Travels with Alice - Softcover

Trillin, Calvin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374526001 ISBN 13: 9780374526009

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999

Synopsis

This delightful book collects Calvin Trillin's accounts of his trips to Europe with his wife, Alice, and their two daughters. In Taormina, Sicily, they cheerfully disagree with Mrs. Tweedie's 1904 assertion that the beautiful town "is being spoilt," and skip the Grand Tour in favor of swimming holes, table soccer, and taureaux piscine. In Paris, they spend a day on the Champs-Elysées comparing Freetime's "le Hitburger" to McDonald's Big Mac. In Spain, Trillin wonders whether he will run out of Spanish "the way someone might run out of flour or eggs." Filled with Trillin's characteristic humor, Travels with Alice is the perfect book for summer travelers.

About this title

Review:

Calvin Trillin goes through life one step behind his appetite. He says he's just a Big Hungry Boy from the Midwest, but he's also one of the funniest American writers around, writing a palate pilgrimage through Europe and the Caribbean, where Trillin fantasizes of an Italian West Indies island of Santo Prosciutto "whose steep hills are green with garlic plants." Trillin gives free play to other obsessions (like taureaux piscine), but most of the travels are happily fueled by thoughts of breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

From the Back Cover:

Here Calvin Trillin defends Sicilian drivers from the charge of unpredictability ("they can be counted on to pass") and elucidates the mysteris of taureaux piscine ("if you and the bull are in the pool at the same time, you win") and wonders at mealtime in the Caribbean why there are no Italian West Indies--Santo Prosciutto, I.W.I. His traveling companions are his two daughters and his wife, Alice, referred to in Italy as "the principesa," he says, because "I found it improved the service at the hotels."

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0374526001
• ISBN 13: 9780374526009
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 216