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

you can get there from here.....it is just how you do it that is so exciting. enjoy

Global cultures clash daily, but none so personally as in Gayle Forman's You Can't Get There From Here: A Year On The Fringes Of A Shrinking World. Forman's trip around the world covers the cultures and differences in eight stories of personal encounters among world groups, from a group of transvestites on Tonga to an odd group of Lord of Rings fans acting out fantasy games in Kazakhstan in an effort to reclaim their European roots. The planet is shrinking as cultures overlap traditional and modern in strange, new ways: that's the underlying message of You Can't Get There From Here.

I love to be entertained by books that also teach you something along the way. Gayle did a great job of finding and exploring the obscure in every country she visited, grabbing you with her writing and taking you on her adventure. Gayle takes you on a ride geographically and emotionally as she and her husband traverse the far corners of the world AND their relationship. I ended the book feeling like I knew the world a little better and was a little smarter about relationships as well!

Globalization is one of the most common words used these days and the very same word has been addressed by Gayle Forman in this brilliant piece of work. But Forman has provided the world with a perspective on globalization not many tend to consider and reach out to. That perspective is that although globalization is changing the material scenario of the world and is aiming largely at the world market economy and its impact on our now 'tiny' globe, it must move forward and end with accomplishing a compassionate connection between its inhabitants. You Can't Get There From Here is a book with a writer who is sometimes blatantly honest yet is totally empathetic towards everything and everyone she encounters along her path. It's open (with the writer sharing her most personal thoughts and events)yet sweet and gentle in a modest manner. Very witty yet non-judgemental. The most powerful message conveyed in the book is that every place and person on earth has a unique value and most of the time all that is required to realize that value and learn something meaningful from it is to look beyond oneself and beyond what the exterior seems to be. Everything about Forman's book is human and universal because her words are truthful and from the heart.It is a complete narration that leaves the reader satiated because there is nothing missing it its content.

Gayle Forman and I occupy the far ends of the Bell Curve of travelers. She goes to Paris and never visits the Louvre; I often head to that glorious depository of art as soon as I've unpacked. But when it comes to travel books, I don't want to read about visits to the Louvre, I want an author who ventures to places I'm NEVER going to go (high on that list: Kazakhastan)and then tells me of adventures there with insight and wit. This is an absolutely marvelous book. I hated to see it end.