Latest news with #A.O

New York Times

2 Books From Other Shores

Image Credit... Mike Belleme for The New York Times Dear readers, I'm not going to get into the various reasons you might have for wanting to go somewhere else right now — somewhere, let's say, on the other side of an international border. The fact is that Americans have always been eager tourists and willing expatriates, game to study the histories and decode the customs of neighboring and far-flung places. There are more and less benign versions of this roving impulse, but let's not get into that either. Also, with due respect to hard-typing globetrotters, travel writing exhausts me. What I'm in the mood for is a scrappy, burrowing cosmopolitanism, books that dig down into the soil of a place and emerge with local dirt under their fingernails. Here are two of those, one a memoir of life in a foreign land, the other an extended excursion into an exotic literature. — A.O. Not long before he died, Origo's father — an American diplomat married to an Anglo-Irish aristocrat — wrote that he wished his daughter to grow up 'free from all this national feeling that makes people so unhappy.' He wanted her 'to be a little 'foreign,' too, so that, when she grows up, she really will be free to love and marry anyone she likes, without its being difficult.' Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.