Far and Away
How Travel Can Change the World
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- € 12,99
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- € 12,99
Beschrijving uitgever
In 1991 Andrew Solomon faced down tanks in Moscow with a band of Russian artists protesting the August coup. We find him on the quest for a rare bird in Zambia in 1998, and in Greenland in 2001 researching widespread depression among the Inuit. In 2002 he was in Afghanistan for the fall of the Taliban. He was brought in for questioning in Qaddafi’s Libya in 2006. In 2014 he travelled to Myanmar to meet ex-political prisoners as the country fitfully pushed towards freedom. Far and Away tells these and many other stories. With his signature compassion, Solomon demonstrates both how history is altered by individuals, and how personal identities shift when governments change.
A journalist and essayist of remarkable perception and prescience, Solomon chronicles a life’s travels to the nexus of hope, courage, and the uncertainty of lived experience and tracks seismic shifts – cultural, political and spiritual. He takes us on a magnificent journey into the heart of extraordinarily diverse experiences via intimate, deeply moving stories that reveal and revel in our common humanity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Revolution, genocide, and violent exhibitions of Chinese art are among the perils navigated in these adventurous essays. Journalist and psychologist Solomon (Far from the Tree) gamely plunges into global tragedies, hot spots, and cultural ferment: persecuted art scenes in Afghanistan and China; folkways of psychological depression in places as far-flung as Greenland, where the suicide rate is 10%, and post Khmer Rouge Cambodia; the bureaucratic and political mazes of Libya under the Qaddafi dictatorship and Myanmar as military rule crumbles. Sprinkled in are calmer but wonderfully lyrical travel pieces portraying the primordial freedoms of Mongolian steppe nomads and the "hostile, exquisite, primitive vastness" of Antarctic ice fields. Solomon's writing captures the sweep of history and social upheaval through vivid, fine-grained reportage that's raptly attuned to individual experience. There are some real gems here, including a romantic, absurdist account of Moscow's avant-garde artists facing down tanks and a piece aptly titled, "Naked, Covered in Ram's Blood, Drinking a Coke, and Feeling Pretty Good." But all the essays make for entertaining, thoughtful reads.
