Mohawk hair-cuts in Bali, yuppies in Hong Kong and Rambo rip-offs in the movie houses of Bombay are just a few of the jarring images that Iyer brings back from the Far East.

When Pico Iyer decided to go to Kyoto and live in a monastery, he did so to learn about Zen Buddhism from the inside, to get to know Kyoto, one of the loveliest old cities in the world, and to find out something about Japanese culture today -- not the world of businessmen and production lines, but the traditional world of changing seasons and the silence of temples, of the images woven through literature, of the lunar Japan that still lives on behind the rising sun of geopolitical power.

All this he did. And then he met Sachiko.

Vivacious, attractive, thoroughly educated, speaking...

A collection of travel writing from the author of "Video Night in Kathmandu".

One of the most acclaimed and perceptive observers of globalism and Buddhism now gives us the first serious consideration-for Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike-of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama's work and ideas as a politician, scientist, and philosopher.

From one of our most astute observers, a haunting and unexpected investigation of the many voices he carries inside himself

Early 20th century French Indochina: a place where the cultures, passions and blood of East and West mixed freely. In 1925, American author Harry Hervey saw white men "sowing the legend of Civilization in soil too fecund to resist any new growth," inspiring his most vivid novel. In a tale drunk with sensuous beauty, irony and dark intensity, we experience the life of one young girl-a congai-named Thi-Linh. Born of an Annamite mother and French father, Thi-Linh-a creature of fragile beauty and savage instinct-embodies the dreams, ambitions and future of Indochina, where two disparate races...

Using his own multicultural upbringing as a point of departure, Pico Iyer sets out on a journey - both physical and psychological - towards a definition of home in this world gone mobile. He travels to America, Hong Kong, Toronto, Atlanta, England, and Japan, where he finally finds a home.

We cherish things, Japan has always known, precisely because they cannot last; it's their frailty that adds sweetness to their beauty. Returning to his home in Japan after his father-in-law's sudden death, Pico Iyer soon picks up the steadying patterns of his everyday rites: going to the post office in the day and engaging in spirited games of ping-pong in the evenings. But in a country whose calendar is marked with occasions honouring the dead, he soon finds himself grappling with the question we all have to live with: how to hold on to the things we love even though we know that they -...