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

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.

Pico Iyer's book of essays about international locales contends that the modern world-scurrying citizen, pushed by business demands or political migrations, can easily lose both roots and sense of home. Airports have morphed into cities where scores of languages are spoken, thousands work, and millions travel through mazed villages of McDonalds, massage parlors, and self-help groups that twist along for miles; the Dallas-Fort Worth airport alone grabs more space than Manhattan. And city life is no different: Iyer's apartment building also houses an immigration office, banks, four cinemas, dozens of restaurants and nearly 100 boutiques; the technologically plugged-in businessman with whom he stays has five phones across the world, a dozen international bank accounts, and travels more than a pilot.

Whether in Toronto--where in larger schools nearly 80 languages may be heard--London, or at the Olympics in Atlanta, Iyer witnesses the overlapping of hundreds of heterogeneous cultures, often pushed by corporate concerns toward commercial homogeneity and powered by technology that offers an office in the sky. The picture painted by Iyer--himself a confused and well-traveled multicultural citizen--is extreme, sci-fi, and futuristic even though set in the present: a global village turned spinning metropolis, with so many fragments set loose in its gyrations that it threatens to explode the minds of its residents. But even this shell-shocked world traveler finds peace, concluding that a simpler life may be a richer one and that home is simply where the frazzled mind decides it will be. In an era when new frontiers open monthly, when frequent flyer miles serve as currency, and constant change may be a lifestyle demand, Iyer's frantic words and dizzying images may prove as prophetic as Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. --Melissa Rossi