It was three days before the New Year in late 2006, and I was eating a burger with the traveler and writer Paul Theroux on Oahu’s North Shore. Beside us in the rickety little shack was a quintessentially Hawaiian group of Chinese Americans, African Americans, semi–Southeast Asians and kids who could have been any or […]
The Snow Leopard is an account of an expedition high into the seldom-seen Himalayan land of Inner Dolpo, to record the habits of the bharal, or rare Himalayan blue sheep. The book begins, as most scientific logs do, with a precise map, and ends with scholarly notes and an index. The leader of the climb […]
It is not answers that pull many people into the religious life, it is questions. The person who lives deeply and enduringly with, and within, a religion often finds that he is surrounded by ever more doubts as he goes on, not convictions. In an eloquent monk like Thomas Merton, say, the religious impulse is […]
On the longest day of the year I found myself on what is billed as the “highest motorable pass in the world,” though “motorable” seemed as much a stretch as did “road.” Icicles were hanging from the mountainside and plaques around every turn recalled those fellow travelers, most of them soldiers, who had “left for […]
“Since China wants to join the world community,” the 14th Dalai Lama said as I was traveling across Japan with him for a week last November, “the world community has a real responsibility to bring China into the mainstream.” The whole world stands to gain, he pointed out, from a peaceful and unified China—not least […]
Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that the artist most constantly invoked on my first day at the Sydney Readers’ and Writers’ Festival this spring was not Patrick White or Orhan Pamuk or W.G. Sebald, but that mumbling icon known as Robert De Niro. “I don’t want to start thinking of novels as if […]
Arriving in Japan twenty-three years ago, on holiday from my job writing for Time magazine in New York, I knew just how I would master the alien and impenetrable island: by treating it as my weekly assignment. I read all the current books on Japan, I mastered all the standard ideas and explanations, I dutifully […]
He bounds onto the stage, dressed to kill, and roars into a rendition of one of his classic songs as if he’s been storing up his energy for fifteen years to make it new. He’s bent before us, crouching, trying to squeeze out every ounce of blood, and he’s looking into the wings to summon […]
The classic British public-school grooms its inmates perfectly for taking on (or over) the world, and not at all for that half of the world known as the other sex. Its charges are trained, in effect, to see women as a foreign country (most of the old boarding-schools are still all-male), and even as they […]
Their ages when they died were 24 or 23 or 74 days; they are described in the barely legible letters on the headstones as “infant daughter”s and 17 year-old sons. The names beside them might make up an atlas of homesickness–Epsom and Abingdon and Surrey, as keenly remembered here as in the buildings all around […]
