Book Review assignment

Book on ‘Travels Overseas’ 

Book Review, due in week 10 [3-5 pages]. Students will select (from the list below) a ‘book on travels’, and write a short paper about it. A book review guideline:

Each student will select from the list (below) a title that you would like to read and review. These titles portray perceptions about life, culture, and traditions in various regions of the world. These are insights, narratives of events seen through a foreigner's eye; and most notably, perceptions captured through the cultural lens of an American traveler. The majority of these books are non-fictional tales of travels providing a comprehensive "snap shop" into the past and contemporary life of these different locales. This activity aims at enriching our understanding of the cultural contrasts between “us” and “them”, which we will discuss at length during the course of the semester. Here is the list of some of these accounts: 

The Snow Leopard—Revised Edition. Peter Matthiessen
 

Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China.
Leslie T. Change (2008)
 

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory. Peter Hessler.
 

Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Katherine Boo
 

First Stop in the New World. David Lida
 

Circle K Cycles. Karen Tei Yamashita.
 

Running the Amazon. Joe Kane
 

The Art of Travel. Alain de Botton
 

The Innocents Abroad. Mark Twain.
 

Travels. Michael Crichton.
 

 The Sheltering Sky. Paul Bowles

The Language of the Land. James Stephenson.

The Sound of Language. Amulya Malladi
 

Bagdad Without a Map and Other Misadventures in 

Arabia. Tony Horwitz.
 

The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto. Pico 

Iyer. 

Falling off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World. Pico Iyer. 

The Yellow Birds. Keven Powers.
 

Seven Years in Tibet. Heinrich Harrer