he underrated James Salter (born James Horowitz) is among the great American prose stylists of the last 50 years. In this collection of travel writing, mostly from the 1980s, Salter focuses on his beloved rural France with side-trips to the Austrian Alps, Italy, and Colorado. Salter’s prose is best described as poetic Hemingway: detailed, direct, and lyrical.
In introducing the killing fields at Verdun, he writes: “One hinge of the twentieth century turned at a drab provincial town in France where the principal industry was sugared almonds.” Acuity and rhetorical surprise make reading Salter a must.
