Author: Pico Iyer
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0670057851
Description
Pico Iyer-one of the most compelling and profoundly provocative travel writers-invites us to accompany him on an array of exotic explorations, from L A to Yemen to Haiti and Ethiopia, from a Bolivian prison to a hidden monastery in Tibet. He goes to Cambodia, where the main tourist attraction is a collection of skulls from the Khmer Rouge killing fields, and travels through southern Arabia in the weeks before September 11, 2001. He practices meditation with Leonard Cohen and discusses geopolitics with the Dalai Lama, travels to Easter Island and through the imaginative terrains of W.G. Sebald and Kazuo Ishiguro, weaving physical and psychological challenges together into a seamless narrative.
Throughout his travels, the familiar thrill of adventure is haunted by the unsettling questions that arise for Iyer everywhere he goes: How do we reconcile suffering with the sunlight often found around it? How does the foreign instruct the traveller, precisely by discomfiting him? And, how does travel take us more deeply into reality, both within us and without? Intensely affecting, Iyer's explorations are a road map of thinking in new ways about our changing world.
PRAISE FOR PICO IYER
Pico Iyer’s remarkable talent is enough justification for going anywhere in the world he fancies.
-Washington Post Book World
Brilliant, (Iyer) reflects back at us images from a postcolonial world that is gorgeously complex and stubbornly elusive, yet firmly within his grasp.
-New York Times
He is most often called a travel writer, but if Iyer is only a ravel writer, then so was Henry James.
-Los Angeles Times
As a guide to far-flung places, Pico Iyer can hardly be surpassed.
-Los Angeles Times
Contents
The Place Across the Mountains
SUN AFTER DARK
A Gathering Around a perplexity
Making Kindness Stand to Reason
Happy Hour in the heart of Darkness
Dead Man Walking
A New Year
FLIGHTS
The Khareef
A Journey into Light
In the Dark
On the Ropebridge
Grandmothers
THE FOREIGN
Nightwalking
A Haunted House of Treasures
A New Millennium
A Foreigner at Home
A Far-off Affair
The Pebble in the Shoe