Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
"When my two daughters were 13e and 15 we took them to Antigua, in the Caribbean, for a one-week getaway in the middle of winter. We lived in Maine at the time, where the winters were long. We wanted to teach them to travel and to give them the world (not a humble amibition). They had been to Disneyworld a couple years prior. This time, I searched for a book about our dsesstination and this one popped up.
It was the best thing we did to prepare. The book is wonderfully lyrical with a unique voice; extolling the virtues of Antigua yet at the same time, laying out the issues of colonialsim from the viewpoint of the locals.
Our trip was ever so much richer than it would have been otherwise, and the book had a lasting effect on my daughters ability to see and to define the world."
"This rageful and funny indictment of tourism in formerly colonized countries is not as predictable as it seems at first. Who does Jamaica Kincaid disdain more thoroughly, the British who colonized Antigua, the corrupt elite who now rule, her fellow Antiguans who attend the Hotel Training School to learn "how to be a good nobody", or the hapless tourists who fly into this mess looking for a nice beach? It's hard to tell, and therein lies the interesting tension in this book, which she sums up with this passage: "...Antigua is a small place, a small island. It is nine miles wide by twelve miles long. It was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493. Not long after, it was settled by human rubbish from Europe, who used enslaved but noble and exalted human beings from Africa (all masters of every stripe are rubbish, and all slaves of every stripe are noble and exalted; there can be no question about this) to satisfy their desire for wealth and power, to feel better about their own miserable existence, so that they could be less lonely and less empty--a European disease...Of course, the thing is, once you cease ti be a master, once you throw off your master's yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the salves. Once they are no loner slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted: they are just human beings.""
"For an English class in college, I had to pick a book by an author we had studied in our short story segment. I chose Kincaid because I had lived in Antigua as a Navy brat when I was young. This book paints an Antigua that we didn't know as white Americans. She writes from her heart, and I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Colonialism is an interesting topic to me . . . a necessary evil of sorts."
"a very fast read, i remember this book exposed the economic and political relationships of the Carribean in ways that hadn't moved me as much before...never traveled anywhere again with the same eyes or awareness. read it a while back. learned a lot since along the same veins but this was still the first book to really give me serious pause on what it means to be a tourist, how i look at places, and many related issues."
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