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: #292207 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'

Customer Reviews

What it is actually like being a Citizen of the World
This is one of the most fascinating books that I've read in recent years. I picked it up the other day and started leafing through it again, and found myself immersed once more. Iyer is a fascinating character - a travel writer and foreign affairs journalist with Time magazine - and is uniquely qualified to talk about globalisation and its effect on individual lives. Born into a family of Indian academics who moved from India to Oxford, he was brought up in England and educated at Eton, Oxford and later Harvard. He subsequently became an American citizen and at the time of the writing of the book was living in Japan. The book has the feel of an amble through the realities of modern life - full of insight and thought-provoking comments, describing a world that more and more of its citizens recognise from first-hand experience. While the cliche of a world that is constantly getting smaller is demonstrable true, we too easily forget the various costs this has on quality of life, at the jet-set and sweat-shop ends.

The simplest thing is probably to quote from various points to give a flavour:
"For more and more people, then, the world is coming to resemble a diaspora, filled with new kinds of beings... as well as new kinds of realities: Rwandans in Auckland and Moroccans in Iceland. One reason why Melbourne looks ever more like Houston is that both of them are filling up with Vietnamese PHO cafés; and computer technology further encourages us to believe that the remotest point is just a click away. Everywhere is so made up of everywhere else - a polycentric anagram - that I hardly notice I'm sitting in a Parisian café just outside Chinatown (in San Francisco), talking to a Mexican-American friend about biculturalism while a Haitian woman stops off to congratulate him on a piece he's just delivered on TV on St Patrick's Day. `I know all about those Irish nuns,' she says in a thick patois, as we sip our Earl Grey tea near signs that say CITY OF HONG KONG, EMPRESS OF CHINA." (The Global Soul, p11)

"In 1996, the entire Canadian 4×100 relay team came from the West Indies (and was competing, of course, against other teams from Britain, France and Trinidad, full of West Indians); Mark McKoy, a Guyana-born, English-bred product of Canada (living in Monaco with his German wife), was somehow running for Austria. And China's age-old supremacy in table tennis was being challenged only because the US, Canada, Great Britain, Japan and Austria (again) were all being led by Chinese players." (The Global Soul, p209-210)

The diaspora effect of globalisation definitely has its dark side though:
"The UNHCR, formed as a temporary agency in 1951 to deal with the refugee emergence in Europe at the end of the War, had received mandate after mandate to keep going. It now had offices in 115 countries, and the number of refugees, just 2.5 million in 1970, was up to 27.4 million, having doubled in just the past 8 years. Refugees, a UNHCR official told TIME, `are one of the growth industries of the '90s.'" (The Global Soul, p110)

Not to mention the economic impact of globalisation:
"Of all the bodies on the planet, multinationals have the greatest stake - quite literally an investment - in telling us that the world is one (and Everyman, therefore a potential consumer). CNN, part of the new media conglomerate for which I work - the largest such in the world - forbids the use of the word FOREIGN on its broadcasts, and IBM, aiming, like most companies, to be local everywhere, tells us in reassuring tones, `Somehow the word FOREIGN seems foreign these days.' Globalism has become the convenient way of saying that all the world's a single market." (The Global Soul, p14)

Perhaps one of the most explicit examples of this is the recent campaign for HSBC - the so-called `world's local bank'. I remember when they took over the Midland Bank in the UK and issued a command to their employees never to refer to themselves as the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation any more but just HSBC because that would make it too rooted in a particular culture. Many today probably have no idea what HSBC stands for - which i guess suits the company just fine.

"Indeed, one of the most troubling features of the globalism we celebrate is that the so-called linking of the planet has, in fact, intensified the distance between people: the richest 358 people in the world, by UN calculations, have a financial worth as great as that of 2.3 billion others, and even in the United States, the prosperous home of egalitarianism, the most wired man in the land (Bill Gates) has a net worth larger than that of 40% of the country's households, or perhaps 100 million of his compatriots combined (according to Robert Reich). The rich have the sense that they can go anywhere tomorrow, while 95% of the new beings on the planet are among the poor; I worry about the effects of E-mail and transprovincialism, while 2/3 of the people in the world have never used a telephone." (The Global Soul, p26)

What particularly strikes me in all this is that, for all the breaking down of barriers and homogenization that globalisation has brought, those caught up in it have become strangely dislocated; those who feel most threatened by it then batten down the hatches and try to preserve their cultures by keeping isolated from the rest of the world. So it seems that Babel is still a reality - it's as if global unity is an inbuilt impossibility. Is there hope - well as a member of an international, incredibly diverse, global body of the most surprising network of all, i would say there is - a body launched 2 millennia ago in a dramatic reversal of Babel.

The meaning of "Home" in the global world
Being a "global soul" myself, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and I recommend it to anyone who has wondered what "home" means in our fast-moving shrinking world, in which cultures merge and international living and travelling has become a way of life.

In a language that reflects the dizzy pace of the ever-changing modern world, the author takes us on a soul-searching journey of the meaning of "home" by drawing on his personal experience and observations. As a man of Indian origin who grew up in the UK and the USA, who lives in Japan by choice and spends most of his life travelling, he is more than well-placed to do so. In this search, he takes us from international airports to the Olympic Games and from Toronto via the British Empire to his adopted home in Japan, exploring the new cross-roads of cultures of modern living in a world that is rapidly becoming a melting pot and in which any traditional assumptions and securities about "home" are fast crumbling. Entertaining, startling, reflective, this book is both an inner and an outer trip accross the world that leaves the reader enough space to come to his or her own conclusions as to what "home" is in this new way of living - not least through some very well-chosen quotes at the beginning of the book and of each chapter (e.g. Huston Smith at the beginning of the chapter entitled the "Alien home": "Daily the world grows smaller, leaving understanding the only place where peace can find a home").

I believe that anyone with a mixed cultural background or who has experienced extensive international exposure - or for that matter anyone wondering about our shrinking planet - will be enriched by the observations and reflections in this book.

For anyone
I study Globalisation and thought this book was an excellent introduction to the subject. There are hundreds of books on Globalisation out there that all say the same thing, but this one puts it into real terms