You Can't Get There from Here: A Year on the Fringes of a Shrinking World

For journalist Gayle Forman, the world is a strange and wonderful place. So when her husband suggested an extended round-the-globe adventure, she agreed as long as they stayed way off the beaten path. Forman, who had always considered herself an outsider, hoped to discover an affinity with those living on the margins in some of the most exotic spots on earth.

But a funny thing happened on her way to the fringe. She started to notice that the tentacles of globalization were changing everything, not only for people in the mainstream but for those on the edges, too. In You Can't Get There from Here, Forman invites us on a whirlwind ride to the mountain hideaways of Kazakhstan's Tolkien fanatics and inside the townships of South Africa's lost tribe of Israel. She introduces us to a wild assortment of characters: lovelorn Tongan transvestites, charismatic Tanzanian rap stars, precocious Cambodian street kids, out-of-work Dutch prostitutes. In the artful interplay of these eight lively, thoughtful, interwoven stories, she reveals how all of these diverse lives-as well as our own-are being inextricably altered by the ever-shrinking world that we all share. Because, she writes, "To forget the humanity in others is to risk forgetting one's own."

In these eight interconnecting stories, Forman traces the trajectory from her relatively comfortable life in New York to her sometimes extreme--and extremely personal--experiences in some of the most exotic spots on Earth. In each of these places she seeks out the most colorful characters and communities she can find. On the island nation of Tonga she throws a party for a clique of lovelorn transvestites, and in rural South Africa she tracks down the so-called Lost Tribe of Israel. Then heres the English-obsessed Beijing doctor who pushes linguistic boundariesand Formans patienceto the breaking point with his sloppy, choppy Chinglish. And in the mountains of Kazakhstan shes befriended by a gang of Lord of the Rings fans acting out their Middle Earth fantasy games as a way to reclaim their European roots.

What Forman comes to realize, and what she reveals with a sharp eye and sensitive ear, is the Big Truth: The planet is shrinking as surely as you can buy Coca-Cola in Kandahar, and yet still theres room for us all.