New Travel Book: ‘Oxford Revisited’
Travel Blog • Eva Holland • 07.29.09 | 10:42 AM ET
Photo by Justin Cartwright’s new travel memoir, about returning to his alma mater in an effort to understand how it shaped him, lands in bookstores next week. Bookslut has a mostly positive review.
Chelsey Philpot writes: “As a young man arriving from South Africa, Cartwright recounts how he was romanced by Oxford even as he still felt himself to be an outsider. His winding tour of old haunts and Oxford landmarks is interrupted by his memories as well as philosophical ruminations ... Under a less skilled writer, such leaps would be clunky. However, Cartwright manages to meld both grand themes and small observations by remaining unabashedly cerebral even as he discusses drunken girlfriends or the tourist appeal of J. R. R. Tolkien (one of Oxford’s celebrated professors).”