In Asia

During my Indian adventure my greatest companion was surely this book of Tiziano Terzani. He was a correspondent for the German journal Der Spiegel who spent most of his life living and traveling around Asia.

The book is a collection of the articles written by Terzani in his 30+ years stay in this continent. The articles are arranged chronologically and divided into sets talking regarding the different countries visited (China, Japan, Sri Lanka, India, …) and each of them concerns a particular event (Tiananmen square’s demonstration in China) or facet (the Yakuzas in Japan) of an Asian country

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Terzani’s style is really neat and elegant; every article is beautifully written, pleasant to read and at the same time thought provoking; being in India and living myself an infinitesimal part of Terzani’s experiences made this lecture perfect.
This book covers most of the important events happened in Asia during the years 1970-200 and my only regret about this lecture concerns my ignorance about history. The context provided before every text is very short and I somehow lacked the background to fully appreciate the pieces and place them in a wider frame. If anyone knows a well written book about modern history (not necessarily regarding only Asia) let me know!

To conclude I give to this book my most unreserved recommendation and suggest to everyone wants to know more about this far.

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Travel’s lectures

Tomorrow I’ll fly to India, where I plan to spend a month volunteering near Dharamsala and backpacking a little around north India.

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I wanted to have with me a suitable book for the coming month,  I then rushed to finish Sophie’s World, which is a suggested lecture if you don’t commit my mistakes:

1. Read this book after 15 (let’s say 20 if you didn’t study Philosophy at secondary school) years old
2. Read this book after having read  ”History of Western Philosophy” of Bertrand Russell

So I ended up with Tiziano Terzani’s “In Asia”, it’s my first book by Terzani; I hope it’s well written and it will do something for my ignorance about Asia’s history. Quite a challenge…

I’m not sure I’ll be able to update this blog during the next 30 days but sooner or later I’ll post pics and anecdotes of this travel.

I’ll see you soon!

Francesco

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