Far and Away: How Travel Can Change the World

As usual, Andrew Solomon is fascinating! Book arrived promptly and I'm loving it.

disappointing to me. It was well hyped!

A book of travel reporting from the author of The Noonday Demon and Far From The Tree, written between the early 1990s and the present, together with a long introductory essay saying something bout his childhood and youth and how he comes to have travelled to so many countries. There's quite a bit of material that's linked to the author's interest in art (of which I had been unaware but he wrote his first book about Russian artists, I learned) - in Russia, China, Taiwan and South Africa. Then some pieces linked to, and indeed some excerpted from his work on depression - including the most interesting pieces on Greenland, Cambodia and an exorcism-type exercise he went in for in Africa and some pieces linked to and excerpted from Far From the Tree (though in that case interesting but perhaps not the most interesting pieces). There are also some pieces about political developments - Solomon was in Moscow at the time of the attempted coup against Gorbachov, and has also a long and quite interesting piece about Myanmar, for example. And finally, some more orthodox travel writing. Each piece has a short afterward, bringing the story up to date.I didn't find this book quite as gripping as the Noonday Demon or Far From The Tree. In those cases, Solomon found a winning theme and developed in an unusual cross-cultural and original framework. Here the interest lies rather in the breadth of his interests, and the effort put into keeping up with life in many troubled parts of the world. A tempered optimism emerges. So I would recommend this, but not as strongly as his other works.

very opinionated but fascinating read