Pico Iyer's Global Soul

Filed in archive Travel Books on September 8, 2007

It seems that Pico Iyer has lived a Charmed Life. He studied, then taught at Harvard, graduated with highest marks from Oxford, all this before joining Time magazine and publishing numerous best-selling travel books.




Despite these intellectual credentials, Iyer is actually quite an accessible writer. He is obsessed with travel in the modern world, publishing chapter length essays that get below the surface of a destination. His book Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, & the Search for Home is an ode to the experiences of the globalized world. His conclusion: The world is not as different as it used to be and foreign places are populated by people who are not actually so foreign. Iyer seems the perfect example of this, a globetrotting intellectual with an American passport. He was born an Indian and educated an Englishman. I think he keeps a condo in Japan as well.