Product Description

In the global village that our world has become, travel and technology fuel each other and us. "Everywhere is made up of everywhere else," motion is our most constant state of being, our very souls have been put into circulation. Yet, as Pico Iyer points out in his fresh, acutely observant, and witty new book, even a global person must have a home. Using his own multicultural upbringing (Indian, American, British) as a point of departure, Iyer sets out on a journey - both physical and psychological - toward a definition of home in this world gone mobile. He travels: to Los Angeles International Airport, where town life (shops, services, sociability) is available without a town; to Hong Kong, where hotels are self-contained communities; to Toronto, made cosmopolitan by its emigre population; to Atlanta, where the Olympic Village unintentionally commemorates the mass-produced universalism that shapes the games; to England, where the effects of empire-as-global-village are still being sorted out; and, to Japan, where Iyer unexpectedly, and finally, finds a home for himself.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63246 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
As an Indian born, English educated, American naturalised "global citizen" now living in "suburban Japan", few could be better qualified for travel writing than Pico Iyer: a fact proved by his much praised previous titles Cuba and the Night and Tropical Classical.

Those looking for similarly agreeable reportage in this book will, however, be disappointed. The Global Soul isn't just a travelogue, it's a thesis: a lyrical and skittish dissertation on the way our once wonderfully huge and diverse world, and the humanity therein, is being shrunk, homogenised, and impoverished by mass communication and international capital.

Iyer begins his quest for the troubled "Global Soul" in Los Angeles Airport. Here, in a place that is "half shopping mall, half border crossing" he finds plenty of evidence to support his vision of global anomie: wandering between the sushi bars, cyber cafés, and Irish pubs he sees an ethnically blurred populace whose spaced-out and half-crazed demeanour isn't entirely ascribable to jet lag. From LAX, Iyer proceeds to several other global crossing points: post-Imperial England; racially paranoid Atlanta; wackily Americanised Japan. In each he finds self-doubt, self-consciousness, suspicion; in each he finds a rejection of the past allied to a lack of faith in the future. In each he finds a vague, inchoate unhappiness that belies increasing prosperity.

If there is a problem with this book, it is over-ambition. Iyer's thesis is grandiose, and sometimes one therefore feels the need for a little more evidence than the meandering if effervescent anecdotes adduced here. But this is still a valuable book: timely, intriguing, and important.--Sean Thomas

Independent
'Wise and subtle, Iyer wears his erudition lightly and weaves personal anecdoe into enduring reportage'

Guardian
'This is a bright and timely book'