Description: Why do we travel? What are we doing - and what do we imagine we are doing - when we leave the house, get on a plane and thereby step into globalism? The Importance of Elsewhere is a collection of essays, rooted in Randy Malamud's own lifetime of travel, that addresses those questions and more. Setting today's tourism in the context of eighteenth...
Brief description:
Randy Malamud is the Regents' Professor of English at Georgia State University and the author of eight books, including Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity and Poetic Animals and Animal Souls. He regularly writes for Salon and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Review Quotes:
'Randy Malamud, a distinguished American professor of English . . . likes to get on planes. He is not a naive tourist but a "travelling humanist". He might carry a lot of literary baggage, but he travels light. His knowledge informs his tourism. It doesn't squash it... He recognises the dangers of travel. Planes can carry nasty bacteria to anywhere with an international airport. But Malamud wants to be a carrier of ease rather than disease, transmitting to his readers the way travel can provoke joy, widen our aesthetics and offer a buffet of experiences.'