The act of reading ... begins on a flat surface, counter or page, and then gets stirred and chopped and blended until what we make, in the end, is a dish, or story, all our own.
— Adam Gopnik
— Adam Gopnik
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
August 5, 2013
Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World
I haven't kept time down to the second -- not like the three gentlemen with synchronized stopwatches who were on hand when Nellie Bly completed her famous trip -- but it's possible that Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland could have raced around the world twice in the time it look me to finish this book. This is not the book's fault ... I enjoyed every minute I spent with it, and with these two women. It's just that I thought (and still think) this was a perfect audiobook to keep me company on long walks through the neighborhood, and then I promised myself that I would only listen to it while I was walking, and now you know how little walking I've been doing.:)
Nellie Bly had already made a name for herself as a crusading reporter when she convinced her editors at a New York newspaper that she could travel around the world faster than Phileas Fogg, the hero of Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days. She left Hoboken, New Jersey on November 14, 1889, 'a young woman in a plaid coat and cap, neither tall, nor short dark not fair, not quite pretty enough to turn a head; the sort of woman who could, if necessary, lose herself in a crowd,' and traveled east, by steamship, train and ferry, through England, France, Italy, Egypt, Yemen, Ceylon, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, San Francisco, Chicago, and home again. She prided herself on traveling with one bag so she won't be delayed by lost luggage {there's a funny bit later in the book where a railroad company tells its passengers that they are limited to one carry-on}, and insists that she will travel by regular means, not making any special arrangements to get home faster. But Bly did not know until well into her trip that on 12 hours notice, a rival newspaper had sent one of its female reporters, 'matinee-girl gorgeous' Elizabeth Bisland, 'an aesthete and an intellectual,' (and traveling with a lot more luggage) to race against her, starting off in the opposite direction.
Bly and Bisland are very interesting women, especially Bisland, maybe because she's less well known, and the story of their race, and I think especially, the story {moving and little horrifying} of what happens to each of them when it's over, is riveting. But there's a lot more in this book -- relations between countries, odd bits of history and anthropology, technological advances in ships and trains, travel writing, food, newspaper rivalries, opportunities for women journalists, advertising and promotion, etc. etc. I think this book is a perfect example of why I've been more and more drawn to reading history in the last couple of years. Like the biographers I like best, Matthew Goodman blends facts and descriptions and stories together so well, and this is also a very good book to listen to. I was very glad to see that Lisa enjoyed it too, and you can read her description and thoughts about it here.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Thank you for visiting!
Card Catalog
#6barsets
#emma200th
#maisie
#Middlemarchin2019
#PalliserParty
#Woolfalong
A.A. Milne
Agatha Christie
Alexander McCall Smith
Allison Pearson
Amy Lowell
Angela Thirkell
Ann Bridge
Anne Perry
Anthony Trollope
Anticipation
Armchair Travels
Art
Audiobooks
Barbara Pym
Biography
Bloomsbury
Bookish things
Boston
British Library Crime Classics
Cambridge
Cathleen Schine
Charles Dickens
Coffee-table books
Cookbooks
D.E. Stevenson
Deborah Crombie
Donna Leon
Dorothy L. Sayers
Dorothy Whipple
E.H. Young
E.M. Delafield
E.M. Forster
Edith Wharton
Elinor Lipman
Elizabeth Gaskell
Elizabeth Jenkins
Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth von Arnim
Ellizabeth Taylor
Emily Dickinson
Ernest Hemingway
Essays
Eudora Welty
Fanny Burney
Fiction
Films
Food from Books
Food Writing
Found on a Blog
George Eliot
Georgette Heyer
Gertrude Stein
Helen Ashton
Henry James
History
Homes and Haunts
Ideas
Imogen Robertson
Isabella Stewart Gardner
Jacqueline Winspear
Jane Austen
Joanna Trollope
Julia Child
Language
Laurie Colwin
Letters
Library Books
Literature
Louise Andrews Kent
Louise Penny
M.F.K. Fisher
Madame Bovary
Madame de Sévigné
Madame de Staël
Margaret Kennedy
Margery Sharp
Martha Grimes
Mary Shelley
Memoirs
Miss Read
My Year with Edith
Mysteries
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nonfiction
Nook
Only Connect
P.D. James
Paris in July
Persephones
Plays
Poetry
Pride and Prejudice 200
Queen Victoria
R.I.P.
Reading England 2015
Ruth Rendell
Sarah Orne Jewett
Short Stories
Susan Hill
Switzerland
Sylvia Beach
Team Middlemarch
The 1924 Club
The Brontës
the Carlyles
The Classics Club
Thomas Hardy
Virago
Virginia Woolf
Washington Irving
Willa Cather
William Maxwell
Winifred Peck
Winifred Watson
3 comments:
Did the audio book come with a map inside the cover? I know I'd have been stopping it quite a bit to look at the map - or to find one. Aren't you tempted to look for the Nellie Bly board game? I notice that the author mentioned he played many games of this with his children :) Thanks again for letting me know about this book!
I am tempted! And about halfway through listening to the book I took a cue from our friend JoAnn and borrowed the book from the library, so I could look for pictures...but I was happy to find the map as well!
Your experience with the audiobook makes me laugh! There have been a couple of books I've designated as 'for walking only' ... one I breezed through in just over a week on the treadmill, but never did finish the other.
Checking out a print edition, especially for nonfiction, really helps. Maps, photos, family trees, charts... I love that stuff!
This books sounds like a winner. I'm off to listen to a sample at audible.
Post a Comment