Reviews for Oxford children's encyclopedia

The average rating for Oxford children's encyclopedia based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-02-21 00:00:00 Christian Ederer Tangier is a fascinating book about the oddball city itself, and the oddballs who have frequented it or lived there. As an "expatriate" currently living in Oaxaca, I understand well how truly cringeworthy we can be when we colonize another piece of paradise. Because of its strategic location on the Straits of Gibraltar, the unique "solution" invented by the European powers was to make Tangier an international city, a tax haven, and what turned out to be an "anything goes" place of escape for the idle rich, the misanthrope, the criminal, the writer, and the artist. All this in an otherwise strict Islamic State ruled from Fez by a corrupt Sultan. The author, Iain Finlayson is a brilliant writer himself, which makes this book so much more than it might have been in less skilled hands. He lays the context for the series of ex-pat travesties with his pungent history of the city, its political and cultural conflicts, and then moves into descriptions of the waves of writers who descended, Paul and Jane Bowles, William Burroughs and the Beats, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. Though this era is long gone, my own fascination with the place has not lessened. For now I content myself with excursions down the Boulevard Pasteur via Google maps….

Review # 2 was written on 2018-03-13 00:00:00 Michael Wilkinson Lots of great stories about the place. I'm a fan of the Beats, and it had a good section on Burroughs. I hadn't realized just how popular it was for writers and artists.