established him as a traveler who not only journeyed fruitfully but had the ability to bring his readers with him' William Trevor, Guardian Gutcher, Lianne (5 February 2017). "Following Eric Newby's footsteps in the Hindu Kush". Wanderlust Travel Magazine . Retrieved 20 February 2018. Newby begins with an anecdotal description of his frustration with life in the fashion business in London, and how he came to leave it.

When we finished we gave out chocolate to the watchers, but it was like attempting to feed the five thousand without the aid of a miracle. They find an injured boy dressed in a goatskin to draw the poison from his wounds. Newby has to eat the tail of a fat-tailed sheep. They are escorted up the Chamar valley by a greedy albino. Newby tries to learn a little of the Bashguli language from a 1901 Indian Staff Corps grammar, which contains an absurd selection of phrases; the book exploits some of these to comic effect. [18] Critics such as the travel writer Alexander Frater have noted that while the book is held in extremely high esteem, [b] and is enjoyably comic, [30] [31] it is not nearly as well-written as his later autobiographical book, Love and War in the Apennines (1971), a judgement in which Newby concurred. [29] [32] [33] [34] George, Don (19 May 1999). "The top 10 travel books of the century". Salon.com . Retrieved 20 February 2018. The witty narrative that is the first chapter had this reviewer enthralled and with that I was looking for words that were to describe my thoughts as to the magnificent adventure that Newby tells us. About how he and Carless do what to me is the unthinkable, walk to and then climb a mountain in a place that few Europeans had ever ventured at the time, the Hindu Kush.

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Anon (24 October 2012). "Review of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby" (PDF). Anmore Ladies' Book Club (Gentlemen Welcome). Archived (PDF) from the original on 4 March 2016 . Retrieved 4 April 2013. The most successful travel writer of his generation. It's impossible to read this book without laughing aloud' Observer His style of writing is like building a straight road, and every now and then build a kink in it, then continue to build the straight road, and add another kink at a random spot, then keep building the straight road, and so on. He tells how he and his friend Carless receive brief training in mountaineering technique, on boulders and small cliffs in North Wales. The inn's waitresses are expert climbers; they take Newby and Carless up a difficult climbing route, Ivy Sepulchre [a] on Dinas Cromlech. The book definitely has its humorous moments. He quotes from his Bashgali(Kafir) phrasebook, which turned out to be of questionable usefulness.

The "Hindu Kush" is the western part of the Himalayan Construct at Central Asia and the "top of the world." (Everest, K2 and similar record-breakers lie farther east). We Americans don't use that term so much, but consider that the Khyber Pass is part of the Hindu Kush. This travelogue has some of the best anecdotes you could ask for. Misadventures galore. What were they thinking? Two out-of-shape pasty-pale gits thinking they could just stroll up the sides of Mt Everest? It's a wonder they weren't killed.Born and brought up in Barnes, south-west London, Newby was sent to St Paul's school, his middle-class parents, George and Hilda, no doubt intending him for a thoroughly conventional future, perhaps a notch up socially, with a safe, well-paid nine to five job and a Joan Hunter-Dunn marriage. Small indications were noted early that events might turn out otherwise. In the fifth form, he was marked out as a boy who could spot a joke at 20 yards and who revelled in self-ridicule. All his life his humour had the equivalent in music of perfect pitch. Nevertheless, after leaving school at 16, he went to work for the advertising firm, Dorland. He intertwines his cast of characters, complex landscapes, diverse cultural customs, and histories like an Oscar winning Director. It isn't what story he is telling, but how he tells it; smooth, seamless, and adventurous. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2012-06-20 17:25:23 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA155314 Boxid_2 CH112101 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City Harmondsworth, Middlesex Donor

From then on he and his wife lived in London. He spent the next 10 years as executive vice-chairman of the philanthropic Hinduja Foundation and as vice-chairman of the South Atlantic Council. From 1994 until 1996, Carless chaired the influential series of Argentine-British Conferences which helped to reinstate full diplomatic relations between the two countries after the Falklands war. I’m only adding this note because I recently re-encountered that wonderful incident Newby tells against himself where they happen to meet Wilfred Thesiger, the legendary solo explorer of the Middle East; and I’d recently read in Among the Mountains that Thesiger wrote of the same incident (and how very English for the two to meet like that!)Notable addition to the literature of unorthodox travel ... tough, extrovert, humorous and immensely literate' Times Literary Supplement Newby writes in short straight clear prose with wry, witty self-depreciating humor delivered with impeccable timing. Time and time again he left me ROFL.

Eric Newby (1919-2006) went on to a career of travel writing and is memorialized in this 2010 edition with its Afterword by fellow adventurer Hugh Carless (1925-2011). The Preface by writer Evelyn Waugh was already included in the first hardcover edition in 1958. The start of this memoir was particularly fun. We join Newby amid the chaos of his company preparing for an upcoming big fashion show, including usable models of impossible dresses for the runway and catalogues. In the middle of this mayhem, Newby suddenly reports sending a cable to his friend Hugh Carless at his job with the State Department in Rio de Janeiro:.One of the greatest travel classics from one of Britain's best-loved travel writers, this edition includes new photographs, an epilogue from Newby's travelling companion, Hugh Carless, and a prologue from one of Newby's greatest proponents, Evelyn Waugh. It seems like it took me an awfully long time to get through such a short book. I think it was just his writing style and the way he included detail about certain things I wasn't so interested in, such as mountain climbing technicalities. After a good few years in the printing industry I had had enough. I had been worn down by the daily grind. One day it was actually all too much, and I thought enough was enough! I rang up a mate and his phone went to message bank I blurted something stupid like let’s climb a mountain in the middle of nowhere or or or or! ……..any ideas? Indeed, he was twice taken prisoner, and told the story of his recapture - "a very disagreeable experience" - in what many regard as his finest book, Love and War in the Apennines (1971), a superb reconstruction of how at the height of the guerrilla warfare against the Germans in Italy, he met Wanda, the girl he returned to find when the war was over and whom he subsequently married. Although A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958) is the comic masterpiece Newby will be remembered by, Love and War revealed another side to what on the surface was an uncomplicated nature, a compelling tenderness and compassion. There are passages of great depth, quite beyond the range of ordinary travel writing. After three years at the FCO in London, then as head of chancery at Budapest, there followed a sabbatical year in the department of politics at Glasgow University. In 1967-70, Carless was posted as consul general to Luanda, Angola. In 1970-73, while serving as press counsellor in Bonn, he improved the German he had learned at Sherborne and accompanied the prime minister, Edward Heath, on a helicopter tour of Bavaria's baroque churches.