The Man within My Head

by Pico Iyer

About the Book: The Man within My Head An extraordinary new book from one of our great non fiction writers! Ever since he first read Graham Greene, Pico Iyer has been obsessed bythe figure of the writer and by one of the great themes of Greene's work:what it means to be an outsider. Wherever he has travelled-usually asan outsider himself--Iyer has found reminders of Greene's life, observedscenes that might have been written by Greene, written stories thatrecall Greene. Yet as Iyer recounts the history of his obsession, anotherphantom image begins to assert itself, one that Iyer had long banishedfrom his inner life--that of his father. Insightful, tender, superbly written,The Man Within my Head is another masterpiece from one of our greattravel writers. About the Author: Pico Iyer Pico Iyer is the author of seven works of nonfiction, most recently, TheOpen Road, as well as two novels. An essayist for Time, he contributesregularly to many publications including The New York Times, The NewYork Review Of Books, The Financial Times Reviews 'As a guide to far-flung places, Pico Iyer can hardly be surpassed.'- New Yorker 'Pico Iyer is the most widely read and popular writer of travel books. He is also its wisest.'- Hindu 'Thoughtful and compelling.'- The Globe and Mail on The Man Within my Head

Genres: Nonfiction, Travel, Memoir, Biography, Biography Memoir, Books About Books, Writing

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Pico Iyer is a British-born essayist and novelist of Indian descent. As an acclaimed travel writer, he began his career documenting a neglected aspect of travel -- the sometimes surreal disconnect between local tradition and imported global pop culture. Since then, he has written ten books, exploring also the cultural consequences of isolation, whether writing about the exiled spiritual leaders of Tibet or the embargoed society of Cuba.

Iyer’s latest focus is on yet another overlooked aspect of travel: how can it help us regain our sense of stillness and focus in a world where our devices and digital networks increasing distract us? As he says: "Almost everybody I know has this sense of overdosing on information and getting dizzy living at post-human speeds. Nearly everybody I know does something to try to remove herself to clear her head and to have enough time and space to think. ... All of us instinctively feel that something inside us is crying out for more spaciousness and stillness to offset the exhilarations of this movement and the fun and diversion of the modern world."

Reviews

[Quo · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has been said that It's a wise child that knows his own father, a statement credited to Shakespeare but also to Samuel Butler, though in the process of translating Virgil's Aeneid in high school Latin Class, I thought that I remembered Ascanius making the same comment in reference to Aeneas, or perhaps it was vice versa? The Man Inside My Head by Pico Iyer is a rather masterful excavation of paternal influences, both familial & literary. Having tried & failed to make my way through the author's The Lady & The Monk, I wasn't sure just what to expect with this 2012 book by Iyer but ultimately found it to be fascinating, though it might be considerably less so for a reader unfamiliar with Graham Greene's novels.

One or more reviewers have called Pico's Iyer's memoir "obsessive" in terms of Greene but that would not capture a fellow author's influence on a life, except in a pejorative sense that bears little meaning for me. Admittedly, Iyer confesses that he "began to feel haunted by a compound ghost & that Greene's novels were my unwritten autobiography."

Later, the author suggests that "the paradox of reading is that you can draw closer to someone else's voice than to the people who surround you." I have heard similar things said by others in relation to a mentor, even if the mentor in question is completely unaware of the degree of influence he or she has over another or is someone never personally met, the influence coming from a literary entanglement or works of art on canvas or inspiration by way of an architectural presence.



Pico Iyer is the only son of a Tamil-speaking, Mumbai-raised father with very British values who gravitated to England as a gifted scholar & a mother who also had a deep interest in philosophy & higher learning. Eventually, the family moves to California, with Pico's father taking a position at sort of New-Age think-tank for scholars in Santa Barbara, but by his father's design, takes his education at Eton, the elite boarding school in the U.K., staying on to take a degree at the University of Oxford.

There are almost constant paradoxes & contradictions to this cultural bifurcation, growing up in a home that values western traditions but also was keen to assimilate the Ramayana and its Indian roots as well. Such a boy is a natural target for the works of Graham Greene, an author who seemed perennially distant from his own roots, forever detailing displaced souls who are almost always on the outside looking in.

