Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Travels with Alice by Calvin Trillin

I'm caught without anything to review this week--I've been reading, but I haven't finished anything. So here's a review of the only book I have to hand that I've actually read before.

Calvin Trillin is an excellent essayist. I highly recommend anything he's written (although his political poetry goes over my head since I don't follow politics). I've read Travels with Alice a number of times, and I always laugh my head off.

This is an older book, first published in 1989. Alice is Trillin's wife, and in these essays their two daughters are still fairly young. Trillin writes about their travels, naturally, during which he tries to, as he says, "stuff a little culture" into his kids, although mostly he just wants to eat good food. The writing is lively, funny, and always interesting. Trillin relates trips to places like France, where he and his family spent a month just hanging around in a small town, and Barbados, where Trillin ate a lot of fried chicken.

It's actually taken me a long time to write this very short review, because I keep dipping into the book and reading it. It's well worth chasing down a copy.

B&N link (used book)

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