A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (New York Review Books Classics)
"This is a glorious feast, the account of a walk in 1934 from  the Hook of Holland to what was then Constantinople. The 18-year-old  Fermor began by sleeping in barns but, after meeting some landowners  early on, got occasional introductions to castles. So he experienced  life from both sides, and with all the senses, absorbing everything:  flora and fauna, art and architecture, geography, clothing, music,  foods, religions, languages. Writing the book decades after the fact, in  a baroque style that is always rigorous, never flowery, he was able to  inject historical depth while still retaining the feeling of boyish  enthusiasm and boundless curiosity. This is the first of a still  uncompleted trilogy; the second volume,Between the Woods and the Water,  takes him through Hungary and Romania; together they capture better  than any books I know the remedial, intoxicating joy of travel." — Thomas Swick,South Florida Sun-Sentinel“Recovers  the innocence and the excitement of youth, when everything was possible  and the world seemed luminescent with promise. ...Even  more magical...through Hungary, its lost province of Transylvania,  and into Romania... sampling the tail end of a languid, urbane and  anglophile way of life that would soon be swept away forever.” —Jeremy  Lewis,Literary Review“A book so good you resent finishing it.” —Norman Stone"The greatest of living travel writers…an amazingly complex and subtle evocation of a place that is no more." — Jan Morris"In these two volumes of extraordinary lyrical beauty and discursive,  staggering erudition, Leigh Fermor recounted his first great excursion…  They’re partially about an older author’s encounter with his young self,  but they’re mostly an evocation of a lost Mitteleuropa of wild horses  and dark forests, of ancient synagogues and vivacious Jewish  coffeehouses, of Hussars and Uhlans, and of high-spirited and deeply  eccentric patricians with vast libraries (such as the Transylvanian  count who was a famous entomologist specializing in Far Eastern moths  and who spoke perfect English, though with a heavy Scottish accent,  thanks to his Highland nanny). These books amply display Leigh Fermor’s  keen eye and preternatural ear for languages, but what sets them apart,  besides the utterly engaging persona of their narrator, is his  historical imagination and intricate sense of historical linkage…Few  writers are as alive to the persistence of the past (he’s ever alert to  the historical forces that account for the shifts in custom, language,  architecture, and costume that he discerns), and I’ve read none who are  so sensitive to the layers of invasion that define the part of Europe he  depicts here. The unusual vantage point of these books lends them great  poignancy, for we and the author know what the youthful Leigh Fermor  cannot: that the war will tear the scenery and shatter the buildings he  evokes; that German and Soviet occupation will uproot the beguiling  world of those Tolstoyan nobles; and that in fact very few people who  became his friends on this marvelous and sunny journey will survive the  coming catastrophe." — Benjamin Schwarz,The AtlanticPraise for  Patrick Leigh Fermor:"One of the greatest travel writers of all time”–The Sunday  Times“A unique mixture of hero, historian, traveler and writer; the last and      the greatest of a generation whose like we won't see again.”–Geographical“The finest  traveling companion we could ever have . . . His head is     stocked with enough cultural  lore and poetic fancy to make every   league   an adventure.” –Evening StandardIf all Europe   were   laid waste tomorrow, one might do worse than attempt  to recreate   it, or   at least to preserve some sense of historical  splendor and   variety,  by  immersing oneself in the travel books of  Patrick Leigh   Fermor.”—Ben   Downing,The Paris Review