Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishings Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the worlds literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

lots to learn from this book - and great fun to read
-sheds a lot of light on Morocco and on the perspective of the British guy who wrote it at the end of the 19th century.In some ways Morocco at that time was perhaps a bit like Afghanistan today...?--Worth thinking about...

Wonderful escape into a past world
Cunninghame Graham is a superb observer and writer.In Mogreb-el-Acksa,published in 1898, Graham describes his attempt to cross the AtlasMountains and reach the forbidden city of Tarudant.However, he wasdetained in the mountains for four months by the Kaid of Kintafi, andultimately turned back to Marakesh. The places he visits and the people hemeets come alive, and a current of humor bubbles throughout the narrative. His observations on western vs. eastern cultures, in many instancesunfavorable to both but usually funny and profound, apparently made thebook unpopular when it was published.I recommended the book to twofriends, one a world traveller, the other a Moroccan.Both loved it.

Wonderful escape into a past world
Cunninghame Graham is a superb observer and writer.In Mogreb-el-Acksa,published in 1898, Graham describes his attempt to cross the AtlasMountains and reach the forbidden city of Tarudant.However, he wasdetained in the mountains for four months by the Kaid of Kintafi, andultimately turned back to Marakesh. The places he visits and the people hemeets come alive, and a current of humor bubbles throughout the narrative. His observations on western vs. eastern cultures, in many instancesunfavorable to both but usually funny and profound, apparently made thebook unpopular when it was published.I recommended the book to twofriends, one a world traveller, the other a Moroccan.Both loved it. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of R(obert) B(ontine) Cunninghame Graham, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 2823 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Product Description
Joseph Conrad's friendship with R. B. Cunninghame Graham was stimulating and in many ways paradoxical. Cunninghame Graham was a remarkable figure - a Scottish aristocrat who lived variously as a South American cowboy, a fencing master, a socialist Member of Parliament and a highly respected writer of travel, histories and short stories. His political beliefs, to which he was deeply and passionately committed, contrasted sharply with Conrad's pessimistic conservatism. They became friends in 1897, when Cunninghame Graham first wrote a letter of admiration to Conrad, and they remained friends until Conrad's death in 1924. The letters to Cunninghame Graham are the most illuminating sequence of letters from Conrad to any of his correspondents. He struggles to define his philosophical and political beliefs in relation to Graham's radical and provocative opinions. The letters also provide comments on Conrad's work, notably The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', Heart of Darkness, Nostromo and The Secret Agent, and show how Graham became a central figure in Conrad's life and helped to sustain him in some of his most strenuous literary struggles. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Savagery and humanity in the Texas-Mexico borderlands
R.B. Cunninghame Graham's books are the sort of non-fiction that can almost be passed off as fiction. Desolate but fascinating wastelands, journeys over the silent terrain of the Americas, encounters with the bare edges of existence -- all make his works so engaging that I can't think of any writers to compare with him except his friends Joseph Conrad and W.H. Hudson.

Culled from his thirty or more books, Graham's "North American Sketches" were written between 1880 and 1925.They form the companion volume to his stunning South American and Scottish sketches also edited by John Walker.Here, we travel with the eccentric Scottish gaucho and radical MP for Menteith to the Mexican frontier and the Texas borderlands.

It is a savage world oscillating between barbarity and loneliness Graham describes for us.Time is punctuated with bloodshed, pointless cruelty, man's inhumanity to man, but also with hope and awe of this still wild land. "A Hegira," perhaps the most powerful sketch, depicts Graham's repeated encounters with six fugitive Mexican Apaches escaping from "the law" as he and his wife head north from Mexico City to their San Antonio ranch."Silent and stoical the warriors sat," he describes them in the first encounter, before their flight, "not speaking once in a whole day, communicating but by signs; naked except the breech-clout; their eyes apparently opaque, and looking at you without sight, but seeing everything."These figures from two worlds meet up again."Days followed days as in a ship at sea; the waggons rolling on across the plains" as Graham's party continually spies traces of the Apaches fleeing to their homes in the north, pursued by Mexican Indian hunters who, over a week, track down and kill them all.Nothing during his journey inspires in him so much fascination as those "stoical," silent "indios bravos":"I wondered what they thought, how they looked upon the world."

There is in these sketches a profound sense of disenchantment with civilization as practised, with "progress" as conceived.The American and Mexican public, he writes, doubtless believe in the problematical "Uncle Sam's Justice [sic]," the "poetical justice" of slaughtering Indians.Nevertheless, Graham does not completely scorn "civilization"; far from it."We might have taught [the Indians] something, they might have taught us much, but soon they will all be forgotten, and the lying telegrams will speak of 'glorious victories by our troops.' "Some sketches, in fact, exhibit Graham's great admiration for the Anglo and Mexican societies he in other places condemns."A Chihuahueño" is a wonderful portrait of Miguel Sáenz, a mestizo from Chihuahua.Full of Sáenz's witty proverbs, the sketch shows Graham's fascination with folk sayings."Trust not a mule nor a wench", Sáenz quips; and "Among soldiers and prostitutes all compliments stand excused."

Graham's portraits of Mexico and Texas are every bit as fascinating as his awesome South American Sketches.If you like W.H. Hudson and Joseph Conrad, you'll love R.B. Cunninghame Graham. ... Read more