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Rating: 
Summary: Iyer Back on the Map
Review: His best work since "Falling Off the Map." I love the piece on language in India and on Leonard Cohen. He paints his mother (off page in several essays) with elegant brushstroke, and I find myself wanting an essay about her as well. Some of the Buddhist pieces need a tad of editing, but that's a minor complaint.
Rating:
Summary: Iyer Back on the Map
Review: His best work since "Falling Off the Map." I love the piece on language in India and on Leonard Cohen. He paints his mother (off page in several essays) with elegant brushstroke, and I find myself wanting an essay about her as well. Some of the Buddhist pieces need a tad of editing, but that's a minor complaint.
Rating:
Summary: Classic Pico!
Review: I am Pico Iyer's biggest fan. After his rather spacy and disappointing last novel, I loved this "classic Pico"! I too thought the Leonard Cohen piece was especially amazing and also loved the piece about the Dalai Lama. A very very cool book with lots of beautiful nuggets written, of course, in the most poetic language imaginable. A perfect book for the armchair traveler.
Rating:
Summary: Classic Pico!
Review: I am Pico Iyer's biggest fan. After his rather spacy and disappointing last novel, I loved this "classic Pico"! I too thought the Leonard Cohen piece was especially amazing and also loved the piece about the Dalai Lama. A very very cool book with lots of beautiful nuggets written, of course, in the most poetic language imaginable. A perfect book for the armchair traveler.
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant
Review: I loved every page of this book.
I think people looking for a run-of-the-mill "travel memoir" will of course be disappointed. However, that isn't the kind of book this purports to be. It's typical Iyer... a little travel, a little philsophy, a little retrospection, a little self-indulgence. It will take you to various places you may never get to visit, remind you of places you have visited, and take you on a wonderful journey through your own thoughts and beliefs.
Rating: 
Summary: I don't get it.
Review: Pico Iyer apparently has something of a cult following, and well, I guess his writing is an acquired taste. He's introspective, and on a first name basis with his old family friend, the Dalai Lama, and hangs out in the mountains above Los Angeles with Leonard Cohen and his Buddhist guru, but for all its potential, none of this was very interesting to me. Jet lag is a theme visited throughout the essays, and reading this book made me feel like I was suffering from it myself.
You don't learn much about the places described (that is, when Iyer actually writes about a place), but you learn about what's going on inside Iyer's head, and frankly, I just didn't get it.
Rating:
Summary: I don't get it.
Review: Pico Iyer apparently has something of a cult following, and well, I guess his writing is an acquired taste. He's introspective, and on a first name basis with his old family friend, the Dalai Lama, and hangs out in the mountains above Los Angeles with Leonard Cohen and his Buddhist guru, but for all its potential, none of this was very interesting to me. Jet lag is a theme visited throughout the essays, and reading this book made me feel like I was suffering from it myself.
You don't learn much about the places described (that is, when Iyer actually writes about a place), but you learn about what's going on inside Iyer's head, and frankly, I just didn't get it.
Rating:
Summary: A master of the essay
Review: Pico Iyer's work generally alternates between fiction and collections of essays, and my personal preference is for the latter. You will find these little jewels scattered in magazines ranging from "National Geographic" to the Buddhist magazine "Tricycle". In his best pieces, he can approach the condensed perfection of Orwell.There is not a bad essay in this collection, but two of them particularly stand out. At the beginning of the book is an account of a week spent at a meditation retreat with the singer/poet Leonard Cohen. If you're used to the vapid hagiographies in music magazines, this piece is a drink of cool water. It quotes from Cohen's songs, acknowledges the brilliance of his work, gives an unblinking account of his contradictory personality and details his day-to-day life, all in twenty pages. The effect is that of a camera zooming in from a mile above the Mount Baldy Zen Center all the way down to a wart on Cohen's face, and then slowly pulling back again. You'll have to read the piece yourself, preferably while playing "Waiting for the Miracle" in the background. The other extraordinary piece is "Nightwalking", which describes the surreal experience of jet lag, something the author endures for at least eight weeks of every year. I read it while on an extended air-trip (San Francisco-Hong Kong-Bangalore-Singapore-Seoul-SF in a week) and cannot recall anything on paper describing as accurately an experience I was undergoing at that moment. The walking blankly along thoroughfares at two in the morning, the absurd spasms of emotion, the faces out of Hopper paintings - he has etched a precise portrait here. His gift for metaphor unmatched. Here is a sentence about the British influence: "The..Empire..stands accused of importing straight lines and right angles to a land of curves, of making the forces of Eternity obey a railway timetable." How can one resist such lapidary prose?
Rating:
Summary: A master of the essay
Review: Pico Iyer's work generally alternates between fiction and collections of essays, and my personal preference is for the latter. You will find these little jewels scattered in magazines ranging from "National Geographic" to the Buddhist magazine "Tricycle". In his best pieces, he can approach the condensed perfection of Orwell. There is not a bad essay in this collection, but two of them particularly stand out. At the beginning of the book is an account of a week spent at a meditation retreat with the singer/poet Leonard Cohen. If you're used to the vapid hagiographies in music magazines, this piece is a drink of cool water. It quotes from Cohen's songs, acknowledges the brilliance of his work, gives an unblinking account of his contradictory personality and details his day-to-day life, all in twenty pages. The effect is that of a camera zooming in from a mile above the Mount Baldy Zen Center all the way down to a wart on Cohen's face, and then slowly pulling back again. You'll have to read the piece yourself, preferably while playing "Waiting for the Miracle" in the background. The other extraordinary piece is "Nightwalking", which describes the surreal experience of jet lag, something the author endures for at least eight weeks of every year. I read it while on an extended air-trip (San Francisco-Hong Kong-Bangalore-Singapore-Seoul-SF in a week) and cannot recall anything on paper describing as accurately an experience I was undergoing at that moment. The walking blankly along thoroughfares at two in the morning, the absurd spasms of emotion, the faces out of Hopper paintings - he has etched a precise portrait here. His gift for metaphor unmatched. Here is a sentence about the British influence: "The..Empire..stands accused of importing straight lines and right angles to a land of curves, of making the forces of Eternity obey a railway timetable." How can one resist such lapidary prose?
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