DESTINATIONS. Essays From Rolling Stone

New York: Oxford University Press / Rolling Stone, 1980. First edition. Hardcover. A fine copy bound in black cloth with gilt lettering and accents in a very good plus dust jacket light dulling to spine. In 1974 Rolling Stone magazine invited Jan Morris, probably the finest travel writer in the world, to write for the magazine. The fruits of that collaboration, the piquant combination of romantic traditionalist Welsh author and innovating contemporary American magazine, are here. 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. The essay on Manhattan may be the best single article on New York since E.B. White's famous book of years ago. Joan Didion called the essay on Los Angeles "the best thing I have ever read about the place and its state of mind. A lot of people come here and don't get the point. She got it." And George McGovern had the "perceptive and thoughtful" piece about Panama read in toto into the Congressional Record. Part impressionism, part history, part political interpretation, part plain travel, these ten essays about cities point the way to a new kind of journalistic sensibility and are all more than spot on. 242pp.