Destinations: Essays from Rolling Stone

by Jan Morris

In these essays which originally appeared in Rolling Stone, Jan Morris captures the essence of places as diverse as Washington just after Watergate, Delhi under Mrs. Gandhi, Panama on the eve of the U.S. treaty debate, and Cairo at the time of the Israeli-Egyptian peace talks. Her essay on Manhattan may be the single best article on New York since E.B. White's famous book 30 years ago. She also writes on L.A., Pretoria and Rhodesia, London, Istanbul, and Trieste.

Genres: Travel, Essays, Nonfiction

258 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 1, 1980

About the author

Jan Morris was a British historian, author and travel writer. Morris was educated at Lancing College, West Sussex, and Christ Church, Oxford, but is Welsh by heritage and adoption. Before 1970 Morris published under her assigned birth name, "James ", and is known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy, a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong, and New York City, and also wrote about Wales, Spanish history, and culture.

In 1949 Jan Morris married Elizabeth Tuckniss, the daughter of a tea planter. Morris and Tuckniss had five children together, including the poet and musician Twm Morys. One of their children died in infancy. As Morris documented in her memoir Conundrum, she began taking oestrogens to feminise her body in 1964. In 1972, she had sex reassignment surgery in Morocco. Sex reassignment surgeon Georges Burou did the surgery, since doctors in Britain refused to allow the procedure unless Morris and Tuckniss divorced, something Morris was not prepared to do at the time. They divorced later, but remained together and later got a civil union. On May, 14th, 2008, Morris and Tuckniss remarried each other. Morris lived mostly in Wales, where her parents were from.

Reviews

[Parvathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A set of impressionistic pieces of places at an era-defining time - the 70s. Washington the day after Nixon's pardon; apathetic New Delhi during the emergency; South Africa and Rhodesia, where you can see the beginning of the end for white supremacy; Sadat's liberal Cairo where the veil has almost vanished from the streets yet you sense a simmering Islamic backlash; secular-on-the-surface Istanbul...and more. You expect these essays to be dated, and they are. But they are also suprisingly contemporary...history repeats? Morris is observant and opinionated and her writing is a pleasure. Touches of a colonial hangover rankle, though. Overall is a 3.5 rather than a 4.

[Seán · Rating 5 out of 5]

Precision writing in the Delhi chapter...Zorro with a sword=Jan Morris with a pen...Jan Morris is required reading if you are a travel genre guru...

The best living travel writer...No one else even comes close...

[Clint · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought I would find this somewhat dated, but Morris' observations still seem timely and her history is really good. Reading her prose is pleasing as always.

[Jeremy Walton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Erudite and illuminating
I've enjoyed Morris's writing for some time - long enough, in fact, to have bought and given away an early copy of this book a long time ago. Remembering the assured way she was able to sketch in her impressions of a location, I bought it again and re-read it last week. Although dated (these pieces were all written in the late 1970's), the author still forges a link between the reader, a place and a time. In fact, some of these are startlingly contemporary: a portrait of a shaken Washington immediately after Watergate, an attempted meeting with (then) Colonel Noriega when he was chief of Panama's National Guard, and a Manhattan that resents the arrogant intrusion of the World Trade Center into its skyline.

Morris has an assured style, wearing her learning lightly - for example, from my first reading, I remembered best the piece on Trieste, which begins with an allusive quotation from Robert Browning. These pieces were originally written for Rolling Stone, which, at the time, could be described as a "sharp and flinty organization" whose "cutting edge" Morris was pleased to be able to temper with "a few thousand words of moss" [p.x]. Great writing.

Originally reviewed 10 February 2020

[Jerrod · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know what this book is. Masterful, sure. But in so many and such surprising ways. As an object, it is beautiful and carefully crafted, with attention to typography and layout that is hardly seen anymore. And what a strange, potent brew of aesthetics and ideologies is bundled up between its covers, too! Morris writes about place in the most sui generis manner, exploring the ways that power, history, culture, geography, and culture can become embedded in the textures of a city and become wellsprings that feed them from below across time and circumstance. In so many ways, these essays, written during a year of great global tumult, are prescient beyond all reasonable expectation and spooky in their resonance with our present moment. An excellent place to begin a search for answers to the question on almost every mind in 2017: How did we get here? We need more writing of place like this. We must look closer at the dynamics within and across cultures that shape our landscapes and thinking, which are ever in conversation.

[Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having read her book on Trieste (and there is an essay devoted to it in this collection as well), I was already familiar with Morris' writing style and with at least some of her idiosyncrasies and preoccupations before reading this collection. Most of the articles have aged fairly well, with the exception of the one on Panama, and the articles on Cairo and Istanbul seem downright prescient now in retrospect. The high water marks in this collection though are the thoughtful and chilling essays on South Africa and Rhodesia, the surprisingly generous essay on Los Angeles, and the concluding essay on Manhattan, which has by now achieved something of "modern classic" status. Morris is a learned and adventurous soul, and so while you may not find what you were looking for when you read her work, you will nevertheless probably find something in the way of a keeper.

[Brenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I repeat: Everyone alive should read every word Jan Morris has ever written.

These essays were written for and originally published in Rolling Stone in the second half of the 1970s, and I laughed out loud at her descriptions of a lot that no longer exists - Yugoslavia, Soviets, the Twin Towers - and yearned out loud to visit or re-visit lots that does, changed but recognizable.

What a writer. What a lover of words, and movement, and the cities of the world.

[Samantha · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5*

DNF! Finished exactly 50% of the book this summer, however I was just never excited to pick it up.

Yeah, it wasn’t the greatest. Very long winded stories that just felt like they were dragging on. Also I get that it was written a while ago but there were some pretty problematic views and racism did absolutely feature in the writing. Maybe I’ll pick it back up in the future, but I have so many other books that intrigue me more.

[Lindsey · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a semi-interesting read, at best. I skipped the South Africa chapter because I had no interest in it, and found myself skimming the majority of other chapters. I will say, however, that I enjoyed the New York and Egypt essays.

Part of the problem with Morris' essays is that they're too political. Rather than reading a captivating narrative about a place, we receive factual evidence and extraneous information about other countries. Rather than "Eat, Pray, Love," we get almost a textbook-historical collection of essays.

The writing is dry, one-dimensional, and boring. Morris' vocabulary is rich and vast, but the fancy word selections aren't enough to hold the reader's interest. Overall, I was not a fan.

[Regine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Acute articles written for the Rolling Stone 1974-1979. Post-Watergate D.C.; unchanging Delhi; colonialist Panama; L.A. past its prime; South Africa of failing apartheid; Cairo simmering prior to Sadat's assassination; inflexible Istanbul; left-behind Trieste; old-fashioned, civilized Manhattan. A marvelous smorgasbord.

[Steve Chilton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Turns out that I don't particularly like the 'essay' style of Jan Morris, although I did enjoy the Manhattan one, which came too late to rescue this from being just an ordinary read.