The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home

"Suddenly, the flames were curling seventy feet above my living room," The Global Soul begins. The author's house burns down, and next thing we know we're caroming from island to city to jungle, culture-hopping the globe, dizzy in the blur of it all.

Born to Indian parents, raised back and forth between England and the United States, and living now in Japan when he's not visiting some far-flung corner of the earth, Pico Iyer calls himself "a mongrel," part of a fast-growing population of global souls who exist in many cultures all at once "and so fall in the cracks between them."

A worldwide television network forbids the use of the word "foreign" on its broadcasts; Olympic athletes offer their bodies to distant nations in order to improve their medal hopes; various Bestselling authors sell most of their books in translation; an international burger chain gains a foothold in Asia while, suddenly, a half dozen Thai restaurants appear in your city; and meanwhile, here you are, surfing the Net . . .

For more and more people, the notion of home has little to do with any particular part of the planet. If this isn't quite what we'd imagine home to be, maybe it's because home has never been quite like this before. Dave Weich, Powells.com

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.

"A delectable smorgasbord of bite-size travel details and large truths that offer a taste of the global world to come. His descriptions of the bounty and paranoia of airports alone make his musings an ideal carry-on. . . . An eloquent eulogy for our late millennium's old-world order of provincialism, and a passport to our borderless future." Kirkus Reviews

Pico Iyer is the author of five previous books, including Video Night in Kathmandu and The Lady and the Monk. He lives in suburban Japan.

From the Hardcover edition.