AA Gill is Away
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
'Theatre, food, refugees: in Adrian's writing they're all linked up ... If you haven't read his book AA GILL IS AWAY, read it now. It was when he was away that he was at his best' Stephen Daldry
A. A. Gill was probably the most read columnist in Britain. Every weekend he entertained readers of the SUNDAY TIMES with his biting observations on television and his unsparing, deeply knowledgeable restaurant reviews. Even those who objected to his opinions agree: his writing is hopelessly, painfully funny. He was one of a tiny band of must-read journalists and it was always a disappointment when the words 'A.A. Gill is away' appeared at the foot of his column. This book is the fruit of those absences: twenty-five long travel pieces that belie his reputation as a mere style-journalist and master of vitriol: this is travel writing of the highest quality and ambition.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Imagine Evelyn Waugh reborn as one of Nick Hornby's endearingly superficial protagonists, and you have London's Sunday Times television and restaurant critic Gill: droll, astute, irritable, irritating and always cleaver-sharp. Moving from Hiroshima to Kyoto, Gill carps about the Japanese, with their ways that differ greatly from Gill's own, being "the people that aliens might be if they'd learnt Human by correspondence course and wanted to slip in unnoticed." He barnstorms through Ethiopia, Russia, Argentina and elsewhere before heading home to England. The anthology of travel essays opens with arguably Gill's finest section on Sudan, whose current horrors make his root-cause impressions from 1998 required reading arguing how even those who care about mass suffering are "protected by the one-way mirror of news." In Los Angeles, he makes a porn film: life on the set teaches him argot like "kung fu death grip" and some unusual uses for pineapples. Compilations inevitably draw episodes against one another, and this one is no different. Yet it maintains a high batting average from start to finish. Gill's aim isn't always on (only a Brit would search for authentic barbecue in California), but usually it's his bald foreignness that makes him such a skilled marksman. That, and the fact that he himself is such an original.