There are connective fragments that seem to deepen the relationship between Pico Iyer & Graham Greene, both of whom had their home burn down, Greene during the WWII blitz of London & Iyer's family home in California due to a wildfire + the fact that at one point the two families lived close to one another in London. But mostly, it is the Graham Greene's fiction that counts as an ever-increasing influence, with many of Greene's books read by Pico Iyer multiple times. And, some of the places the vagabonding Iyer visits are in fact places where Greene situated his novels, including The Quiet American (Vietnam), The Power & the Glory (Mexico) & The Comedians, set in Haiti.

My interest in Graham Greene is rather deep but not reverential and having read a few biographies of the author, I will go on record as saying that Pico Iyer's analysis of the author in The Man Within My Head is perhaps the most incisive I have come upon, anywhere. Here are just a few of Mr. Iyer's insights:

Graham Greene the novelist appeals to some of us--even challenges our sense of who we are--in part because he is so acutely sensitive to all the ways we can fail to understand one another, even those people closest to ourselves; he knew his characters better than anyone in real life. He becomes the caretaker of that part of us that feels we are much larger & harder to contain, a mystery that is fundamental & unanswerable, which gives us a sense of hauntedness. It is the best side of us, our conscience, our sense of sympathy, our feelings for another's pain--that causes the deepest grief. And God, if He even exists, is less a source of solace that a hound of heaven, always on our path.

One Greenian paradox is that in his books, as in many lives, enemies do suddenly become friends & then turn into enemies again. Beyond that, he mocks America's civilization, yet his greatest love was an American, as was his favorite writer; he pricks holes in Catholicism & yet his fallen, errant, sinning Catholic priest becomes a hero because he refuses to flee when his dying mother needs his priestly ministration--I noticed that the only reliable & constant enemy in all of his work was, in fact a version of himself. Greene could write with harrowing compassion for every character except the one who might be taken as Graham Greene.

Throughout The Man Within My Head, there are vestiges of Pico Iyer's father, including his response to his son's books, not always positive but the shadow of Graham Greene always seems the preeminent force.

There are examples of rather quizzical behavior on the part of Greene, as when the author enters a Graham Greene parody contest in a magazine, and wins! It seems that Greene very often parodied himself in his novels. But always, according to Iyer, the author's "great theme was innocence, because he could never disguise how much he missed it." Pico Iyer, in looking for clues to his own identity, considers the two cultures where he spent the most time, England & America and concludes that...

No one can be defined by the roles he plays onstage. I watched my neighbors n California embark on lifelong excursions into the self, while seeming baffled by the world; I saw my friends in Britain more or less take over the world, but only by never looking too closely within.

Greene, I felt was always in his books hoping to give us a sense of responsibility--of conscience--in part by bringing himself before an unsparing tribunal. At the heart, he offered me a way of looking at things & the way one looked became a kind of theology, a preparing for a way of acting. It didn't matter if the man within my head--this one at least-- was carefully edited or artfully fashioned; his unearthly, unflinching blind man's eyes gave me an image of attention, and the spirit that lies behind it.

Pico Iyer's well-crafted narrative conveys how the books we read can stand as a guiding force in our lives, even beyond that of a parent's influence, fostering a kind of tandem kinship with one's own genetic inheritance.



*The 1st photo image within my review is of Pico Iyer, the 2nd of Graham Greene & the 3rd of Pico Iyer with his wife Hiroko Takeuchi & the Dalai Lama.

[Zoeb · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A man within your head whispers his secrets and fears to you, and it can go right to your core, accompanied by flesh and blood; accompanied by flesh and blood, it comes up to the surface..."

I know a certain friend of mine on Instagram, a fine young writer and poet by the name of Subhadip Majumdar, to be an ardent admirer of Ernest Hemingway. He calls him his "greatest inspiration" and I wonder, sometimes, what does he mean by that - does he mean that Hemingway's famed "iceberg" prose style and penchant for storytelling has captivated him to the degree that he has been inspired similarly to write like him or does he mean, on another dimension, that he is awe-struck by the sheer overwhelming personality of the man and the mythos behind him - his wanderlust, his rugged personality of machismo and brooding pathos, his compulsive alcoholism and furious envy about his fellow writers and his own gritty sense of poetry which seeped in his spare words. I cannot understand if it is the latter - I have never found Papa compelling in the same way as I have followed the meandering, relentless trail of another writer, who perhaps deserves to be considered in the same league as him. But then, it is true that the literary fathers that we choose are ours to own, ours to understand and only ours to hold close to our heart.

