The Kindness of Strangers Paperback ? October 1, 2021

Once again, Tom Lutz takes us to seldom-traveled corners of the world—the small towns of western Madagascar, the terraced rice fields in northern Luzon, the scattered homesteads on the Mongolian steppe, the hilltop churches on Micronesian islands, the riverside docks of Dhaka, Ethiopian weddings in Gondar, funeral pyres in Nepal, traditionalist karaoke bars in Bhutan—to bring us random reports of human kindness.

You may never visit these places, but Tom Lutz will do it for you. And while global media may serve up a steady diet of division, violence, oppression, hatred, and strife, The Kindness of Strangers shows that people the world over are much more likely to meet strangers with interest, empathy, welcome, and compassion.
 

Tom Lutz has traveled in some 150 countries and territories and has written about many of them, as in And the Monkey Learned Nothing: Dispatches from a Life in Transit (Iowa, 2016). The founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lutz is distinguished professor and chair of creative writing at University of California, Riverside. He lives in Los Angeles, California.