Jo’s Reviews > Amazonian: The Penguin Book of Women's New Travel Writing > Status Update

...how can she state with such limited insight - she didn't even speak with them! - that their lives are "lonely and uncertain"? "The more a building had cost, the more hideous it looked." Her contempt throughout this piece is palpable & I ended this otherwise excellent collection with a bad taste in my mouth.

Sarah Wheeler's essay was everything I thought this collection would be about. Thankfully, I was wrong. Wheeler comes across as patronising & pompous during her time in Bangladesh, a place she doesn't even want to be. "None of the others spoke a single word of English," she says. That's b/c the first language of the country isn't English. Describing the local fishermen: "They lived their lonely & uncertain lives..."

"Thus the Cala...had been taken over by retired English people on deck chairs, mostly from the north of England, reading the latest Jeffrey Archer"

ELISA SEGRAVE: YOU INSUFFERABLE SNOB

While there's a conversation to be had about Brits & Germans abroad moving to Spain & failing to integrate or show respect to the locals, this is just unadulterated snobbery. Northerners! Whatever next?

Discussing the similarity between prison & Oxford colleges: "the overwhelming masculinity...the mysterious rituals, the secret clubs, the inexplicably rigid hierarchies, the unwritten rules...the continuous jostling for power...the casual racism. The similarities were most disconcerting. Except, of course, in the end the prison was a lot more friendly." The Good Ferry by Kate Pullinger

Suzanne Moore's story (Miami Vice) strikes me as a work of such transparent fiction. Which is OK, I guess...

CTD... longer, all would have been well. This struck me as ironic, considering that mere pages previously, she had been worried about her daughter becoming 'subservient' simply b/c she was in Pakistan. I really enjoyed this essay, but this ending seemed really unnecessary."

This is the last sentence in this essay: "As we drove through the hinterland of Surrey we overtook a middle-aged woman stumping along the pavement on pale sausage legs under a short black skirt; she was a walking argument for the dignified shalwar kameez."

Would it have been better if the woman had not been middle-aged & had "sauntered", rather than stumped? The author seems to imply that had the skirt been...

"At home we make the assumption that ours is the real world & other cultures are deviations from the norm."