The Door Swings Both Ways by Pico Iyer

Author:Pico Iyer [Iyer, Pico]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

BOOKS BY

PICO IYER

VIDEO NIGHT IN KATHMANDU

And Other Reports from the Not so Far East

Mowhawk haircuts in Bali. Yuppies in Hong Kong. In Bombay, not one but five Rambo rip-offs, complete with music and dancing. And in the new People’s Republic of China, a restaurant that serves dishes called “Yes, Sir, Cheese My Baby,” “A Legitimate Beef,” and “Ike and Tuna Turner.” These are some of the images—comical, poignant, and unsettling—that Pico Iyer brings back from the Far East in this brilliant book of travel reportage. As a writer for Time, Iyer approached his subject with a camera-sharp eye, a style that suggests a cross between Paul Theroux and Hunter S. Thompson, and a willingness to go beyond the obvious conclusions about the hybrid cultures of East and West.

Travel

THE GLOBAL SOUL

Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home

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.

Travel

SUN AFTER DARK

Flights Into the Foreign

One of the best travel writers now at work in the English language brings back the sights and sounds from a dozen different frontiers. A cryptic encounter in the perfumed darkness of Bali; a tour of a Bolivian prison, conducted by an enterprising inmate; a nightmarish taxi ride across southern Yemen, where the men with guns may be customs inspectors or revolutionaries—these are just three of the stops on Pico Iyer’s latest itinerary. But the true subject of Sun After Dark is the dislocations of the mind in transit. And so Iyer takes us along to meditate with Leonard Cohen and talk geopolitics with the Dalai Lama. He navigates the Magritte-like landscape of jet lag, “a place that no human had ever been until forty or so years ago.” And on every page of this poetic and provocative book, he compels us to redraw our map of the world.

Travel

THE LADY AND THE MONK

Four Seasons in Kyoto

When Pico Iyer decided to go to Kyoto and live in a monastery, he did so to learn about Zen Buddhism from the inside, to get to know Kyoto, one of the loveliest old cities in the world, and to find out something about Japanese culture today—not the world of businessmen and production lines, but the traditional world of changing seasons and the silence of temples, of the images woven through literature, of the lunar Japan that still lives on behind the rising sun of geopolitical power. All this he did. And then he met Sachiko. Vivacious, attractive, thoroughly educated, speaking English enthusiastically if eccentrically, the wife of a Japanese “salaryman” who seldom left the office before 10 p.

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