"The Man Within My Head", for Pico Iyer, himself a skilled and dexterous chronicler of being forever on the prowl like a traveller across the breadth and space of the world's far-flung outposts, is none other than the same man within my own head - Graham Greene - and while that alone explains why this book was a reading experience so dear to my heart and soul, the mere connection that I share with Iyer, as a fellow wandering soul who has been enthralled and mesmerised by the English writer, it is not the only reason why the book haunted me and mesmerised me in its strange, mystical power and its resonant eloquence.

Yes, it is about Greene, unabashedly so, as he looms like a hypnotic, yet always enigmatic father figure in Iyer's mind, giving shape to his inspirations, his own observations and character sketches mirroring in the unpredictable tumult of Iyer's own life. Indeed, Greene, as the writer puts it so succinctly and affectionately, had this rare gift of leaving indelible traces in the souls of his readers, of getting under their skin with his gift of piercing understanding and plucking their heartstrings with his boundless compassion, even more so for the fallen and downtrodden, and it is this gift, it is this extraordinary skill that links many, as it has done, to him in such an uncanny way. He is, after all, our all-understanding, all-forgiving patron saint - the storyteller who speaks to our mischievous yet chivalrous, adventurous yet jaded, cynical yet compassionate self all at the same time.

But even more than that, as the book flips beautifully across time and countries, from the dizzying snowy heights of Bolivia to the electric street-life of Saigon, from forest fires raging in Californian hills to the trail of the devotees in the wilds of Ethiopia, from the constant danger of civil-war in Sri Lanka to the humdrum suburbia of Berkhamsted, this is about fathers, both real and virtual and how they both contend for that place within our minds, influencing us even beyond their graves. This is about, on a lesser but no less essential note, about Iyer's father and his carefully groomed confidence pitted against Greene's own self-doubting moral dilemma and this is about whom we choose - the real father, posturing like a self-assured, erudite gentleman or the vulnerable, flawed, even self-loathing wanderer who bares his tormented heart out to us through his words.

It is also about Iyer questioning, thoughtfully, about where does he belong. Does he belong to the free-wheeling, upbeat world of America and California where he had spent his holidays and much of his youth and even adulthood, without the tough realities of his English schooling to haunt him for too long? Or does he belong, eventually and even grudgingly, to the quieter, more taciturn, desultory and even traditionally wise world of that same English schooling which has also instilled in him the sense of wanderlust that fills his books? Is he more preening and cocksure as his father or does he, more to the point, resemble that "other" father figure - jaded, self-critical, painfully honest and never at peace?

"The Man Within My Head", rendered in a beautifully measured, lightly nuanced prose that takes in the littlest and simplest of details and paints them in vivid strokes, answers that question at the end of its length and the answer that comes is unexpected but then wholly admirable and resonant to us all. Because Iyer's allegiance to Greene is not just something that we, fellow admirers of the English writer who taught us all to question our own claims to goodness and forgive all evil, share in - it is something meant for every reader out there in the world who has felt some kinship, at sometime or the other, with a voice speaking to her or him through the words printed on a yellowing page of a paperback. It is about fathers and sons, about the legends that live on forever in our minds and it is about how storytelling or a storyteller can, more than the people we have always known or loved, still understand us better than ourselves. Essential reading for all.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just bought this book through Indiebound, just got the phone call, it's in!!!! WOO HOO!!! STAY TUNED
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I had been looking forward to reading this since I met Iyer several years ago at the LA Festival of Books. He was touring with the Dalai Lama book, but what we spoke about was Graham Greene, and the book he wanted to write. A great conversation, far ranging--we talked about Maugham and Greene and Chandler and Anthony Burgess, Long Day Wanes... And every year since then, we've met and had these wonderful discussions, always circling back to Greene. Once we were in a restaurant and I'd brought The End of the Affair, in case he was late (but he's always early)--the waitress saw the bookcover and exclaimed that she was reading Greene too! Such a subterranean Greene cult! Not to mention a Pico Iyer cult, in which I'm deeply invested.

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Aaaahhhhhh.... Everything I could have wanted. A dream city of twisted alleyways which loop around and connect in surprising ways--motivic rather than chronological-- a meditation by Iyer on his own travels and paternity, his education, his life between worlds, as his unique path overlaps and is illuminated by (and illumnates) the person and works of his literary forebear and 'the man within my head'--the novelist Graham Greene.

