You Can't Get There from Here: A Year on the Fringes of a Shrinking World - Softcover

Forman, Gayle

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9781594865510: You Can't Get There from Here: A Year on the Fringes of a Shrinking World

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1594865515 ISBN 13: 9781594865510

Publisher: Rodale Books, 2006

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In these eight interconnected travel stories, journalist Gayle Forman traces the trajectory from her relatively comfortable life in New York's Hell's Kitchen to her sometimes extreme―and extremely personal―experiences in some of the most exotic spots on earth

In this extraordinary memoir―now issued in paperback―Gayle Forman takes us with her to the mountain hideaways of Kazakhstan's Tolkien fanatics and inside the townships of South Africa's lost tribe of Israel. She introduces us to a wild assortment of characters: lovelorn Tongan transvestites, charismatic Tanzanian rap stars, precocious Cambodian street kids, out-of-work Dutch prostitutes. In the artful interplay of these eight lively, thoughtful stories, she reveals how all of these diverse lives―as well as our own―are being inextricably altered by the ever-shrinking world that we share. Because, she writes, "To forget the humanity in others is to risk forgetting one's own."

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About the Author:

GAYLE FORMAN is an award-winning investigative journalist who has traveled the world to report for such publications as the New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Glamour, Elle, and Seventeen. She lives in New York City.

From Publishers Weekly:

In Kazakhstan, a dedicated group of Tolkien readers pretend to be the Hobbits of Middle Earth. In China, a doctor attempts to cure cancer by creating a comprehensive book of English slang. In Zanzibar, Vanilla Ice-influenced hip-hop is the reigning musical genre. Journalist Forman set off with her husband on a year-long international journey, determined to find these and other offbeat cultural tidbits. From Tonga to Amsterdam, Forman "planned to experience these exotic countries through the eyes of those on the margins... to see if our otherness would bind us." Her account is a richly woven narrative that highlights a single person or group of people from each country, whether the Lemba of South Africa (Jews descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel) or the Fakaletti of Tonga (not-quite male/not-quite female transvestites). Forman can be grating as she repeatedly claims her "Weird Girl" status; her book is similar to other "off-the-beaten-path" travel books. She sets her book apart, though, by sharing glimpses into her personal life. Traveling for a year with her husband is no honeymoon--at times the two seem on the verge of divorce--and while Forman doesn't tie up the loose ends of her relationship satisfactorily, those personal details give her memoir a center and put more at stake for Forman. Armchair travelers will be sated by these smart, well-written tales.
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