The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home (Vintage Departures) - Softcover

Iyer, Pico

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679776117 ISBN 13: 9780679776116

Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group, 2001

Synopsis

From the acclaimed author of Video Nights in Kathmandu comes this intriguing new book that deciphers the cultural ramifications of globalization and the rising tide of worldwide displacement.

Beginning in Los Angeles International Airport, where town life--shops, services, sociability--is available without a town, Pico Iyer takes us on a tour of the transnational village our world has become. From Hong Kong, where people actually live in self-contained hotels, to Atlanta's Olympic Village, which seems to inadvertently commemorate a sort of corporate universalism, to Japan, where in the midst of alien surfaces his apartment building is called "The Memphis," Iyer ponders what the word "home" can possibly mean in a world whose face is blurred by its cultural fusion and its alarmingly rapid rate of change.

About this title

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

Review:

"Powerful and essential reading for anyone trying to understand the modern world."-Minneapolis Star Tribune

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0679776117
• ISBN 13: 9780679776116
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 322