The Traveller: Observations from an American in Exile

by Michael Katakis and Michael Palin

Book Overview

How could I have known then with no maps acquired and my bags not yet packed that my journey had already begun?...The tools of a traveler are compass and map. They calculate distances covered and destinations sought but cannot measure the consequences of experiences on a human heart, writes Michael Katakis in his introduction.

Traveller is a collection of letters and journal entries that bring the immediacy of experience together with perceptive reflections of the author's own past. The entries in this volume are not travel guides. They are more personal, like letters from the most desirable sort of friend. The friend carries the listener with him as he meanders through the medina in Fez or into the hills of Gallipoli. His voice is such that listeners can almost smell the herbs and dusty soil of Crete, and always they are introduced to the people he meets along the way.

For anyone curious about the world, and introduced with a foreword written and read by Michael Palin, Traveller is sure to delight, infuriate and, perhaps most importantly, inspire thought about the complex world around them.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1439175705
• ISBN13: 9781439175705
• Release Date: August 2009
• Publisher: Traveller
• Length: 152 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.2" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Other Roads

If you want to know what the world is thinking and feeling _ not the politicians, we know where they stand or pretend to stand _ but the guide in Sierra Leone, the young Algerian Muslim woman who warns we are funding our ``own assassins,'' the Tango dancer in Paris, the Cuban fisherman . . . then this is the book for you. Katakis explores, and when he meets people they confide in him, and what he reports them saying and doing over two decades of travel is often eye-opening, tragic, charming and funny by turns. But more to the point, this book is in many ways a warning that the world is flying apart and governments are losing touch with the people because they have let the people down, and the results could be dire _ and aren't we beginning to see that? This is an insightful book and an enlightening book with the author's movingly dramatic photographs an added bonus. This is a book President Obama _ or at least his foreign policy advisors _ should read.