Give Me the World (Adventura Books) - Softcover

Hadley, Leila

3.91

171 ratings by Goodreads

9781580050913: Give Me the World (Adventura Books)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1580050913 ISBN 13: 9781580050913

Publisher: Seal Press, 2003

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At the age of twenty-five, Leila Hadley, bored with her New York PR job, buys two tickets aboard a cargo ship headed for Hong Kong: one for herself, and one for her six-year-old son Kippy. This decision sets her life on an entirely new course. After Manila, Hong Kong and Bangkok, their travels take an unexpected turn: she meets four young men sailing their boat around the world, and convinces them to let her and Kippy join them.
Filled with sensual descriptions of the places she visits, lively accounts of the people and traditions, and intriguing characters, it is not only the luminous vitality of her prose that make this travelogue such a pleasure to read, but the courage of her decision to toss expectations to the wind and embrace all the adventures the world has to offer-an inspiration to the adventurer that lurks within us all.

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Review:

This travelogue about the mystery-shrouded Far East is a must-read book. However, there are hazards in doing so. Originally published in 1958, Give Me the World clutters up the tidy notion that women in the '50s were all Donna Reed clones. Leila Hadley, a 25-year-old divorc�e with a plum PR position in Manhattan tossed aside conventionality and shipped out to Hong Kong--her 6-year-old son in tow. Hooking up with characters from scholars and mystics to a quartet of American sailors, she traveled to locales such as Ceylon, Bombay, Bangkok, and Delhi, sailing much of the way on a schooner on which she was a bona fide shipmate.

Her danger-filled, 18-month trek is remarkable, but it's her skill at observing details and capturing them on paper, creating a dreamy world that plays to all senses, that makes her memoir extraordinary. Of a Bombay street, she writes: "The women floated through the traffic like butterflies. The men ... leaped and darted, tentatively jumping forward and back in the path of onrushing motorcars, cyclists and oxcarts. Rickety gharries hurtled past driven by whip-cracking turbaned charioteers." Whether writing of food, rituals, or topography--"the mazing side streets were soft and muddied by the monsoon rains"--Hadley unleashes images so rich you can't help thinking that if everyone wrote like this, we wouldn't need TV. Like TV, Give Me the World is habit-forming: you ignore pressing work simply to curl up with this intoxicating memoir. When asked what's new, you may answer: "Well, today Leila Hadley stumbled into an opium den with a camera, and someone chased her out with a knife!" or, "Leila nearly died from a dust storm that gave her a fever of 107, but she survived and met Indira Gandhi." You may sniff at the books of other travel writers, as though they're phonies who aren't even trying.

In short, this is a wonderful book filled with such luxurious prose and so many cultural insights and wild experiences that you finish it feeling enriched and realizing that Hadley has set a standard for travel writing--and traveling--that few, including her ancestor Boswell, can match. --Melissa Rossi

From the Publisher:

"Ms. Hadley is a gifted travel writer with an artist's eye for composition." --The New York Times Book Review

"Written with great wit and passion, constructed as seductively as the spider's web, this is a romance about a young mother's liaison with the world, which taught her all the real and deep feelings of a life fully lived. It is the narrative of youth turning mature through magnificent experience, set in locations that would astonish even Sheherezade." --Andrew Solomon, author of A Stone Boat

"Hadley's questioning spirit draws us into a kaleidoscope of hidden treasures where we discover that magic of innocence we so often lose touch with as the price we pay for growing up. A wondrous tale that holds us in its thrall." --Gloria Vanderbilt

"Whatever she is describing--a storm at sea, a mutilation ritual, a gem dealer in Ceylon, or the marlin that got away--Leila Hadley has an uncanny ability to make the reader see what she sees and feel what she feels. This is a wonderful book." --Ted Morgan, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author of Wilderness at Dawn

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