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

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You Can't Get There from Here: A Year on the Fringes of a Shrinking World Pub. Date: 11/14/2006 Publisher: Rodale Press, Inc.
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You Can't Get There from Here: A Year on the Fringes of a Shrinking World Pub. Date: 4/2/2005 Publisher: Rodale Press, Inc.

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Overview

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."

Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

Award-winning journalist Forman is a world traveler married to Nick, a librarian struck by wanderlust. When Nick suggests a year of travel, Forman agrees, with some trepidation and conditions: they start at the beach, maintain their separate space, and spend long periods in one place. This is Forman's story of their fascinating adventure: searching for Tolkienists in Kazakhstan; learning about the Lemba, the Jewish population in Africa; and exploring the subculture of the cross-dressing fakaleiti in Tonga. Throughout, Forman seeks out connections with those on the fringes of society, reveling in the relationships she is able to forge. Her husband, conversely, enjoys days in the bar and prefers North American society, causing some friction. Traveling together and separately, they fight and make up, learn how to deal with the new tensions this trip brings, and eventually return to New York City closer than before. All of this is packaged in a personal, engrossing description of a year of adventure and education. Recommended for larger public libraries.-Alison Hopkins, Brantford P.L., Ont. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Travels in search of the merely exotic. Debut author Forman, well known to readers of Seventeen, takes a teenager's delight in casting herself as an outcast, a "Weird Girl" whose journeys tend to involve adoption by immigrant florists or drag queens or street performers, and who has thus seen several countries from perspectives generally denied the casual tourist. When she and her husband decide to spend a year wandering from one remote outpost to another in the wake of 9/11, the two-accompanied, sad to say, by big-wheeled suitcases to which they'd given names-naturally drift into some unusual circles. In Tonga, for instance (which Forman inaccurately describes as "rarely visited by tourists," even though in the year of her visit there was one tourist for every three natives), she spends time among "fakaleiti, a strange third gender of half-men, half-women" who apparently fit right into Tongan society until the arrival of "American-style religious fundamentalism." Presto: thanks to the Mormons, Tongans now know that they're out of touch with the civilized world. Just so, in Beijing a doctor collars her into correcting an English phrasebook he's been writing, even though he doesn't know much English (sample phrase: "Is this the file you desired?" "Not that file, you retard"); the doctor's lack of sophistication, Forman writes, will cost him, for whereas by her account Chinese don't much care about the niceties of grammar, they do care about what it means to be an American, just as Tanzanian teenagers have made a near-Derridaean study of the collected works of Vanilla Ice. Forman writes breezily and pleasantly, though some of her set pieces go on too long and run out of steam. Her book,too, could have benefited from a more closely followed overarching theme of the kind that Franklin Foer worked so effectively in his globalism-dissecting How Soccer Explains the World (2004), which makes many of the same points. A mixed bag, then, of some interest to armchair travelers, if not to Weird Girls everywhere.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781594860379
Publisher: Rodale Press, Inc.
Publication date: 4/2/2005
Pages: 336
Product dimensions: 5.62 (w) x 8.80 (h) x 1.19 (d)

Meet the Author

Gayle Forman

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.

	Invitation to a Shrinking World	3
	You Can't Get There from Here: U.S. to Tonga-January-February	9
	Sex, Love, and Bouillabaisse	13
	You Can't Get There from Here: Tonga to China-February	51
	Chinglish Lessons	54
	You Can't Get There from Here: China to Cambodia-April	91
	The Erudite Urchins	95
	You Can't Get There from Here: Cambodia to India-June-July	131
	Bhagwans and Born-Agains in Bollywood	134
	You Can't Get There from Here: India to Kazakhstan-September	169
	Hobbits on the Silk Road	173
	You Can't Get There from Here: Kazakhstan to Tanzania-October	209
	Raparound	212
	You Can't Get There from Here: Tanzanla to South Africa-November	243
	Welcome to the Family	247
	You Can't Get There from Here: South Africa to the Netherlands-December	281
	Laid Off	282
	You Can Get There from Here: The Netherlands to Home-January	319
	Acknowledgments	324

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Anonymous

Posted June 15, 2005

Smart, witty, unique & fun

I devoured this book. Every sentence dove tails into the next. Her observations are as riveting as the communities she visits. I wait eagerly for my vicarious next globe trop with the coolest wierd girl in print.
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Anonymous

Posted May 3, 2005

OK read but lost the theme

The theme of this book, according to the subtitle and the introduction, is the effect of globalization on more remote communities. However, that theme was not developed and got lost after the first chapter. The real theme was achieving the sense of community in different places through the world and as an isolated world traveler.
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You Can't Get There from Here: A Year on the Fringes of a Shrinking World

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Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

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Product Details

Meet the Author

Gayle Forman

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Smart, witty, unique & fun

OK read but lost the theme