Transit of Venus|Julian Evans 0749391650

||boek: Transit of Venus|Travels in the Pacific|Minerva

||door: Julian Evans

||taal: en
||jaar: 1993
||druk: Minerva Edition
||pag.: 273p
||opm.: paperback|like new|cover vertoont kreukje en scheurtje

||code: 1:001207

--- Over het boek (foto 1): Transit of Venus ---

From Marco Polo, Magellan, and Captain Cook to James Michener and Rodgers and Hammerstein, the South Pacific has exercised a profound influence on the Western imagination. It conjures dreams of Marco Polo's illusory kingdoms, the Noble Savage as imagined by the West, the guilt-free sex and gin-clear lagoons of Polynesia, the perfection of idleness on desert islands, Mutiny on the Bounty and the contention between Captain Bligh and Fletcher Christian. Since Captain Cook first traveled to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus across the sun, fabulae about the South Seas have enabled the Western mind to imagine itself vis-a-vis the Other. Written with passion, biting wit, and lyrical sadness, Transit of Venus is a luminous elegy for a fragile, beautiful, corrupted "paradise." Julian Evans's journey begins with a modern myth, a photograph of a Last Judgment sky glowering on the horizon and spears of light streaking down into the ocean: reentry vehicles from a Peacekeeper missile. It was the source of this man-made vision that Evans decided he had to see. But the journey became a wanderer's tale: Delayed on his way to the Peacekeeper's target (a place that has probably contributed more to the arms race than anywhere else on Earth) by stories of both white men and islanders, he found himself tracing the reality of the Pacific dream. For European interlopers - planters, speculators, and fugitives - it is a place where they lose themselves in schemes and drink-fever. For the islanders - from New Caledonia and Vanuatu to Fiji, Western Samoa, Kiribati, and the Marshall Islands - gifts of money, military aspirations, and crackpot colonialism have had their fatal impact on ancient ways. Few places illustrate more powerfully the inexorable outcome of "civilization."

[source: https--www.goodreads.com]

[2021-02-13]

I have always found the many little islands in the Pacific Ocean fascinating, it's where you could find a cannibal and it is where you could get stranded on a desert island wishing you had brought food with you instead of 10 CDs and no CD player. It is also the one place on the map of the world where it is hard to get an understanding of scale, they are always down in the bottom right of the map and it looks like the only place within a million miles is New Zealand, it is surprising just how close they are to Hawaii.

Evans has something in his blood calling to him to visit these islands, the see those beautiful beaches, to meet the locals and to experience all that he can. It's not an easy task, finding a boat or plane to take him anywhere is a tough undertaking, timekeeping is not something that happens on the islands, a boat will arrive when it happens to turn up, it really does make planning a trip difficult. Evans ends up trying to find the true face of the islands, looking for the damage caused by British/French/American/German politics and the ever present missionaries, you'll never get used to the damage we caused in the past. There are some shocking scenes and some people are living in heart-breaking conditions but Evans keeps a cool head, he tells the reader how it is, he doesn't cover things up... even when he promised to do just that. He meets some wonderful people, so generous when they have so little and he doesn't cover up anything embarrassing he does, trying to flirt with a young lady soon backfires but he is able to laugh it off.

One of the most interesting areas he visits is near the Bikini Atoll, where the nuclear bombs were tested and people were only moved slightly away, truly shocking treatment of humans by the USA. The book is worth getting just to read this section.

This book is a proper good adventure, sharing the stories of the people he meets, not shying away from any customs, every experience is included from sleeping conditions to dodgy food. He visits places you've probably never heard of Vanuatu and Tuvalu were only places I had heard of on the gameshow called Pointless. The writing is easy to read, reading about his personal experiences mixed in with other peoples stories and plenty of interesting history makes this a fun book. Highly recommended by me.

Jason [source: https--www.goodreads.com]

[2017-11-02]

I can't put my finger on it, but something in the book seems "off" -- episodes that should be funny just don't help with a feeling of slogging through this one.

John [source: https--www.goodreads.com]

[2021-07-05]

Very fun, lots of gossipy goodness, preachy, whiny, negative, miserable. It's a strange bag of quick takes and rushing from one island to the next. Bits of historical background mixed with the author's adventures.

I liked it, but found it started to drag at the end. And as the author grew wistful and tried to sum up lessons learned, there came the inevitable environmentalism.lecture: the stupidities of human beings are destroying our world. Yes, they are. We all know that. It sucks. We know.

One of the threads I found interesting was that of colonialism, and how rich countries make deals with poor countries, and then disregard them. And how rich countries provide aid to poor countries, and that can cripple them far more more than actually aid them. Brutal madness.

