I am posting this review on behalf of Jim McWilliams who wrote it.
- Barbara Schmidt

~~~~~

Cooper, Robert.  _Around the World with Mark Twain_.  New York: Arcade
Publishing, 2000.  Pp. 432.  Bibliographical notes and index.  Hardcover, 6
1/8 x 9 1/4".  $27.95.  ISBN 1-55970-522-1.

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Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:

Jim McWilliams <[log in to unmask]>
Shepherd College

Copyright (c) 2000 Mark Twain Forum.  This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.

Last summer, as we sat and sunned ourselves aboard the top deck of the
Hannibal riverboat, Rick Hill and I talked about how much adventure we
could have if we recreated Mark Twain's most famous journeys.  We'd begin
with an easy trip--from St. Joseph to San Francisco, with maybe a jaunt to
the Sandwich Islands if our money held out--but someday we'd try the big
one, the circumnavigation described in _Following the Equator_. Robert
Cooper did us one better:  He not only duplicated Twain's route, he even
left Elmira one-hundred years to the day after Twain himself left Elmira to
begin his lecture tour around the world.  Cooper then wrote a book about
his experience, _Around the World with Mark Twain_.

While he does occasionally discuss what he saw and experienced on his own
trip, Cooper's main focus throughout his book is on Twain's tour.  In fact,
_Around the World with Mark Twain_ should become the standard biographical
source for the year that Twain, his wife, and his daughter Clara followed
the equator, 14 July 1895 through 15 July 1896.  Cooper's book is
meticulously researched, with many citations to document the descriptions
of Twain and his travels.  An annoying flaw in this documentation, however,
is that Cooper eschews the familiar superscript numerals for his endnotes.
What he does instead is repeat a few words from the sentence at the
beginning of the endnote before giving the citation.  Here's an example of
what I mean:

At the end of the first paragraph of his book, Cooper writes, "Because he
had failed as a businessman, he [Twain] felt he had failed as a father and
husband as well."  As I began reading the subsequent paragraph, I found
myself still puzzling over that assertion; I wondered if it were entirely
Cooper's own, or if he could be influenced by a Twain critic since that
phrasing sounded familiar.  Curiosity finally got the better of me, so I
decided to check the notes, and, sure enough, I saw for the second endnote,
"he felt he had failed as a father and husband Kaplan (1966:332)."  If
Cooper had given a superscript numeral directing me to an endnote, I could
have known immediately that the assertion was indeed a paraphrase from
Justin Kaplan's _Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain_.  As it was, I first felt
puzzled, and then I wasted some seconds looking through the first few
endnotes until I found the matching phrase so I could see the citation.  I
admit that the entire process only took me thirty seconds or so, but
multiply that thirty seconds by the dozens of times that I wondered if
Cooper were citing someone. . . .  I suspect that _Around the World with
Mark Twain_ is aimed primarily at a general audience (and a fear that a
half-dozen superscript numerals swimming on a page would intimidate
non-specialists and hurt sales is undoubtedly a well-founded fear), but,
nevertheless, I found Cooper's lack of conventional documentation to be
cumbersome.

Even with this flaw, however, _Around the World with Mark Twain_ is loaded
with fascinating information about Twain's travels and lectures that Cooper
has gleaned from newspaper accounts, museum archives, and other primary
sources.  Some of this information is already known to Twain
scholars--Cooper notes when he draws material from Paul Fatout's books
about Twain on the lecture circuit or from Miriam Shillingsburg's book
about Twain in Australasia, for example--but much is new.  In addition to
his endnotes, Cooper includes eighteen photographs and illustrations (a few
I hadn't seen before), a day-by-day chronology of Twain's trip, a fairly
comprehensive bibliography, and an index.

Perhaps just as interesting as the material directly about Twain are
Cooper's frequent digressions into background information that puts Twain
and his travels into context.  A prime illustration of such a digression
would be the three pages that he devotes to the 1895 clashes between the
Bannock Indians and white settlers in the Jackson Hole area of Wyoming.
National newspapers  covered the conflict prominently, and Cooper notes
that Twain--"an avid newspaper reader"--presumably knew that he and his
family would be traveling just two hundred miles north of what threatened
to become open warfare.  Cooper concedes, however, that Twain never
mentioned the Bannocks in his letters or journal, and so he cannot prove
that Twain worried about an Indian attack during his train trip.

I suppose these many digressions might irritate a Twain scholar who wants
"just the facts," but I found them intriguing.  (I should add as a caveat
that I'm a sucker for such items in old newspapers.  When I was compiling
the material for my own Twain book, reports about the Beecher trial, Little
Bighorn, Lizzie Borden, Garfield's assassination, and innumerable other
scandals constantly distracted me from my work.)  The only time I found
Cooper's digressions to be a bore was when they covered material that I
already knew, such as the four pages that explain the feud between Bret
Harte and Twain and the many pages that discuss Twain's attitudes toward
colonialism.  But these sorts of digressions are essential for the
non-specialist, and so I won't complain about them.

As I suggested earlier in this review, _Around the World with Mark Twain_
isn't  really a travel book.  In fact, it actually gives very little
information about the places that Cooper visited and the people that he
met.  I had just finished reading Bill Bryson's latest travel book, _In a
Sunburned Land_, before beginning _Around the World with Mark Twain_, and
the difference between the two books is striking.  Simply put, if you want
to read a lively, funny account of what it's like to travel through
Australia in the late 1990s, you should read Bryson's book.  But if it's
information about Twain's trip through Australia in 1896--as well as
information about the rest of his circumnavigation--that you want, _Around
the World with Mark Twain_ is the book for you.

_____

About the Reviewer: Dr. Jim McWilliams, an assistant professor of English
at Shepherd College in West Virginia, is the author of _Mark Twain in the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1874-1891_.  He and Rick Hill have edited a
collection of essays about contemporary Twain criticism that will be
published by Whitston next year.  This is his fourth book review for the
Forum.