Pico: While I understand your being overwhelmed at the rate at which things are moving in your life, I have one piece of advice: slow down. I felt anxious reading this and when I felt the need to pop a Xanax I realized that if his intent was to make the reader feel harried, he succeeded. If it was his intent for me to strangely be bored at the same time, he succeeded as well. Don't waste your time.

Very disappointing, reads like a cross between one of those anecdotal management books, celebrity name-dropping and a reality show about living in airports; full of punk statistics and dubious stereotypes. Not a travel book, more of a hangover.

This book is insightful as the author himself leads such a multicultural life. He is a British born Indian who grew up in America and lives in Japan. He talks about airport culture (or meta-culture) and cross cultural relationships. The prose is manic exposition almost all of the way through but Iyer has so many facts at his fingertips I never felt like I was living solely inside his head. I still have my questions, such as how most of the world can't live like him (flying from country to countr...

Easy to read, but can be boring and annoying at times.It can also be a discomfiting read for someone (like myself) who has undertaken intensive academic study of phenomena like globalization, transnational networks and communities, diaspora, and so on. But this might be a good text to read with undergraduates or young students interested in learning more about globalization--the strength of the teaching utilizing the weaknesses of Iyer's problem- and contradiction-filled text. An extra challenge...

Bailed on this one halfway through as I found it almost sci-fi than nonfiction. I understand that it is about real life people and places, but situations so far out of the mainstream that I couldn't begin to identify with the content, and I've traveled a fair amount and am familiar with the world of heavy duty frequent travelers.

This will likely to be an unfinished review because as with many thought-provoking books that I’ve come across, there are reflections and observations that the author writes about that I was not able to truly comprehend, probably because I’m still young and haven’t traveled far and long enough to accumulate enough life experiences. But I will try my best to sum up my thoughts on this book, nevertheless.First off, I will say that this is not an easy book to read. I think the pace of this book ref...

I wanted to like this a lot more than I did. For some reason, Pico Iyer's writing style makes me think he wants readers to feel sorry for him for not having an easily categorized identity. And I don't feel sorry for him, so it is annoying. He does have some interesting observations about the world but I can't get past his tone to fully appreciate them.

People say that Video Night in Kathmandu is good. I wouldn't say this one was. As a Canadian, I found his assessment of Toronto to be rather ungrounded. He seems to think it's a kind of multicultural utopia, and although Canadians heap a lot of undue scorn on the place, it has a lot of social problems: a rich-poor disparity for one, guns for another. This was my first attempt at Pico Iyer; I just didn't get it, but perhaps I should try again.

Well, this sucked.I had never heard of Pico Iyer until I joined a group here on goodreads that talks about travel literature. I love travel literature (at least I think I do. Maybe I just love Paul Theroux and Mark Twain.) I got the impression that Iyer was one of THE travel authors to read, and immediately put him on my ebay watch-list. A few weeks later, this book was what I was able to acquire(and good thing I bought it for Euro on ebay, too, because it certainly wasn't worth more!)I wish I c...

Because Iyer talks so much about the immigrant experience, his book made me realize that I should return to reading Salman Rushdie's Don Quichotte, which I had put back on the shelf for being a little too post-modern and metafictional for my taste. Iyer reminded me that there is more going on in a story like that than just literary games. The displacement of people between different cultural spheres and the associations that linger, fade, or get adopted -- this is a very real part of many people...

"The sense of home is not divided, but scattered across the planet, and in the absence of any center at all, people find themselves at sea." The book is mostly about how as a global soul, or a permanent alien wherever he goes, Pico Iyer finds himself lacking an identity, a sense of belonging. And the book seems to be further about how he makes peace with that fact, a process through which he tends to help the reader make up his mind about the same.As someone who never had a feeling of home tied

look, this book made me dizzy and pico's insistence on how freaking global he is really began to grate after about ten pages. good for you bro, you're a global soul! but hey maybe so are the rest of us? and his writing style -- i get what he's trying to do, but after about two pages, it's unnecessary to keep cataloging who/what everyone is, where they are from etc etc. i think that kind of overshadows/whelms his point about the global soul or whatever -- if you are truly a global soul, man would...

Iyer is one of the great travel writers, and I give this 2 stars only in comparison with what I know he is capable of. He has a promising start, discussing the notion of a global soul: a uniquely modern human created by advances in technology and breaking down of borders and colonialism. But he seems to lose sight of his iniitial premise, and rambles on about Toronto, the Olympics, England and its colonies, and Japan. Some good parts, but overall he gets lost in the absractionism and shades of g...

The book came out in 2000 and it's embarrassingly obvious. I love Pico Iyer, but, aside from the first chapter, "The Burning House" (tale of how his California house burnt to the ground) and the last one, "The Alien Home" (reflections on the author's Nara, Japan), I don't recommend this read. Each of the sandwiched chapters feel very dated and unless you specifically want to read about LAX, Hong Kong, Toronto, the Olympics, or Cambridge during the late 1990's, it's irrelevant.I marked a few good...

Great observations offer insights into contemporary globalism. Iyer is at his best when showing the peculiarities of life in our current times.

Pico Iyer is known as a travel writer, but this book reads closer to an autobiographical dissection of his identity crisis. Iyer writes about a difficult topic, the modern migrant’s search for a sense of belonging. If you have parents from different cultures, multiple passports and/or nationalities and no right to vote in any country in the world, you might find this book intriguing. As a third culture kid myself, I found I could relate to Iyer’s observations on many levels. The modern migrant’s...

I profoundly dislike this book. I dislike it both for its style of writing, and the general worldview it proclaims.Iyer's writing style comes across as directionless, as if this book is a compilation of notes he's made over the years as he waits in airport terminals. I suppose that could be forgiven, given the book's subject matter being Iyer's journey as a "directionless" global soul, but still. Many sections are needlessly verbose, while Iyer qualifies many of his statements with long, bracket...

Not a whole lot of joy in this book. Basically seven long - sometimes rambling - essays dealing with the meaning of multiculturalism, (inter)nationalism, globalization, etc. Generally speaking, I found this one pretty dull. It's Iyer musing, for 300 pages - where is home? where am I from? why do I look Indian and not speak the language? etc, etc. Particularly the first half seems to be a collection of observations of "culture clash" (for lack of a better term): Chinese girls working in Mexican r...

I have been a global soul. I have lived in India for most of my life, in England as a child, and then in China and Singapore. I worked in China and Singapore, and travelled many countries, saw many malls and airports. The emptiness of this life got to me, and I quit despite being at the top. The book, like the global soul, is essentially empty. While he writes well, it seems to be a slapdash of bits of writing and anecdotes piled together. There was a super opportunity to go deep and really talk...

I myself am a Global Soul like Iyer. Of one heritage, born in a different country and living in a totally different one. Hence, I can relate to much of what he has to say. How did I find this? Well, Iyer wrote the Introduction to the new edition of The Inland Sea. That piqued my interest in him, but didn't search any further until February this year when raiding Blue Parrot Books with my biblioholic mate, Gaijinmama, where I found this 2nd-hand copy signed in April 2007 by the man himself to Ton...