The author is also a man's man, drinking lots, wanting to punch people for being bores, walking around with a massive leg wound he doesn't take care of, and so on. It struck me as sort of cute and slightly embarrassing.

Over all, I found the book best when reporting details of his travels. Slightly less great when providing historical background. Dull when he goes on a philosophical tear about what it all means.

I read this with Google Maps handy, constantly looking at the islands being discussed. Oddly, it's the sort of book that tries to talk you out of visiting the places discussed because they're all tourist traps or nightmares. Not being the kind of guy who wants to lounge on a beach, swim, or scuba dive, none of these places have much appeal as travel destinations, but were interesting to read about.

Nikmaack [source: https--www.goodreads.com]

[2022-01-08]

What an excellent book. Very well written, quite enthralling and hardly dated. Surprisingly little has changed in the intervening 20 years which is depressing given that the stories of individual Pacific nations are bleak tales of colonial pillaging and current day servitude. Descriptions of beaches strewn with garbage and children malnourished by a diet of sweet drinks and junk food supplied by their American overlords are at odds with the images of the tropical island paradises but they ring true. Such a lucky find in my favourite secondhand bookshop. (Purchased at Skoob Books, London, UK.)

Jane E [source: https--www.goodreads.com]

[2019-03-10]

The first chapter was pretty slow going. I didn't think I would finish the book at first, even though I will slog through just about any Pacific literature. But as I kept reading I was pleasantly surprised. This turned out to be one of my favorite Pacific Island travel books. I thought the section on the Marshall Islands was especially brilliant - probably the best description I've read in any travel writing of this kind. Here are some of the things I liked about this book in comparison to similar travel writing:

• The destinations were varied
• The writer prefaced his experiences with just the right amount of relevant historical background
• He focused on the places and characters he encountered and didn't include too many personal stories
• He highlighted historical and on-going injustices and struggles while still capturing the modern reality and beauty of the Pacific islands
• The writing is almost poetic at times and not just a list of events

August [source: https--www.goodreads.com]

[2020-07-29]

Perhaps he's a Paul Theroux wannabe because I'm not sure why he wrote this book. He complained about the places being too hot (it's the tropics), too boring, and too corrupt making this book a chore to read. Published in 1992, the information on the politics of the region is dated. Not recommended.

Ann [source: https--www.goodreads.com]

[2008-04-09]

"Enticed by photographs, memories of Australia, and a desire to search for solitude, Evans sets out to experience the islands of the South Pacific. Leaving Sidney by freighter, he journeys by whatever means available through New Caledonia, Figi, Western Samoa, and a variety of islands in the region. With a lack of time restraint and a personal fluidity of choice, he saunters from island to island and meets a colorful array of informative local acquaintances. Evans describes his adventures in this tropical vastness with candidness and clarity. His journey concludes with a visit to the U.S. Army Base in Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, the site of the Missile Test Range. An obvious strength of the book is the brief but excellent history of the islands and the impact of various cultures upon it. This is a good introduction to the area and the people, places, and politics that make it unique. For travel collections." --Jo-Anne Mary Benson, Osgoode, Ontario

Paul [source: https--www.goodreads.com]

[2012-03-25]

A travel book of an area of the world most people consider Paradise, but on this journey with Author Julian Evans that is not the case. The place I am referring to is the South seas but Julian visits the overlooked or in some cases the underside of these islands and the results are funny, sad, depressing. After reading this book I definitely know where not to go in the South Pacific.

Paul [source: https--www.goodreads.com]

The Pacific Ocean calls to mind a world of fabulous kingdoms and noble savages, guilt free sex and gin-clear lagoons, and a perfect idleness fed by lush fruits and fish-rich seas. Ever since Captain Cook first went to Tahiti in 1769 to observe the transit of Venus across the sun, this dream of the Pacific has not lost its force. But Julian Evans's journey through the island archipelagos of the Great Ocean was also informed by a quest into our more modern myths - such as Peacekeeper missiles and nuclear bombs being tested by the US Army. With humour and vivid imagery, honesty and a wickedly sardonic wit, Evans uncovers the reality of these two Pacific dreams: a brave new ocean where the islanders have money and booze, military coups and cold-war politics, atomic explosions and rising sea levels, but where, in the remotest atolls, beyond all our modernity and rationality, the old dream of islands continues to assert itself.