What a subtle writer Iyer is! I love the oblique sneaky ways this story unfolds--how modest, how sly-- I find myself paging backwards to tease out the answer to some dropped clue into the mystery of Pico Iyer, as he searches for the mystery of Greene. Like Greene, Iyer likes to reveal things aslant--the mystery of a life and especially, a life in literature--the way in which a reader discovers soul-deep affinities with an author one will never met.

Fascinating. I can see another tour of the Greene canon coming on--as well as a dip in Maugham as well. I so admire the compass of this book--from Japan to Santa Barbara to Bolivia, Chile, Bhutan and the green fields of England--and its depth, psychologically, spiritually, as he describes his relationship to Greene, one that could only be described as a haunting. Such disasters and serendipities.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is always interesting when an author like Pico Iyer succeeds in channeling another author, in this case Graham Greene. The Man Within My Head deals with Iyer's lifelong obsession with Greene, an author he never actually met. Yet there were intersecting points and interesting parallels in their respective lives.

A Tamil, Iyer was especially drawn to Greene's The Quiet American, about the encounter between a world-weary Brit and an idealistic American who knows exactly what Viet Nam should have been like if it weren't the way it actually was. It is also the greatest novel written about the American experience in Viet Nam.

If you like Greene -- and I idolize him -- or if you like Iyer (as I do), then this is a book you should consider reading.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book, hence the four stars. It is about Graham Greene for one; it is about the effect books have on our perception of the world as well and those twi would have been enough. However there is more. It is brilliantly well-written, flowing sentences, elegantly structured chapters and a narrative that encompasses English public school life, California's spiritual heartland, Bolivia and if course Greeneland. It is so far ranging it leaves you a bit breathless, like the oxygenless atmosphere of La Paz, but also so internal you feel your own life experiences battering at your mind as you make connections between what Iyer writes and what you have thought and felt.

It is a man's book in lots of ways. I is written by a man who acknowledges that he was brought up to deal with school life not family life and all the implications that has for building strong relationships with women. He is in turn writing about another man, brought up in a similar way, who had close and lasting relationships with several women, but none of them conventionally 'happy' ones.

But I liked it, I felt I learned things about Greene as well as about the author,; it has made me want to read other books of his about places I have visited.

I hesitate to recommend it, but if you like Greene and you like good writing ... give it a go.

[JMM · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Man Within My Head is an examination of Graham Greene’s role in the author’s life (a man he’s never met but whose novels remarkably intersect with Iyer’s experiences and inner life). It’s about Greene’s life, Iyer’s life, and the life of the author’s father, about the themes of Greene’s work (foreignness, displacement, innocence, detachment) and much more. It’s a thoughtful and fascinating book, one that left me, frankly, gasping.

[Shane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Graham Greene is one of my favourite authors, so I am bound to be biased by anything written about him. And I found this book to be startling in Pico Iyer's insights into Greene and into that in-between country of guilt, doubt, compassion, faithlessness, inscrutability and betrayal we have come to call "Greeneland."

Greene's many recurring themes are called out: (1)the visiting foreigner vs. the resident foreigner in an offbeat country, both out of touch with the mother country(2) The relationship between the local woman and the visiting foreigner, and its sexual subtext (3) the Catholic atheist (4) the Do-gooders (usually Americans) in a country that does not want to be saved (5) the compassion of the wounded towards the wounded. Greene's private life is also interesting: he stayed married to his first wife despite leaving her 43 years ago, and living with a string of mistresses afterwards. And there is an exact count of the number of prostitues he had been with. He did not drive a car, and preferred to live in a small 2-room flat despite spending his enormous royalty payments on buying houses, ranches and cars for those he cared for. He was the perennial outsider of the literary establishment despite being a a popular writer; I think the establishment had a problem in welcoming a spy and a lapsed Catholic into their midst although they did not have any problem in embracing alcoholics and suicides openly. But after his death, we can't seem to get enough of Greene - now elevated to a Christ-like figure, albeit with a mortal stain on it.

