More than any other in Western Europe, Britain remains a country where a traveler has to think twice before indulging in the ordinary food of ordinary people.

March 29 2011. Politicians in India have generally and across the political spectrum denounced the book and demanded it be banned as being allegedly defamatory with the Government of Gujarat under Narendra Modi banning the book as "perverse in nature. While he was a reporter for the New York Times he received the 1971 George Polk Award for Education Reporting and the 1983 award for Foreign Reporting.

Among Lelyveld's books is Move Your Shadow: South Africa Black and White based on his reporting from Johannesburg South Africa in the 1960s and 1980s. In all Lelyveld worked at the Times for nearly 40 years starting out in 1962. He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1986 for Move Your Shadow.