Review of The Global Soul by Pico Iyer

The book tries to portray the changing global scenario and how boundaries are being blurred by people that are on their way to find the place where they really belong. To some extent the book is really able to describe the dilemma of a wandering soul but the way it is written certainly makes the book a pathetic reading; the writing itself is as confused as the wandering lead character. The ideas he wanted to express are certainly there but it would have been better if he would have taken care to give those thought a proper shape; he should have written them in more coherent manner.

The book is about a character who roams around the world from Japan to Atlanta, from Barcelona to Hong Kong and Singapore and found himself to be a foreigner where ever he goes. He makes a trip to Toronto in Canada also and while he was interacting with the Indian origin people over there, he was alien among them as well as he could not understand a word of Hindi and that was a big surprise for those people; they were even questioning his Indian-ness.

In some of the pages he gave good ideas about how Olympic Games are being fixed and how freebies play a big role in deciding the venues of the games. But other than these occasional good thoughts there is nothing new that you can find in the book and I would emphatically say that the book is not worth reading. I want to take liberty of the medium and would like to suggest the publisher that if you want the book to find a response that can be considered as even ‘worth discussing’ then you must edit the book as it seriously lack coherence.