Roumania: The Border Land of The, Christian and the Turk. Comprising Adventures of Travel in Eastern Europe and Western Asia
By in the Ottoman Army. New York: Rudd & Carleton, 310 Broadway. 1857.
DR. JAMES OSCAR NOYES, the author of this book, is an American all over. He has the rapidity and eagerness of mind that the champagny atmosphere of our northern hills gives to those who are stout enough not to be wilted by our hot summers. For briskness, thriftiness, energy, and alacrity, it is hard to find his match. He has made a book of travels, and will make a hundred, unless somebody finds him a place at home where he will have an indefinite number of labors-of-Hercules to keep him busy,—or unless some African prince cuts his head off, or he happens to call upon the Battas about their Thanksgiving-time.
Here he has been streaming through Eastern Europe and Western Asia, so hilarious and good-tempered all the time, so intensely wide-awake, so perfectly at home everywhere, so quick at making friends, so perfectly convinced that the world was made for American travellers, and so apt at proving it by his own example, that his friends who missed him for a while not only were not astonished to find that he had been a Surgeon in the Ottoman Army, during this brief interval, but only wondered he had not been Grand Vizier.
In this instance the book is the man, if we may so far change Monsieur de Buffon's saying. It is full of fresh observations and lively descriptions,—perhaps a little too overlarded and oversprigged with prose and verse quotations,—but as lively as a golden carp just landed. It describes scenes not familiar to most readers, tells stories they have never heard, introduces them to new costumes and faces, and helps itself by the aid of pictures to make its vivacious narrative real. We are much pleased to learn that the work has met with a very good reception; for we consider it as the card of introduction of a gentleman whom the American people will very probably know pretty well before he has done with them, and be the better for the acquaintance.