The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home Paperback – March 13, 2001

**Iyer, Pico. The Global Soul****(Vintage Departures)** . Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, MARCH 2001Homelessness takes on a different meaning in Global Soul. Throughout his 2001 Novel, Pico describes the flux of his life journey, as having never felt rooted to a singular physical locale. In the first chapter, this sense of lack of belonging is further magnified by an event that causes him to lose his worldly possessions. The novel chronicles the author's experience of living amid multiple places at one time and the world globalization and evolving tech landscape that makes this possible. While fantastic and insightful, Pico 's description of his life embodies a feeling of loneliness within a crowd, and the possibility of homelessness within a family. Each chapter begins with a poignant quote setting one up for the experiences and meaning of the words that follow.I recommend this book to anyone who has traversed the world and knows the disorientation of space and time, as well as to those who may have never ventured beyond their own neighborhoods yet remain fixated on the question “Where is my home"? In his exploration of the topic, Pico shares an almost poetic outlook and experience that binds us Global Souls together in a place where heart and experience are the basis for home more than any locale or geographic landmark.

Excellent product, excellent shipping

Iyer's romantic vision of the "Global Soul" (i.e., Iyer and people like him) is insufficiently self-critical in respects to its essential economic location. What Iyer imagines as cosmopolitan seems to boil down to those who are wealthy enough to occupy a rarified socio-economic -- and hence, geographic -- location. Rather than a new type of person, the Global Soul seems to be someone who likes sampling lots of different kinds of ethnic foods, dress, custom, etc. Yet the Global Soul's essential and parasitic dependency on these stable and "authentic" ethnicities, nationalities, etc., is completely unremarked-upon.Additionally, Iyer's prose, while often terrific, lapses about a thousand too many times into a simple (and simplistic) juxtaposition of adjectives to demonstrate our new global reality: "a Chinese girl eating American apple pie wearing Italian Adidas shoes made in India...jeepers, isn't the world one big place now!" (This is hopefully obvious as a paraphrase) But these descriptions float by without attendant analysis, which makes me question Iyer's journalistic chops. Too often it appears we are simply looking at the surface of reality through his eyes, without gaining insight into the phenomena boiling under the surface.

It turns out that there are two kinds of people--those who are global souls and those who aren't. In this book Iyer provides a useful definition of what a global soul is. Although he uses himself as a prototype (born in England to Indian parents, sent to boarding school in the US, current resident of Japan), throughout the book he provides lots of other examples. Global souls belong to lots of places at once--emotionally, physically, spiritually. They don't know how to answer the question, "Where are you from?" because the answer is anything but simple.Iyer's book was quite useful to me because I've always been a global soul at heart. I love to travel and experience new cultures, and I feel at home in lots of different places. A few of my friends understand this because they too love to travel, etc. But many other people I know have a hard time understanding why I can't unpack my bags and stay in one place. The book gave me some clues to my own vagabonding.Reading Iyer's book gave me insight into the dichotomy between these two diverse groups of people. The book inspires me to encourage others to explore their own inner "global soul"--there's no better way to create world harmony than by knowing more about the vast types of people who inhabit it.

This is actually a pretty good book.The Pico is kind of a fluffy writer, if you're into that, but overall I think his description of Atlanta is spot on! As an Atlanta resident, even 20 years later a lot his observations still apply.