Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

by Dervla Murphy

Overview

When Dervla Murphy was ten, she was given a bicycle and an atlas, and within days she was secretly planning a trip to India. At the age of thirty-one, in 1963, she finally set off and this book is based on the daily diary she kept while riding through Persia, Afghanistan and over the Himalayas to Pakistan and India. A lone woman on a bicycle (with a revolver in her trouser pocket) was an almost unknown occurrence and a focus of enormous interest wherever she went. Undaunted by snow in alarming quantities, and using her .25 pistol on starving wolves in Bulgaria and to scare lecherous Kurds in Persia, her resourcefulness and the blind eye she turned to personal danger and extreme discomfort were remarkable.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781906011727
Publisher:	Eland Publishing
Publication date:	10/18/2011
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	255
Sales rank:	280,602
File size:	763 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Dervla Murphy was born on 28 November 1931 of parents whose families were both settled in Dublin as far back as can be traced. Her grandfather and most of his family were involved in the Irish Republican movement. Her father was appointed Waterford County Librarian in 1930 after three years internment in Wormwood Scrubs prison and seven years at the Sorbonne. Her mother was invalided by arthritis when Dervla was one year old. She was educated at the Ursuline Convent in Waterford until she was fourteen, when, because of the wartime shortage of servants, she left to keep house for her father and to nurse her mother. Dervla did this for sixteen years with occasional breaks bicycling on the Continent. Her mother's death left her free to go farther afield and in 1963 she cycled to India. There she worked with Tibetan refugee children before returning home after a year to write her first two books. Full Tilt was published in 1965 and over twenty other travel books have followed. She still lives in County Waterford. Her daughter, Rachel, and three granddaughters live in Italy and join Dervla on her travels when possible.

Editorial Reviews

Here is the first American appearance of a book by Irish travel writer Murphy. Originally published in 1965, it is the diary of her bicycle trek from Dunkirk, across Europe, through Iran and Afghanistan, over the Himalayas to Pakistan and India. Murphy's immediate rapport with the people she alights among is vibrant and appealing and makes her travelogue unique. Venturing aloneaccompanied only by her bicycle, which she dubs Rozthe indomitable Murphy not only survives daunting physical rigors but gleans considerable enjoyment in getting to know peoples who were then even more remote than they are now. Overlook will also soon publish in uniform editions Murphy's Eight Feet in the Andes, The Waiting Land and On a Shoestring to Coorg. (March 21)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This book recounts a trip, taken mostly on bicycle, by a gritty Irishwoman in 1963. Her route was through Yugoslavia, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and ended in New Delhi. She carried a pistol, got sunstroke, and suffered the usual stomach disorders. She endured bad accommodations but reaped much local hospitality, too, including a dinner with the Pakistani president. Most of the book concerns the high mountain country of Afghanistan and Pakistan. First published in England in 1965, the book is neither current, nor quite old enough to be of much historical interest. Nonetheless, it is a spirited account, suitable for larger public library collections. Unfortunately, it lacks illustrations, and the two maps included give us little idea of the remote areas she visited. Harold M. Otness, Southern Oregon State Coll. Lib., Ashland

Library Journal

In a comfortable Irish lilt, Dublin-born narrator Emma Lowe captures the author’s adventurous spirit, courage, and gritty determination to ride a bicycle more than 5,000 miles from London through the Italian Alps, across Eastern Europe and Turkey, through northern Iran and Afghanistan, over the Hindu Kush mountains to Pakistan, and on to New Delhi. There’s an amazing calmness to Lowe’s voice as she recounts taking on wolves, gun-toting bandits, and extreme temperatures, all while pedaling away. The year 1963 was an interesting year to be traveling through some of the most isolated edges of the Middle East, and Lowe presents the author’s tone of deep appreciation and admiration for the easy hospitality shown to her by diverse people who had gone untouched by outside influences for centuries. B.P. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

JANUARY 2020 - AudioFile

In a comfortable Irish lilt, Dublin-born narrator Emma Lowe captures the author’s adventurous spirit, courage, and gritty determination to ride a bicycle more than 5,000 miles from London through the Italian Alps, across Eastern Europe and Turkey, through northern Iran and Afghanistan, over the Hindu Kush mountains to Pakistan, and on to New Delhi. There’s an amazing calmness to Lowe’s voice as she recounts taking on wolves, gun-toting bandits, and extreme temperatures, all while pedaling away. The year 1963 was an interesting year to be traveling through some of the most isolated edges of the Middle East, and Lowe presents the author’s tone of deep appreciation and admiration for the easy hospitality shown to her by diverse people who had gone untouched by outside influences for centuries. B.P. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

JANUARY 2020 - AudioFile