Iyer tries to marry his own life and pregrinations along roads less travelled as a journalist in more recent times, his own father's life as an academic and philosopher living in the US, and Graham Greene, the man who lives within his head. It was this juxtaposition of the three strands that never quite wove together for me. I think that Iyer's travels and adventures would have made for a fascinating traveloge in its own right, and his insights into Greene and his work could have been extended to carry a separate book of literary crticism on the celebrated author. As for fathers, well, we all have issues in reconciling with them; they are the subject of memoir or introspection, not very interesting when displayed in the public arena, and fathers rarely fit between travelogue and literary observations. There is also a danger in using the name and work of a literary lion such as Greene to sanctify one's own life - it smacks of pretension.

All that said, I'll look forward to the next book by Iyer on "The Lawless Roads - travels with myself"

[Kartik · Rating 2 out of 5]

I usually try to see the positives in a book, and I usually end up buying or picking out that books I like. This time however, will be an exception. This is the first book I've bought in the last 2 years that I feel was a waste of my money. Watching Iyer's TED talk on identity and home a few months earlier had made me interested in what he had to say, since he too is of Indian descent, loved to travel, and introspected during his travels.

To start off, the blurb on the back of the book stated it was about Graham Greene, and Iyer's habit of drawing comparison between their lives. I had barely read any of Greene's work, so I didn't have much to draw from. Strike one.

I told myself that it'd be fine, I'd learn along the way, reading Iyer's description of his life. And that didn't work out. Why? Because I sensed no struggle, no hardship in his story that could myself know what it felt like to be him. It didn't communicate to me at all. Iyer had a pretty privileged background in every sense of the word, and his ramblings seemed too caught up in that. There was no 'grit' that made me feel what he had to say. Strike two.

The pacing made utterly no sense either. Tying into my previous point, there were sections where he'd randomly go off to some exotic location, and then promptly navel gaze. They were tied together rather haphazardly. Strike three.

Dissapointed, I put the book down. The first time I did that with a book I bought.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the review, I tend to see the positive in books as far as possible. And in this case, it was his writing. For all the book's faults, Iyer's writing is refined and uses just the right words, painting (yet ultimately soulless) vivid images. I will probably read the book again someday, to give it another chance, but somehow I don't think it'll stand up to that.

[Allene Symons · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who follows new modes of writing memoir and mixed genres, and as a fan of Pico Iyer who has read all his books, I was captivated by his new braided biography-memoir about Graham Greene and his influence on Iyer's life. This indirect autobiography through the mirror of another writer's life and work provides insights that, I think, are more nuanced than if stated directly. A note of inevitability carries the pairing, for the two writers lived near each other though they were born at least a generation apart. Greene's travels and the international setting of his novels parallels, not coincidentally it turns out, Pico Iyer's global life and work as a boy born in India, educated at elite schools in England, a trans-Atlantic commuter to his parent's home in Santa Barbara. Certainly it helps to have read some work by Greene or Iyer--whether Iyer's books like Global Soul or his travel essays for Time magazine and other publications--so in praising this book I'll assume a reader has already taken a taste by way of prerequisite. Reading The Man Within My Head is rather like going to an art exhibition, a retrospective, where you see the influences and eras and styles an artist passes through on their creative journey.

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

From BBC Radio 4:
The travel writer Pico Iyer (author of Video Nights in Kathmandu, Falling Off The Map) has always wandered the world with a mentor 'looking on'. Whether it be Bogota, Cuba, California, Japan, the man inside Iyer's head, as he puts it, is always Graham Greene. And it is Greene's fights with faith, his reservations about innocence, his generous spirit, that are really inspiring. In the course of five episodes and from various destinations the author describes his fascination for the great man..

[Vaidya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have no clue why I liked this book. But I did.
A fair bit did not make any sense, but it was a beautiful fair bit, like the rest of the book.
Easily one of the best books by Iyer. (Am a bit surprised he still holds an Indian passport though.)
I want to read more Greene though. I stopped after The End of the Affair and Brighton Rock.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this, but that's because Graham Greene is the man within my head, too. If you're not already a Greene aficionado, I'm not sure how much you'll get out of this, but if you are, you'll love it (even if some of Iyer's musings are a little cryptic). It has lots of fun aha! moments ("Oh, that's why I love Graham Greene..."), and is also a nice advertisement for how literature can help you learn more about yourself.

