A. A. Gill (1954–2016)

A collection of essays and travel pieces by the late travel and food critic, who was one of the wittiest, funniest, most vulgar and observant writers. His topics here range from an assignment in Haiti, where he witnesses a murder and gets caught in the middle of a riot. In Brazil, he observes the lifestyle of both the rich and poor and gets pretty entranced with "bottoms". In New York, he commits to trying all the trendy gyms and their exercise programs. One of the funniest pieces is about show more golf, with Gill in a fury, listings everything he hates about the idea of golf and golfers, before becoming a golfer himself, and the most heartfelt essay is about his father's Alzheimer's. There's also a piece about hunting that is graphic at times, but also explains his stance.
Even if you think you aren't interested in the subject he's writing about, Gill could hold the reader's attention because he had such an unpredictable, original voice. show less

This is another book I used to flick through during the endless tedious hours at my bookstore job. AA Gill is a British columnist, ostensibly a travel writer, but not the kind with a tagline at the end which says "the writer was a guest of X Travel." Gill is as much a political and social writer as he is a travel writer, and this compendium of his columns for the Sunday Times ranges across topics from a Sudanese famine to the California pornography industry to one of the worst environmental show more disasters of all time - the drying up of the Aral Sea by Soviet agriculture. This one in particular struck me with its ending, because I've noticed at my current job how British journalism is typically incapable of wrapping up a story without some kind of neat ending:

A story like this, a story of such unremitting misery, ought to end with a candle of hope. There should be something to be done. Well, I'm sorry, but there isn't. Plenty of better men with clipboards and white Land Cruisers have been here to put it back together again, but they've retreated, dumbfounded and defeated.

Gill is notorious for his scathing criticism and "rapier wit," but in the prologue he says: "Like many writers who resort to humour, really, I want to be taken very, very seriously." He succeeds at both, with a distinctive writing style that's both funny and thought-provoking, and I definitely intend to buy his other books. show less

Another excellent collection of AA Gill’s travel columns and opinion pieces, one of the only contemporary journalists whose prose is actually worth gathering up in a volume. AA Gill is Further Away is divided into two halves, “Near” and “Far,” with “Near” collecting stories from England and “Far” containing more general foreign travel narratives.

On the whole I enjoyed the English pieces better, as they range across topics as diverse as sustainable fishing, plastic surgery show more for burned WWII airmen, chicken breeding and dyslexia. There’s a marvellous love letter to Hyde Park, its “open plains and secret dells, wild places, ruins and follies, fountains and palaces.” One of the best articles is an exploration of the Battle of Towton, Britain’s bloodiest in history, yet largely forgotten.

The reason Towton hasn’t come down the ages to us may be in part that it was in the middle of the War of Roses, that complex internecine bout of patrician bombast, a hissy fit that stuttered and smouldered through the exhausted fag end of the Middle Ages like a gang feud. The War of Roses have no heroes; there are no good guys and precious little romance. They’re as complicated and brain-aching as Russian novels and pigeon breeding.

The second half consists largely of more typical travel articles, but still has a few gems, such as his trip to Svalbard, his coverage of the 2008 US elections, or his analysis of Dubai:

Dubai has been built very fast. The plan was money. The architect was money. The designer and the builder was money. And if you ever wondered what money would look like if it were left to its own devices, the answer is Dubai.

Enjoyable and illuminating as always. show less

A collection of travel articles by critic Gill that ran in The Sunday Times of London between 1998-2001. Gill was something of a misanthrope, but one with empathy. His articles describe traveling to Hiroshima and ending up in an argument with a Japanese activist about who was to blame for the bombing, or a drive up the California coast sneering at the wealth, only to turn his cynicism on himself. He attends the Royal Agricultural Show, Fashion Week in Milan, goes to highly dangerous show more locations such as the war-torn Sudan and Uganda, and puts a lot of effort into reaching what the Guinness Book of Records named "The Biggest Ecological Disaster in the World", the city of Nukus in Uzbekistan.
Traveling with Gill isn't to everyone's taste. He's got a razor sharp tongue, but he's so funny and often surprising. show less