[source: https--www.waterstones.com/book/transit-of-venus/julian-evans/9781780600536]

--- Over (foto 2): Julian Evans ---

Julian Evans grew up on Australia's east coast and in the south London suburbs in the 1960s. In 1990 he left his job in London to island-hop across the Pacific Ocean by ship, small plane and boat, a journey that ended five months later at a US nuclear-missile test range at Kwajalein atoll. The book that resulted, Transit of Venus, has been described as "far and away the best book about the Pacific of our times". Eland Press are reissuing Transit of Venus with a new afterword on 24 October 2014.

His latest book is Semi-Invisible Man: the Life of Norman Lewis (Jonathan Cape, Picador).

He has also written and presented radio and television documentaries and writes for English and French newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, Prospect, Times Literary Supplement and L'Atelier du Roman. He translates from French and German and is a recipient of the Prix du Rayonnement de la Langue Française from the Académie Française. He is also a Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow. He lives in Bristol and London with his two children.

To find out more, click on the menu to read selected essays and interviews and hear the radio documentaries, and to find reviews, photographs and notes on when, where and why things were written.

[source: https--julianevans.com/about]

The essays, reviews and articles here have a coherence I imagine rather than claim for them. A coherence of pleasure, of curiosity; of amazement at our modernity and our disarray. There's no special picture - look at the interviews and you'll see that in most cases the subject's life spanned the best part of the 20th century: Norman Lewis, witnessing the Asturian miners' gunfire that precursed the Spanish Civil War; Eric Ambler in Manchester Square, viewing the upward curve of fascism; Lydia Chukovskaya, without whom there would be less of Akhmatova's poetry, seeing the reality of Stalin's purges. But that pattern is an accident. I think I just like talking to those who take me backwards, and forwards; deep, and wide.

You'll notice too a fixation with writers, mainly novelists. Even when I have written about people for whom writing books is not their main activity - Oliver Sacks, Morrissey, Kraftwerk - it was because they seemed to possess a literary sensibility, a reaching for the persuasion of words. And often the writers I've written about are forgotten. If there's a connection between them, it may be that they represent a style sidelined for a couple of decades - the era of post-modernism, call it what you will - a style that's married to its meaning, a style both for itself and for the reader.

If I dissent from style for its own sake, as being a particularly bad kind of writerly vanity, I also dissent from the view that the world is ending, or changing, especially since 9/11 and its sequels. Both are vanities. Civilisations are always threatened, and our fragility is vital to us, being what makes us human. Yet the world manages to remain more various, more encrusted with future discoveries, than our security-fixated and normative outlook suggests. And whether that conformist tendency eases or not, I believe the world is still best perfected, or made legible, through the metaphor of writing about it.

Because the writing racket is itinerant, the story strays. I have included a few excursions that illustrate the unplanned process of finding things to write about. None of the subjects, bar one, was anybody else's idea. I agree that that doesn't excuse their appearance.

[source: https--julianevans.com/journalism]

Julian Evans (born 1955) is an Australian writer and presenter.

In 1990 he left his office job to become a writer and spent six months travelling among the islands of the south Pacific Ocean. In 1992 he published Transit of Venus: Travels in the Pacific, which met with enthusiastic critical acclaim. This launched him on a career as a writer of books, travel articles, essays, and radio and television documentaries on literary subjects. He is also a translator and a reviewer for a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Times Literary Supplement and Prospect. His most recent full-length book was Semi-Invisible Man: the Life of Norman Lewis (2008), which was reviewed favourably; Evans was an appropriate biographer for the great writer and adventurer, as Norman Lewis had once described Evans's first book, Transit of Venus, as "far and away the best book about the Pacific of our times."

Works

• Semi-Invisible Man: the Life of Norman Lewis (Jonathan Cape, June 2008, Picador June 2009)
• I sotteranei del Vaticano: rereading André Gide's Les Caves du Vatican (Metauro Edizioni, Pesaro 2006)
• "Remettez-moi ça" ("Really very fortunate"), La Revue Littéraire vol.1 no.1, April 2004
• "Un gâchis" ("A waste"), L'Atelier du Roman no. 29, March 2002
• José Saramago: A Life of Resistance (BBC Four film), 2002
• The Romantic Road (BBC Radio 3 20-part radio series), 2000-2
• Transit of Venus: Travels in the Pacific (Secker & Warburg 1992, Pantheon 1992 (US); revised edition Eland Books 2014)

[source: wikipedia]

Julian Evans is a biographer, travel writer and translator. His first book Transit of Venus (Secker & Warburg, 1992; Eland Books, 2014) is an account of a journey across the Pacific Ocean to a US nuclear missile-testing range. It was named by Lonely Planet as 'the best modern travelogue about the Pacific'. His recent biography of the writer and adventurer Norman Lewis, Semi-Invisible Man (Jonathan Cape, 2008), was acclaimed for both its spirited depiction of Lewis's own journeys, many of which Evans followed, and its meditations on the nature of biography and our need for stories.

