I've always enjoyed a good travel memoir, and I read some of Pico Iyer's books when I was younger, but it's been a while since I've picked one up. This one is intriguing because it's a little more intentional than the typical travel memoir -- Iyer is specifically in search of sites of great spiritual significance. I didn't get the sense that he is exploring his own spirituality here, though I suppose one wouldn't undertake such an enterprise without some consciousness of that. He visits sites in India, Sri Lanka, Japan, Israel, even North Korea, and makes observations about spiritual practices and how they are woven into the general social fabric of those places. He is a good writer and a good traveler, and this is an intellectual approach to these journeys. In the end, he seems to awake spiritually in spite of himself, realizing after visiting Sarnath, one of the holiest sites in India: "I decided that I would no longer seek out holy places in this city of temples; I would just let life come to me in all its happy confusion and find the holiness in that." This struck me as the words of a person who had found peace. Words to live by. ( )

This relatively short book has something to surprise on nearly every page. It's one of those unusual books that starts out, as so many travel books do, as merely interesting, and turns into something much deeper by the end. You could call it a collection of essays on a theme, and certainly there's no indication that the places Iyer visited were visited recently or in the order presented, although you could read the book thinking that. What we have here, in part, is a work by a man who has spent decades traveling and is no longer content to simply report on wonderful and unusual destinations. Instead, he's looking deeper, finding new connections between the people and cultures he's encountering and humanity at large, and especially, the connections between humanity at large and he himself. Although he never says so outright, it's clear that he's feeling the approaching shadow of mortality and is no longer content to merely marvel at the surface of things, or to find patterns only a few levels deep. Hence the subtitle of the book, "In Search of Paradise." Not only are we individuals fated to fade away, but so are our cultures. What really, beneath all the bright diversity of people and places, undergirds this vast web called humanity?

Not that this book is at all difficult to read, or that it can't be experienced as travelogue. But late in the book, when Iyer happens to mention that he has spent much time with the Dalai Lama, traveling in his company on several occasions, I wasn't as surprised as I might have been.

Nevertheless I do recommend the book to those who are not looking for something deep; that's how I discovered it. I read the opening pages about Iyer getting off the plane in Tehran and liked his voice and didn't expect anything other than a fresh perspective on overlooked or misrepresented places. The full list of places visited and discussed, in addition to Iran, are North Korea; Kashmir; Broome, in Western Australia; Jerusalem; Ladakh, on the border of India and Tibet; Sri Lanka; Gokurabashi, Japan, an ancient cemetery near Osaka; and Varanasi. Although that last section is only 24 pages long, it let me imagine the place so vividly that my "memory" of it is as strong as my memory of places I've actually visited!

Highly recommended, whether you consider yourself a spiritual person or not. ( )

I can't really give this book a complete review because of a large scale error at the printer/publisher. I bought the hardcover edition of the book at a major retailer for full price, but inside starting at about page 90 there are large swaths of the text which have been accidentally replaced with pages from a Ralph Macchio memoir about the making of "The Karate Kid" and his newer Netflix series. The parts of Pico Iyer's book I was able to read (which is the majority) were very good, but obviously some pages are missing and some chapters were cut off before completion. Still glad I read it. ( )