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Binding: Audio Cassette
Dewey Decimal Number: 910
EAN: 9780001049314
Edition: Abridged
Format: Abridged, Audiobook
ISBN: 0001049313
Label: HarperCollins Audio
Manufacturer: HarperCollins Audio
Number Of Items: 2
Publication Date: October 23, 1995
Publisher: HarperCollins Audio
Studio: HarperCollins Audio

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Related Items:

• Arabian Sands (Penguin Classics)
• The Last Grain Race (Travel Literature)
• Slowly Down the Ganges
• The Places In Between
• Love And War In The Apennines
• see more

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Editorial Review:

Amazon.com Review:
For more than a decade following the end of World War II, Eric Newby toiled away in the British fashion industry, peddling some of the ugliest clothes on the planet. (Regarding one wafer-thin model in her runway best, he was reminded of "those flagpoles they put up in the Mall when the Queen comes home.") Fortunately, Newby reached the end his haute-couture tether in 1956. At that point, with the sort of sublime impulsiveness that's forbidden to fictional characters but endemic to real ones, he decided to visit a remote corner of Afghanistan, where no Englishman had planted his brogans for at least 50 years. What's more, he recorded his adventure in a classic narrative, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. The title, of course, is a fine example of Newby's habitual self-effacement, since his journey--which included a near-ascent of the 19,800-foot Mir Samir--was anything but short. And his book seems to furnish a missing link between the great Britannic wanderers of the Victorian era and such contemporary jungle nuts as Redmond O'Hanlon.

At times it also brings to mind Evelyn Waugh, who contributed the preface. Newby is a less acidulous writer, to be sure, and he has little interest in launching the sort of heat-seeking satiric missiles that were Waugh's specialty. Still, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush is a hilarious read. The author excels at the dispiriting snapshot, capturing, say, the Afghan backwater of Fariman in two crisp sentences: "A whole gale of wind was blowing, tearing up the surface of the main street. Except for two policemen holding hands and a dog whose hind legs were paralysed it was deserted." His capsule history of Nuristan also gets in some sly digs at Britain's special relationship with the violence-prone Abdur Rahman:

Officially his subsidy had just been increased from 12,000 to 16,000 lakhs of rupees. To the British he had fully justified their selection of him as Amir of Afghanistan and, apart from the few foibles remarked by Lord Curzon, like flaying people alive who displeased him, blowing them from the mouths of cannon, or standing them up to the neck in pools of water on the summits of high mountains and letting them freeze solid, he had done nothing to which exception could be taken.

Newby also surpasses Waugh--and indeed, most other travel writers--in another important respect: he's miraculously free of solipsism. Even the keenest literary voyagers tend to be, in the purest sense of the term, self-centered. But A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush includes wonderfully oblique portraits of the author's travel companion, Hugh Carless, and his wife, Wanda (who plays a starring role in such subsequent chronicles as Slowly down the Ganges). There are also dozens of brilliant cameo parts, and an indelible record of a stunning landscape. The roof of the world is, in Newby's rendering, both an absolute heaven and a low-oxygen hell. Yet the author never pretends to pit himself against a malicious Nature--his mountains are, in Frost's memorable phrase, too lofty and original to rage. Which is yet another reason to call this little masterpiece a peak performance. --James Marcus

Product Description:
Eric Newby describes his travels in the mountains of Afghanistan. He has also written "The Last Grain Race", "Slowly Down the Ganges", "Love and War in the Apennines" and "On the Shores of the Mediterranean".




Rating: - A Ramble Through Afghanistan...
What can I say...a thoroughly enjoyable read (and I've reread this book several times)! Newby and his companion are "innocents abroad" and his recounting of their misadventures kept me chuckling throughout.

If you're looking for deep insights into the Afghan culture and people, this isn't the book for you. But if you enjoy travel-writing told with a dry wit, then check it out.

Oh, and by the way...if you're a fan of Wilfred "Arabian Sands" Thesiger, don't miss Newby's ... Read More

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Rating: - A lesson in how the world has changed in 50 years
Ok, I have read the reviews about this book, most of which have "got it" and some of whom have not. Firstly get a map or even better a globe (a kind of round map) and see just how far London (England) is from Afghanistan. Now try and imagine driving there in a family car, not one of those road going ocean liners known I believe as "SUV's", through countries, some of which are considered too dangerous for westerners to enter.

Remember that even at the time of writing, Britain was still ... Read More

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Rating: - IVE READ IT TWICE and STill plan to read it again.
I love this book, his humor and imagination, the descriptions. It's his best!
Highly Recommended!

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Rating: - A superb blend of humor and adventure
I got this book on the recommendation from the book Afghanistan: A Companion and Guide, which described it as "among the best travel books ever written". Having read the book, I would have to agree.

This book could be a humor book almost as much as a travel book. Newby's style of writing is, at times, felt like watching a Monty Python sketch in its dry British humor and the unexpected places that one constantly found it coming up.

Eric Newby starts the book as a man working in ... Read More

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Rating: - As happy as England
"A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush" by Eric Newby (1958) is a minor classic among travel books that was, recently for me, a true pleasure to read. It's new info, insightful, light but not shallow, humorous, yet apropos to current events. Its preface by one of my favorite 'snobs' (Evelyn Waugh) was enough recommendation for me. An amateur British mountain climber with his sidekick in the wild mountains of North-east Afghanistan. Very subtle, very English. Eric Newby died in 2006. I'm happy he was a writer.
Read More

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