“Then northward with the spring into Kashmir,” begins a paragraph in the book you are holding in your hand, “past valley after lovely valley, shepherds and their flocks moving across the greenery in the day, men squatting by their hillside fires in the night. Soft-lipped boys with enormous turbans shrieking at us from their dark […]
We stumble toward another election that can look, to the disenchanted, like a choice between one shade of grey and another. A liberation theologian is violently deposed in Haiti. Guerrillas, in Russia and everywhere, say that even the deaths of children are justified in the light of a larger cause. And a Tibetan monk flies […]
From the air, as one descends, Saigon looks to be a vast and scattered web of white and yellow lights, coming up from shacks and tiny houses, notably impoverished, not flashy, the graceful curve of the Saigon River breaking up the grid and reminding you of the paucity of clustered lights and high-rises. But as […]
Here are a few statistics from Suketu Mehta’s stunning new book, Maximum City. In some parts of Bombay, you can find 1 million people in a single square mile. Two millon of the city’s residents lack access to latrines, and the air has ten times the maximum permissible levels of lead (to breathe it in, […]
The Japan we imagine from afar is placid, tidy and seamlessly efficient, correct to the last place. The trains arrive on the dot, and when the crowds pour out of them, in streamlined rows of look-alike Chanel and grey suits, not a bead of sweat is visible even in the heat of summer rush-hour. Japan […]
American travel writing is about looking for the light. Or so, at least, I told myself, rather loftily, as I landed in Atlanta on my first trip to the city, got into a new Aspire and proceeded to drive around the “Phoenix of the South.” I passed Perimeter Point and Perimeter Mall, drove through a […]
Four years ago on New Year’s Day, while contemplating the intricate battle of good and evil depicted on the walls of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, I saw two of the Khmer Rouge’s chief killers—Pol Pot’s lieutenants, in effect—walking, unprotected, through the country they had devastated. Having turned themselves in to Cambodian authorities under an amnesty […]
In all the stories, California is the point of arrival, the place to which everyone aspires: the end of the line, as more sardonic souls might put it, or at the very least, in Don Henley’s agile pun, the “last resort.” It is the place where dreams and dreamers culminate (which is another way of […]
America, in all the myths, is the place where the future begins, first settled by pilgrims who wished to leave the past far behind them. That sense of broad horizons is what has always drawn people from the Old World (myself included) to its shores–the sense that in America you can live in the optative […]
Graham Greene is treacherously easy to film, not least because, as a film critic for four years in the Thirties, he was one of the first serious novelists to grow up with the cinema, in all senses, and to see how the camera had changed the way we tell stories and think about perspective. Though […]