[Literary Review The · Rating 5 out of 5]

By Franklin Freeman

For The Literary Review
Spring 2012 "Encyclopedia Britannica"


I have traveled to Greeneland—the land so-called to describe the world Graham
Greene wrote of—at least thirteen times, but lately I have been more interested in
reading travel books about this place than in going there. Perhaps this is because I
read a lot of his books when I was younger and have tended to agree with Martin
Amis that Greene is a writer you think profound when young but, when older,
you’re not so sure the seeming profundities weren’t platitudes.
Not that I entirely rejected a once-beloved writer—even after I had hurled his
first novel, The Man Within, across the room when I finished it from revulsion at
the protagonist, and after I had put The Human Factor back on the shelf because it
seemed to me the author was pulling the strings of characters that resembled puppets; even then I bought Getting to Know the General in a used bookstore and was surprised at how much I liked it. I questioned Greene’s politics but was fascinated
by his portrayal of the Panamanian general and his musings about his own creative
methods. That is the only Greene book I have read in the last few years.
On the other hand, lately I have read a quite a few books about Graham
Greene, and now comes Pico Iyer’s The Man Within My Head, a book about literary
inspiration, travel, family, fathers and sons, and the silences of both faith and doubt.
“Who are these figures who take residence inside our heads, to the point where we
can feel them shivering inside us even when we want to ‘be ourselves’?” Iyer asks.
His book is a meditation cum memoir about that phenomenon.
Iyer would have liked to have known Greene personally but never tried to meet
him; he was afraid of the let-down that might ensue if he did. “Besides,” he writes,
“it was Greene himself who had taught me how the author we meet can never, by
definition, be quite the one we love; as soon as he’s meeting us, he’s looking away
from his desk, putting on a public face to greet the world.”
But in this book Iyer does try to know more deeply this writer who has
haunted him all his adult life, a writer whose books he reads over and over until
the pages become detached from the bindings. And as he explores what he knows
about Greene’s life and works, he also muses about his own father, who moved from
India to England and then from England to southern California, where the physical
and spiritual landscapes were prone to wildfires, and where his father—a popular
philosophy professor, told him—there was “no understanding of evil.” Both Greene
and his father are finally unknowable to Iyer—though he knows both better than
when he started the book—and he is left with more questions than answers. That,
however, is part of the value he sees in reading Greene, who asks questions more
than answers them, not from philosophical laziness but because of searing honesty.
As Iyer writes in the first section of the book, “Ghosts” (the other two sections
are entitled, respectively, “Gods” and “Fathers”):

Graham Greene the novelist appeals to some of us, I think—even challenges our
sense of who we are—in part because he is so acutely sensitive to all the ways we
can fail to understand one another, even those people closest to ourselves; he
knew his characters, he wrote in his memoirs, better than he knew anyone in
real life. He becomes the caretaker of that part of us that feels we are larger and
much harder to contain than even we can get our heads around, and that there is
a mystery, fundamental and unanswerable, in ourselves as in the world around
us, which is in fact a part of what gives life its sense of hauntedness. It’s the best
side of us, in his books—our conscience, our sense of sympathy, our feeling for
another’s pain—that causes us our deepest grief. And God, if He even exists, is
less a source of solace than a hound of Heaven, always on our path.

Greene, then, for Iyer, challenges us constantly—one of the people who knew
him said the one word that described him best was “difficult.” An example is when
he received the Hamburg Shakespeare prize and in his acceptance speech, entitled
“The Virtue of Disloyalty,” he castigated the Bard for abandoning his Catholic faith
then praised the poet Robert Southwell for staying true to his and becoming a martyr. To the German audience he said,

Dietrich Bonhoeffer chose to be hanged like our English poet Southwell. He is a greater hero for the writer than Shakespeare. Perhaps the deepest tragedy Shakespeare lived was his own: the blind eye exchanged for the coat of arms,
the prudent tongue for the friendships at Court and the great house at Stratford.

He challenged both the complacent religious people, anyone in authority, and
America, whom he saw as a frequent bully, but also those who denied all mystery.
Iyer writes, “It wasn’t faith that was the escape, he always maintained, but atheism.”
Even so, Iyer’s admiration is not blind. He devotes one chapter to the things
he dislikes about Greene’s work, especially the travel books, which he calls “a nearperfect example of how not to write or think about travel.”

Often, as the years went on, I told myself I’d had enough of Greene. I never wanted to hear another word from him or about him. I had no interest in encountering again his close readings of The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies or reading how The
Roly-Poly Pudding, by Beatrix Potter, is a “masterpiece,” by an author comparable
to Henry James.

