Book reviews

A few of you at the 2005 SIETAR Congress were lucky to draw copies of Peter Kurze’s book, Around the World in 80 Travel Tales. More of you might find the book interesting and perhaps inspire you to tell your stories in similar fashion and most of us are world travelers to some degree.

This book is easier to describe by first telling what it is not rather than what it is. It is not a book of stories collected by the author from the locals in his travels in 30 countries. It is not a treatise on how to behave in a culturally competent way. It is not a treatise in cultural or political correctness, though it offers some tips and learnings, for example a list of negotiating does and don’ts aimed at the tourist in the bazaar rather than the businessman in the board room, though the logic of many of these is transferable.

The book is a collection of experiences with the author’s own perspective, words, reactions and feelings to encounters in many places. It is the highlights of a year and a half of circumambulation of the globe. The stories are his own, the feelings are his own, the learnings are his own, shared openly with the reader. The book is about Peter Kurze as much as it is about the places he went, the people he met and the incidents that befell him. Hence its authenticity and its interest. It raises comments in the reader, like, “Wow, never knew that!” “Better be careful if I ever go there” and even “Yup, been there, done that.”

So who is Peter Kurze? A third-culture kid, born of US parents in Nepal, with extensive international education and experience in working in various cultures. He wrote the book as a result of as Australians would say, taking a “walkabout” on terminating an expatriate assignment in Japan. His travels are not at all what any decent tour operator would organize for you but the bracing experience of doing it on your own, where, as the author observes, “one thing led to another.”

And lead, it did… from a “Bungee Baptism” in New Zealand, to a” Caravanserai in Old Cairo” to an encounter with “Reindeer Balls” in Iceland the author ultimately finds himself in “Lost Horizons”—not the movie, but the question that faces all of us who travel and work abroad, How do you go back home again?”