A View of the World: Selected Journalism (Art & Architecture) - Hardcover

A View of the World will carry Norman Lewis's reputation even higher than it already is. It is a triumph -- Patrick Marnham, The Literary Review

Everything is portrayed with a brilliance which makes all other travel-writing read like the blurb on the brochure. -- Time Out

Norman Lewis is outstandingly the best travel writer of our age, if not the best since Marco Polo. -- Auberon Waugh, The Business Traveller

Outstanding journalistic essays by one of our best travel writers. -- Emma Dally, Cosmopolitan

an insight into the mind of an exceptionally sensitive and observant human being. -- Euan Cameron, Books and Bookman

Norman Lewis’ early childhood, as recalled in Jackdaw Cake (1985), was spent partly with his Welsh spiritualist parents in Enfield, North London, and partly with his eccentric aunts in Wales. Forgoing a place at university for lack of funds, he used the income from wedding photography and various petty trading to finance travels to Spain, Italy and the Balkans before being approached by the Colonial Office to spy for them with his camera in Yemen.
He moved to Cuba but was recalled for duty in the Intelligence Corps during the Second World War. It was from this that Norman Lewis’ masterpiece, Naples ’44, emerged, a resurrection of his wartime diary only finally published in 1978.
Before that came a number of novels and travel books, notably A Dragon Apparent (1951) and Golden Earth (1952), both of which were bestsellers in their day. His novel The Volcanoes Above Us, based on personal experiences in Central America, sold six million copies in paperback in Russia and The Honoured Society (1964), a non-fiction study of the Sicilian Mafia, was serialised in six instalments by the New Yorker.
Norman Lewis is the author of thirteen novels and thirteen works of non-fiction, mostly travel books, but he regards his life’s major achievement to be the reaction to an article written by him entitled Genocide in Brazil, published in the Sunday Times in 1968 and reprinted (under the title ’Genocide’) in A View of the World (1986). This led to a change in the Brazilian law relating to the treatment of Indians, and to the formation of Survival International, the influential international organisation which campaigns for the rights of tribal peoples. He later published a very successful book called The Missionaries (1988) which is set amongst the Indians of Central and Latin America.

More recent books include Voices of the Old Sea (1984), Goddess in the Stones: Travels in India (1991), An Empire of the East: Travels in Indonesia (1993), The World the World (1996), which concludes his autobiography, as well as collections of pieces in The Happy Ant Heap (1998) and Voyage by Dhow (2001). With In Sicily (2002), he returns to his much loved Italy. He is currently working on a book about Spain.
Lewis relaxes by his occasional travel to offbeat parts of the world, which he prefers to be as remote as possible; otherwise he lives with his second wife in introspective, almost monastic calm, in the depths of Essex.