An Innocent Abroad

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

Making peace in the long-troubled Middle East is likely to be one of the top priorities of the next American president. He will need to take account of the important lessons from past attempts, which are described and analyzed here in a gripping book by a renowned expert who served twice as U.S. ambassador to Israel and as Middle East adviser to President Clinton. Martin Indyk draws on his many years of intense involvement in the region to provide the inside story of the last time the United States employed sustained diplomacy to end the Arab-Israeli conflict and change the behavior of rogue regimes in Iraq and Iran. Innocent Abroad is an insightful history and a poignant memoir. Indyk provides a fascinating examination of the ironic consequences when American naïveté meets Middle Eastern cynicism in the region's political bazaars. He dissects the very different strategies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to explain why they both faced such difficulties remaking the Middle East in their images of a more peaceful or democratic place. He provides new details of the breakdown of the Arab-Israeli peace talks at Camp David, of the CIA's failure to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and of Clinton's attempts to negotiate with Iran's president. Indyk takes us inside the Oval Office, the Situation Room, the palaces of Arab potentates, and the offices of Israeli prime ministers. He draws intimate portraits of the American, Israeli, and Arab leaders he worked with, including Israel's Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon; the PLO's Yasser Arafat; Egypt's Hosni Mubarak; and Syria's Hafez al-Asad. He describes in vivid detail high-level meetings, demonstrating how difficult it is for American presidents to understand the motives and intentions of Middle Eastern leaders and how easy it is for them to miss those rare moments when these leaders are willing to act in ways that can produce breakthroughs to peace. Innocent Abroad is an extraordinarily candid and enthralling account, crucially important in grasping the obstacles that have confounded the efforts of recent presidents. As a new administration takes power, this experienced diplomat distills the lessons of past failures to chart a new way forward that will be required reading.

One stormy night Regina “Reggie” Barrington received a call from a mysterious stranger named Severo Cardenosa, who demanded she reappear in South America to keep up her end of a bargain. Having no idea what he’s talking about, Reggie confronts her sister, Bella, who had been in South America the previous month. It turns out that Bella promised Severo she’d play the part of his fianc?e to ease his ill grandfather's mind about his future. Bella ran away from her responsibility, and now Reggie feels compelled to take her place. Reggie is in love with someone else, so when she meets Severo she is not impressed. Will love blossom between the two? Can Reggie look past her misconceptions to see Severo for who he is?

Here, collected in book form for the first time, are the letters written by Mark Twain on the famous Holy Land Excursion of 1867—letters that Twain once said would ruin him if published. Twain, a brash young journalist with one book under his belt, was one of seventy-seven passengers on the steamship Quaker City when it left New York in June 1867, to begin “The Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion.” As special correspondent for the Daily Alta California, Twain wrote fifty letters during the next six months, describing in detail the places visited and the sights seen as the pilgrims journeyed from Tangier to Paris, then to Venice, Constantinople, and Bethlehem—with many stops in between. Full of sprightly humor and savage satire, these letters also contain some of the most elegant vituperation ever to appear in an American newspaper. Twain later incorporated parts of the letters into The Innocents Abroad, probably the most famous travel book ever written by an American, but every letter was drastically revised to appeal to the more refined taste of eastern readers. Daniel Morley McKeithan’s discussion of the alterations and deletions made in each letter throws light on Twain’s methods of composition and revision. Those who have read The Innocents Abroad and those who have not will find equal delight in this volume.

When Ann Leary and her husband, then unknown actor-comedian Denis Leary, flew to London in the early nineties for a brief getaway during Ann's second trimester of pregnancy, neither anticipated the adventure that was in store for them. The morning after their arrival, Ann's water broke as they strolled through London's streets. A week later their son, Jack, was born weighing only two pounds, six ounces, and it would be five long months before mother and son could return to the States. In the meantime, Ann became an unwitting yet grateful hostage to Britain's National Health Service -- a stranger in a strange land plunged abruptly into a world of breast pumps and midwives, blood oxygen levels, mad cow disease, and poll tax riots. Desperately worried about the health of her baby, Ann struggled to adapt to motherhood and make sense of a very different culture. At once an intimate family memoir, a lively travelogue, and a touching love story, An Innocent, a Broad is utterly engaging and unforgettable.

Innocents Abroad is a travel book which humorously chronicles the trip Twain called his "Great Pleasure Excursion," on board the chartered vessel Quaker City through Europe and the Holy Land in 1867. The excursion was billed as a Holy Land expedition, with numerous stops and side trips along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, such as the train excursion from Marseille to Paris for the 1867 Paris Exhibition during the reign of Napoleon III and the Second French Empire, a journey through the Papal States to Rome, a side trip through the Black Sea to Odessa, and finally culminating in an excursion through the Holy Land. Twain recorded his observations and critiques of the various aspects of culture and society which he encountered on the journey, some more serious than others. Many of his observations draw a contrast between his own experiences and the often grandiose accounts in contemporary travelogues, which were regarded in their own time as indispensable aids for traveling in the region. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He is best known for his two novels – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but his satirical stories and travel books are also widely popular. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned him praise from critics and peers. He was lauded as the greatest American humorist of his age.

Winner of the Overseas Press Club of America's Cornelius Ryan Award • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by New York Magazine and The Progressive "A deeply honest and brave portrait of of an individual sensibility reckoning with her country's violent role in the world." —Hisham Matar, The New York Times Book Review In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul. Hansen arrived in Istanbul with romantic ideas about a mythical city perched between East and West, and with a naïve sense of the Islamic world beyond. Over the course of her many years of living in Turkey and traveling in Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Iran, she learned a great deal about these countries and their cultures and histories and politics. But the greatest, most unsettling surprise would be what she learned about her own country—and herself, an American abroad in the era of American decline. It would take leaving her home to discover what she came to think of as the two Americas: the country and its people, and the experience of American power around the world. She came to understand that anti-Americanism is not a violent pathology. It is, Hansen writes, “a broken heart . . . A one-hundred-year-old relationship.” Blending memoir, journalism, and history, and deeply attuned to the voices of those she met on her travels, Notes on a Foreign Country is a moving reflection on America’s place in the world. It is a powerful journey of self-discovery and revelation—a profound reckoning with what it means to be American in a moment of grave national and global turmoil.

When, in 1978, as a participant in a teacher exchange programme, the author, accompanied by his wife and young family, exchanged his boring existence in Grangemouth in central Scotland for life in Missoula, Montana, in the western United Sates, he could not have foreseen just how much of a life-changing experience it would be not just for him and his family, but for his exchangee as well. He was prepared for a less formal atmosphere in the classroom, while, for their part, his students had been warned that he would be Mr Strict. It was not long before this clash of cultures reared its ugly head and the author found himself in big trouble. But, as he had found out from the very instant he arrived on the continent, just because we share a common language it doesnt mean Americans do things the same way. And the Montanans, he was to discover, do things more differently still. There were times, in the beginning, when he wished he had stayed at home in his boring but safe existence in Scotland and there were times when life got more than just a little bit too exciting for comfort. But mainly this is a heart- warming and humorous tale of how this Innocent abroad, confronted with one culture shock after another, overcame his trials and tribulations and thanks to a whole array of colourful and kind people, finally came to realise that this exchange was the best thing he had ever done.