In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, young English elites often spent years traveling around Europe to broaden their horizons in an experience known as the Grand Tour. In his book Searching... This description may be from another edition of this product.
This book is the travel memoir of a young American who spends seven weeks traveling across Western Europe, primarily as part of an organized tour. One's initial reaction to this setting might be: "Really? Some guy books a trip on one of those massive buses and thinks he has a unique experience worth writing about?" However, the author quickly pulls in the reader with a mixture of tongue-in-cheek stereotypes ("whenever the subject of English women comes up in conversation, I invariably grimace and comment that there aren't any good-looking ones"), humorous observations on the vernacular of his fellow travelers (for Aussies, "everything either comes in a small quantity, 'a bit of,' or a large quantity, 'heaps'"), and droll commentary on major landmarks ("Figuring that a fallen tower wouldn't be as good of a tourist draw as a leaning tower, the Pisans were taking great pains to keep it upright"). Travelers in foreign countries (particularly large groups of American tourists) tend to fall in one of two camps: passive (i.e., get on/off the bus and accept the experience presented) or active. The author falls in the latter, as he keenly engages with many of the landmarks. He weaves descriptions of the history and grandeur of various locations (because of St. Peter's Basilica's "voluminous interior....[t]housands of people were inside, but it didn't seem particularly crowded") with musings that are at turns critical (the cathedral is "more a symbol of power and authority than grace"), philosophical ("[a]lthough people long for heaven, I believe most would find it intolerable...[t]he joy is in the struggle"), and introspective ("no matter how strongly one believes in something, if enough people claim otherwise, it is almost impossible not to doubt oneself"). More than the travel diary of a curious, adventurous American, Searching for the Holy Grail is an essay--long and overly detailed in certain sections, but consistently entertaining--of how international travel can encourage valuable reflections on faith, goals, and identity. In the introduction to the 2008 edition of The Best American Travel Writing, editor Anthony Bourdain suggests that the most powerful travel stories are those that evoke "the small epiphanies familiar to the full-time traveler, interspersed by a sense of dislocation--and the strange, unholy need to record the experience." Searching for the Holy Grail does exactly this. Halfway through his trip, Walters notes: "It seemed that the farther I got from home and the longer I was away, the....more I began to understand how much my country was part of me, and I a part of it....Everything in life is defined in relation to something else, and because of this, I don't think that we can truly comprehend ourselves until we put ourselves in the midst of people who are different." This modern Grand Tour tale encourages the reader to reflect on his own Holy Grail--whether it exists, and how and if it might be found beyond his immedia
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