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by: Mark Twain  Dewey Decimal Number: 818.403 EAN: 9780195101379 Edition: New impression of 1876 ISBN: 0195101375 Label: Oxford University Press, USA Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 720 Publication Date: December 05, 1996 Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA Studio: Oxford University Press, USA Related Items:
Browse for similar items by category: Click to Display Editorial Review: Amazon.com Review: Nearly nine decades after his death, Mark Twain remains an international icon. His white-maned, mustachioed image is instantly identifiable throughout the world, the very picture of probity and high spirits (which explains why he's become the poster boy for products as diverse as beer, billiard tables, sewing machines, pizza, and real estate). Perhaps more importantly, Twain's books have retained all their power to amuse and enrage. How is it possible for the creator of a 19th-century "boy's holiday book" (Twain's own description of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) to raise so many contemporary hackles? The answer is that Twain is a contemporary writer. Not, of course, from a chronological point of view--he was born in Missouri in 1835 and died in 1910 (having insisted that "annihilation has no terrors for me"). But Twain was the first writer to elevate the American vernacular to a high art. Sidestepping the starched-shirt diction of his peers, he created an idiom that resembled (but did not precisely duplicate) the wayward, slangy, ungrammatical music of American conversation. No serious reader of Twain will want to do without the Oxford Mark Twain. This 29-volume leviathan includes not only the major works but also a treasure trove of essays and short pieces, many of them unavailable for decades. Throw in the introductions to each volume (by such heavyweights as Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Cynthia Ozick, Gore Vidal, George Plimpton, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Walter Mosley), as well as the original illustrations, and you've got the book bargain of the millennium. Product Description: A Tramp Abroad, published in 1880, is Mark Twain's second travel book, a sequel to his immensely popular The Innocents Abroad. Here Twain returns to Europe in the company, as Russell Banks puts it in his introduction, of a genial "goad, guide, and all-purpose straight man" modeled on his friend and real-life traveling companion, Joe Twitchell, who "plays Butch Cassidy to Twain's Sundance, Sancho to his Quixote." The eccentric journey they take through Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and other countries constantly veers into imaginative burlesques, exaggerations, tall tales, and humorous digressions, the most well known of which are the inimitable "Baker's Blue-Jay Yarn" and "The Awful German Language." The travelers gamely take in student duels, Wagnerian opera, and the works of the Old Masters; they travel by raft, train, and donkey cart, listen to folk legends and dreadful pianists, scale the Alps, and view cathedrals he found noble in their ugliness. But the sight that cheers them most is that of New York harbor on their return. A Tramp Abroad, Banks reminds us, celebrates two "American males clearly blessed with the gift of friendship, of giving it and of receiving and holding onto it." Average Rating:
 Rating: - You could tell it was Twain with your eyes closed (might be hard to read, though)When Twain is funny, he is laugh-out-loud, read-it-out loud funny. When he isn't, he's obscure, topical, or dated. He's usually funny in an unmistakable style that you could identify as Twain with your eyes closed (I.e. without being told who wrote it)! Rating:  - Disappointed after liking "The Innocents Abroad"I listened to the audio version of both books, and will admit up front that the narrator for this one is not one of my favorites, but I got past that after a while. Twain seemed to be "padding" the narrative with an awful lot of folktales and legend, rather than his own experience. There's a lengthy (and highly annoying) "fantasy" sequence - I suppose he was trying for parody - as well. I found myself fast-forwarding through almost a full cassette of a gory description of two deuls (near the ... Read More Rating:  - Don't be suprised!!!This is a single book, not the whole set and the book is in less then usable quality. The seller was to send return address materials and has not as of 12/19. Rating:  - As an American living in Germany, this was a HILARIOUS readIt's fascinating to compare my own experiences, having lived now 3 years in Germany, to those of an American from 125 years earlier. I've been learning to speak German, and his Appendix on the "awful" German language was hilarious. In poking fun at German grammar (e.g., long sentences), he purposely commits the same errors in his own writing. The scene "riding" the glacier down the Alps was so funny I had tears running down my face. It's amazing to think that it was written in 1879, when America ... Read More Rating: - Mark Twain is our tramp abroad as he travel the Europe of 1880!A Tramp Abroad is the third and least successful of the travel books written by the pen of Mark Twain. In this book we follow Twain as he tours Germany, Italy, France and Switzerland. I found the early chapters chronicling his visit to Heidelburg University; hilarious visits to opera houses and tale tales such as the Blue Jay yarn to be well done. The longest section of the book deals with Twain's alpine climbing adventures in Switzerland. This material is interesting but goes on a ... Read More 
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