The Global Soul
Subtitle: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home
Publisher: Knopf
Published: February 29, 2000
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 320
ISBN-13: 9780679454335
Subjects: Social Science; Travel - General; Popular culture; 20th Century Description And Travel; Travel; Sociology; Social Aspects; Essays & Travelogues; Popular Culture - General; Current Events / International; General; Voyages and travels; Internationalism; Iyer, Pico
First sentence: Suddenly, the flames were curling seventy feet above my living room, whipped on by seventy-mile-per-hour winds that sent them ripping across the dry brush like maddened horses.
Description: "Pico Iyer has for many years described with keen perception and exacting wit the shifting textures of faraway lands anchored on a spinning globe that mixes and matches East and West. Now he casts a philosophical eye upon this curious state of floatingness.".

"Using his own multicultural upbringing (Indian, American, British) as a point of departure, Iyer sets out on a quest, both physical and psychological, to find what remains constant in a world gone mobile. He begins in Los Angeles International Airport where town life - shops, services, sociability - is available without a town, and in Hong Kong, where people actually live in self-contained hotels.

He moves on to Toronto, which has been given new life and a new literature by its immigrant population, and to Atlanta, where the Olympic Village inadvertently commemorates the corporate universalism that is the Olympics' secret face. And, finally, he returns to England, where the effects of empire-as-global-village are still being sorted out, and to Japan, where in the midst of alien surfaces, Iyer unexpectedly finds a home."--BOOK JACKET.