His sense of humanity's imperative for stories has inspired the many radio and TV documentaries he has written and presented, including BBC Radio 3's series on the European novel The Romantic Road and the BBC4 film José Saramago: a life of resistance. He has also translated the novels of André Gide and Michel Déon, among others. In 1997 he was awarded the Académie Française prize for the advancement of French literature.

Since 2004 he has been closely involved in the work of the writers' organisation, English Pen, and its writers-in-translation committee. His desire to offer his experience to a new audience led to his work with the RLF fellowship scheme. He now lives between London and Bristol with the artist Natasha Dikaya, their two children and a Jack Russell terrier. For his next book he is researching Gustave Flaubert's intimate connections with Chelsea and several of its residents.

[source: https--www.rlf.org.uk/fellowships/julian-evans]

Julian Evans is a biographer and travel writer who has run workshops with the National Trust, the NERC's Doctoral Training Partnership, and several universities and charities. He focuses on showing clients not only how to express themselves effectively when they write, but how to enjoy the process. He has been an editorial director at Penguin Books and written and presented radio features for the BBC. He was an RLF Fellow at the University of Bristol and more recently at the University of the West of England, where he has been commissioned to develop online writing resources and continues to deliver writing development workshops. His publications include Transit of Venus: Travels in the Pacific and a biography of the writer Norman Lewis. He is an RLF Consultant Fellow.

[source: https--www.writingproject.co.uk/staff-member/julian-evans]

Julian Evans is the author of Transit of Venus: Travels in the Pacific (1992), and the authorised biographer of the writer and adventurer Norman Lewis. He is a regular contributor to the Guardian and Prospect magazine. He lives in south-west England.

[source: https--www.panmacmillan.com/authors/julian-evans/2429]

"Writing Italy" with Helena Attlee and Julian Evans

Join us for 6 days of writing masterclasses this September in the superb comfort and bohemian atmosphere of a 13th-century castle, deep in the Tuscan countryside.

Following on from their successful course last year, bestselling author Helena Attlee and acclaimed biographer and travel writer Julian Evans will help you to discover new writing skills and ways of seeing and experiencing your surroundings.

Guided by bestselling author Helena Attlee and acclaimed biographer and travel writer Julian Evans, this is a perfect opportunity to discover new writing skills and ways of seeing and experiencing your surroundings. Whether you want to write about travel, history, biography or autobiography, landscape, food or nature - any form of creative non-fiction - our 6 days at Castello di Potentino are the ideal moment to start a new project or look at an existing one with fresh eyes.

During the week you'll watch Tuscan shepherds making cheese, taste wines made from the castle vineyards, explore unspoiled landscapes with a local botanist, make pasta with acclaimed food writer Rachel Roddy, and immerse yourself in village life: lived experiences that you'll learn to capture on the page. Helena and Julian will work with you in small groups, introducing new approaches to strengthen your writing voice and helping you to find the most compelling way to tell your story. You will also be invited to a one-to-one tutorial, where you can discuss your writing in detail.

Our special guests this week will be Rachel Roddy, whose books and weekly column in the London Guardian have won her many fans, and Derek Johns, who recently stepped down from running London's oldest literary agency.

We designed this course for non-fiction writers who want to capture lived experience in their writing, strengthen their voice on the page, and find the story they want to tell.

Each day is built around an activity, whether it's making cheese with shepherds from a neighbouring village, making pasta with Rachel Roddy, walking the valley with a local botanist, or tasting wines made in the castle winery.

These experiences are coupled with workshops and one-to-one tutorials designed to help you build your skills and confidence and explore essential elements of the writing process.

Helena Attlee's latest book Lev's Violin: An Italian adventure was published last year and broadcast as BBC Radio 4's 'Book of the Week'. Her bestselling The Land Where Lemons Grow: The story of Italy and its citrus fruit has been translated into several languages and won the Guild of Food Writers' Book of the Year 2015.

Julian Evans is the author of the acclaimed biography Semi-Invisible Man: The life of Norman Lewis and Transit of Venus: Travels in the Pacific. He has presented radio and TV documentaries, reported from central Europe and written about the war in Ukraine from the frontline.

[source: https--potentino.com/products/copy-of-writing-italy-with-helena-attlee-and-julian-evans]