I think this is Pico Iyer's first book.It is not as polished as the later ones.It is a journey through several Asian countries in the 1980s.It didn't quite meet my expectations,after having already read The Lady and the Monk.The destinations include : Bali,Tibet,Nepal,China,Japan,Thailand,Hong Kong and India.Some of the chapters get a bit lop-sided.In India,he writes mostly about Bollywood and in Japan,mostly about baseball,without touching upon much else.He embarks on his trip to Mao's China wi...

The book is a travelogue of East Asia set in late 1980s. Of the dozen or so pieces, the one on Japan was superb, so were the introduction and conclusion. But the rest made me wish I hadnt picked up this book. And now I see that d 3 most popular reviews on goodreads app are 2 or 3 stars.The author's aim is to analyse cultural impact of d West on d East and he does so with a lot of self-indulgence, whining and cliches. The usual Indian Bollywood piece that u may now have memorised, the almost ceas...

For such an acclaimed writer, this was just ok. First of all i wonder if he actually hung out with any Nepalis - they do not call their hats "fezzes" they are Dhaka topis. Details are so distracting, it is worth getting them right.

Acclaimed travel writer, Pico Iyer, wrote about his travels in Asia during the mid-1980s. His essays explore the disconnect between the local traditional ways of life and imported American culture. His destinations included Nepal, Bali, China, Hong Kong, Tibet. Thailand, Japan, the Philippines, and India. Conversations with Asians led to a deeper understanding on both sides, or to some humourous misunderstandings with hilarious results. He wrote a witty book with compassion and fairness. Iyer ex...

Disappointing. Pico rails about how badly the West has polluted the rest of the world, lamenting the ruined purity of far-flung places. Michael Jackson cd's for sale in Indonesian villages? I'm shocked, shocked! For anyone who has been around the world a bit, this book is just too obvious, and for anyone who hasn't, it's a cynical and jaded expose of...nothing too interesting. What a clever fellow! He finds what he expects to find; this book is about as interesting as a restaurant review of Chil...

Well written, witty and fascinating account of travelling in Asia in the 80s. It is very interesting to read in 2016 about how these countries were 30 years ago. Pico states outright that his is a single sided account purely from the little he sees as a tourist.The book has an overarching theme of how the West influences the East,Pico sticks to it and makes no bones of it either. It is a good thing that he gives the clarification at the start itself. If he had not, this book would have come acro...

This book was patronizing bordering on the repulsive. This is a perfect example of how being aware of colonialism does not magically prevent you from participating in it. Pico Iyer tries so hard to be arch and snide towards careless, self-absorbed Western tourists only to end up acting just like them, every time, everywhere he goes. He never bothers to encounter anybody except tourists and taxi drivers. His "analysis" ends up reinforcing pre-existing stereotypes everywhere he goes. His fascinati...

I read parts of this book every once in a while, not so much because I love it, but because every single time it gives me something new to think about. Iyer's chronicling of the east in the 80s will remain a classic for this very reason: It is literature as time-travel. He is remarkably prescient about so much that's to come, and yet little of the writing is dated, if at all.There is so much to unpack and think about here, in just how the world has changed from then to now, where I write from th...

Essays on travel in Asia in the 1980s. His first book? Some entertaining stuff, dimly remembered now.

Iyer travels to various Asian countries over a multi-year period in the 80s. His thesis is how American pop-culture is being exported and adopted throughout Asia. Rambo, Madonna and Bruce Springsteen are mentioned throughout the book.Iyer covers a number of countries and regions including Bali, India, the Philippines, Japan, Nepal, Thailand, and Hong Kong.Western tourism in Bali.Movie stars in India.Karaoke and escorts in the Phillipines.Baseball in Japan.Prostitution in Thailand.Iyer depicts As...

The book is gives readers an intriguing look at the Western world’s impact on Eastern culture, and how the tourism industry has affected the lives Asian citizens so heavily bombarded by propaganda, politics, and US standards. It’s as if we’ve polluted the West, in some ways. The actual author seems to be a bit stuck up; I recall he called short Asian women dwarfs or something of the like. He is quite different in the final chapter of the book, stating that he had experienced so much beauty in hi...

Iyer in his introduction tells us this is “less like a conventional travel diary than a series of essays” of a “casual traveler’s casual observations” of the Asia he saw “over the course of two years... [spending] a total of seven months crisscrossing the continent.” Each chapter covers his thoughts about one country: Bail (Indonesia), Tibet, Nepal, China, Philippines, Burma, Hong Kong, India, Thailand, Japan. Most of the essays have an overarching theme through which he looked at the country. B...

The book is about his 6-month visit to the different countries in the Far East in 1985. Each country has its own chapter in the book but the sequence is not chronological. I think it was arranged according to how Iyer would like to impact or influence the mind of the reader and I think he was able to do that effectively. The first chapter is about the paradise island of Bali focusing on the effect of the tourism to the previously gentle and virgin island. The character of Wayan, the child-father...

better to be fascinating wrong than boringly nigh-correct, one supposes, and in this regard, Pico Iyer's most famous work 'Video Night in Katmandu' deserves its sort of backpacker fame, it's name dropping in Bali and Lhasa. several years before its time (first published 1988, the Soviet Union still existent), Iyer's relentless accounts of dynamic and hustler Asia, decadent and work-averse West predicts a state of affairs that comes to pass thirty years later... but the average Chinaman, of cours...

Once in a while I like to read a good travel book, preferably about Asia. Sometimes I also catch myself finishing these books with some sort of dissatisfaction. It's difficult for me to put a finger on it - is it because usually these travel accounts are written by the Westerners? Is it because of them illustrating a time in the past, almost a history, and not the flavor of "right now"? Or is it because the personality of the author barges in way too much at times?While, a few years ago, I was r...

Pico Iyer is a talented writer and a thoughtful cultural analyst. The book is now dated, having been written in the mid-eighties, but that isn't one of my motivations for its rating. I found the glimpses of things that have definitively changed to be interesting, and often they made me wish I had some sort of comparative current nonfiction text about the region, to compare, but this is really a problem of my lack of comprehensive reading, not the book's.My three-star rating comes from two develo...

Set in the mid 80's, Pico's travel writing worked on two levels for me - one, in terms of his destinations, and the other, in terms of time. Right from the first page, with his interpretation of the Rambo phenomenon in Asia, his sharp wit makes this book a great read.He uses individual characters in different places (India, China, Tibet, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, HongKong, Japan, Philippines) to describe the place's character. In some cases, the stereotypes are reinforced, but in a lot of others,

Were the 1980s another world? I didn't realise on starting this book that it was written in the 1980s. Surely, I thought, when I realised, Asia would have changed so much in 30 years that this book would perhaps seem a little out of date? Well, no. Not really. The pop song and pricing references may be dated, but many of the things the book talks about in looking at Asia from the eyes of an outsider are still valid. Pico Iyer did not attempt to make a sociological or economic study of the Asian

This was written in 1988, and I was afraid it would be outdated & uninteresting. But I certainly remember how the 80s played out here in the states and it was fascinating to read what was going on halfway around the globe... Ah, the 80s...no matter where you were, who could forget?

I first heard of Pico Iyer by reading his liner notes in THE ESSENTIAL LEONARD COHEN compilation. Then I heard him interviewed about his interactions with the Dalai Lama on the NPR program Fresh Air. Clearly, he is a devout seeker with an admirable curiousity. This book describes the exoticism that goes both directions in the cultural "East" and "West". It opens with Iyer's observations of how different Asian countries were impressed by the movie RAMBO and the numerous ways Westerner tourists ar...