Falling Off the Map - Some Lonely Places of the World  (English, Paperback, Iyer Pico)

Falling Off The Map: Some Lonely Places Of The World is a delightful exploration of some of the isolated regions of the world.

Summary Of The Book

In Falling Off The Map: Some Lonely Places Of The World, the author takes us to isolated locations across the world. But there are varieties of isolation, which are measured by parameters which are geographical, cultural, attitudes and habits. These are the kinds of isolation explored in the book. The author has deliberately kept off the popular tourist destinations like London, Paris, New York, Tokyo and others of that ilk. Instead, he travels to North Korea, Cuba and Paraguay. He goes to Bhutan, Iceland and and Argentina.

In Argentina, he discovers Batmobiles being sold by women, and penguins parading off in pairs. In North Korea, he is entertained by the People’s Army Circus, whose members hold on to their guns while doing handstands.

In Iceland, he marvels at the high literacy rate and also at the country’s landscape. He gives a pithy review of Bhutan’s first feature film, which he describes as a $6500 blockbuster where the girl dies and the boy kills himself in her funeral pyre. They then live happily ever after as a cow and an ox.

Falling Off The Map: Some Lonely Places Of The World has taken for its subject a set of places that are as different as possible from each other in many ways, yet linked by an impression of remoteness, of being cut-off from the rest of the world. The vivid descriptions and the witty commentaries make this book eminently readable as a travelogue, even after almost two decades.

About Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer is a British born writer of Indian origin.

Other books by this author are Video Night in Kathmandu: And Other Reports from the Not-so-Far East, Imagining Canada: An Outsider's Hope for a Global Future, The Recovery of Innocence, and The Man Within My Head.

Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer was born in 1957 in Oxford, England, to Indian parents. He grew up in England and the US, and was educated at Eton College, Oxford University and Harvard University. He taught literature at Harvard University for some time before joining Time magazine in 1982. He now lives in Japan with his Japanese wife.