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"Shacochis, Bob, author"
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Kingdoms in the air : dispatches from the far away
\"Best known for his sweeping international and political fiction narratives, including The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, which won the Dayton Peace Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Bob Shacochis began his writing career as a pioneering journalist and contributing editor for Outside magazine and Harper's. Kingdoms in the Air brings together the very best of Shacochis's culture and travel essays in one live-wire collection that spans his global adventures and his life passions; from surfing, to his obsession with the South American dorado, to the time he went bushwhacking in Mozambique. In the titular essay \"Kingdoms,\" the longest work in the collection, Shacochis ventures to Nepal with his friend, the photographer Thomas Laird, who was the first foreigner to live in Nepal's kingdom of Mustang as the forbidden Shangri-la prepared to open its borders to trekkers and trade. When the two men return a decade after Laird first lived there, Shacochis observes in brilliantly evocative prose both the current cultural and political landscape of the country and the changes with which his friend has to reconcile. Replete with Shacochis's signature swagger, humor, and crystalline wisdom, Kingdoms in the Air is a majestic and essential collection from one of our most important writers.\" -- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
TRAPPED BY LOVE. . . AND HAPPINESS
Miss F. and I live together, and seem to have made a habit of it-for better or worse, but always under the obligation not to destroy each other, as is too often the style in the modern art of relationships. This all began in the mid-'70s, when she first moved in with me. I was 24 years old. Miss F. had just turned an extraordinarily tenacious 23, a miraculous age where she would remain for many years. I remember that, at the time, the air surrounding us felt pressurized with the understanding, held in common between us, that we had more or less been catapulted into love. Yet as far as I was concerned, this was not a big deal and certainly no cause for alarm. This happened on a regular basis among people our age-it was like still another dress rehearsal for the future, the time in our 30-something dotage when we would weary of lust and romance and actually chance a commitment, essentially placing the gun of adulthood to our youth-crazed brains and pulling the trigger, leaving us with no other choice but to pursue that most dire and numbing of social acts called settling down. Clearly, some men arise from their cradles as ready-made bureaucrats of love, and these are the ones who march straight ahead toward the barn of domesticity, that hallowed shelter of tradition where they will be adequately fed and fattened, where the alluring scent of greener pastures gradually fades into oblivion.
Newspaper Article
A HIGHBROW LOVES A LOWBROW
TRANSACTIONS IN A FOREIGN CURRENCY By Deborah Eisenberg. 214 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $15.95. IN this provocative debut collection of stories, ''Transactions in a Foreign Currency,'' Deborah Eisenberg's characters are exhaustingly fascinating, made to travel outside the native land of their inner selves into a world that appears astonishingly regulated, where ostensibly enlightened men collect women the way superpowers assert spheres of influence, where sexual diplomacy becomes a contest ''to adhere to the slippery requirements of distant authorities.'' Charlotte, the physically awkward narrator of ''Flotsam,'' is told by her fashionable roommate: ''You're lucky that you're so nice. . . . Men are going to treat you really well in your next life.'' Needless to say, niceness is a disability. Charlotte, alternately bludgeoned and ignored by romance, is a victim of her own inclination to be overwhelmed by beauty and by folks like those Padgett Powell describes in his novel, ''Edisto,'' as knowing ''the whole alphabet of worldly maneuver.'' How to survive in the midst of women who always win, men who always manipulate?
Book Review
Three decades later, Theroux re-creates his grand train tour of Asia
Theroux himself, ironically, became a prime inspiration for the nuclear age of tourism and its myriad variations in the last decades of the 20th century, all of which resulted in a booming industry - adventure travel, ecotourism, disaster tourism, magazines like Outside and Conde Nast Traveler, Lonely Planet guides, the Discovery and Travel channels, the swarming of the planet fueled by cheap tickets, Peace Corps volunteers like Theroux himself, military deployments and globalization, satellite mapping, and the ability for real-time blogging from the slopes of Everest.
Newspaper Article