That is the flip side to Greene’s “difficult” personality, that he sometimes chose to
be perverse or to shock just for the sake of shocking, to be a bad boy, not to mention
his many infidelities, to both wives and mistresses.
Is it time, then, to pack one or two travel books and return to Greene-land to
be entertained and challenged? But what about how I used to feel about Greene, that
his profundities were, at bottom, platitudes? Why would I want to go back? Because
Iyer’s book is one of those books you pick up, read the first page or two and know
you will finish before you pick up another—an accomplishment if you are someone
who reads many books concurrently.
This was because of the quality of the writing, the beauty and simplicity of
the descriptions (“great shafts of light broke through the swollen clouds as if to
announce some heavenly arrival”), the perceptiveness about the inner life, and the
grappling with a fellow writer for whom I have shared a fascination, though not as
deep as Iyer’s. He has convinced me that Greene’s heterodoxy, in religion and literary criticism, sprang from a sincere search for truth. Iyer’s multilayered meditation
on Greene’s desire “to see every situation in the round,” as well as his insistence
on “the importance of never mocking innocence too readily,” is enough to get me
traveling in Greene-land again.


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[Frederick · Rating 4 out of 5]

[I have expanded this review a little. I was falling asleep while writing it last night. I'm awake now; awake enough to add some bits at the end, after a row of asterisks.]
The first three words of the title of this book form the entire title of Graham Greene's first published novel. Noticing THE MAN WITHIN MY HEAD on the shelf at my local library, I instantly thought of THE MAN WITHIN, and took it down off the shelf. I was surprised and delighted to see an image of Graham Greene on the cover, because THE MAN WITHIN is not a very well-known book. I really hadn't expected THE MAN WITHIN MY HEAD to be a reference to THE MAN WITHIN.
Last year (2018) I read every single novel Graham Greene ever published. There were twenty, I think. I had not been aware that Pico Iyer, in 2012, had written this book, which is a memoir of the reading life.
Iyer details the ways in which the writings of Graham Greene have affected him since he began reading him as a teen. For the first third of the book I found myself not quite seeing how it was Greene's literary art affected Iyer's life, but as the stories of Iyer's travels as a reporter built, I found that his approach is as good a way of showing Greene's allure as any. Greene had me in thrall for almost a year. (Halfway through 2019 I decided my next stunt would be to read every short story Greene ever wrote. There is a desire to read as much of him as you can. I have since read all of Herman Melville's novels, but as revelatory as that has been for me, there's something about Greene which positively demands this.)
I'm writing this late at night. I have work tomorrow, so I'll make a few quick points. Chapter 12, which deals mainly with Pico Iyer's British prep school, is where this book is at its strongest. Iyer's parents, based in Santa Barbara, California, gave him permission to attend a boarding school in England. Iyer contrasts his school experience in England with the life he led with his parents, leading lights in California's intellectual circles. What Pico Iyer does is convincingly portray English boarding school life as a positive thing. In short, he turns Orwell's "Such, Such Were The Joys" on its head. Iyer felt lost in the idealistic academic world his parents embraced in California. The way this ties in with Graham Greene is that Greene, a quintessential Englishman, a son of a headmaster, spent his life fleeing that part of English life while also reviling American liberals.
Pico Iyer, then, knows the America Greene dreaded and avoided, and he knows the Britain Greene kept trying to escape and never could. Iyer is drawn to Japan; neither Britain nor America has a permanent hold on him. The Greene work he mentions most often is THE QUIET AMERICAN. There's not a single mention of BRIGHTON ROCK here. BRIGHTON ROCK is almost always mentioned in studies of Graham Greene. THE QUIET AMERICAN contrasts an old British imperialist with a young American imperialist. Pico Iyer has one foot in America and one foot in Britain. The Graham Greene he feels kinship with is the one who escaped Britain and avoided America.
It is a very engaging memoir and is a testament to the palpable effect the written word (and therefore those who put those words to paper) can have on our lives.
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I'm adding a little more here:
I think your enjoyment of THE MAN WITHIN MY HEAD will be enhanced if you have read at least two or three of Graham Greene's novels. I am not certain what I would have made of the literary criticism in this book if I had not been steeped in Greene. Reflecting, a day after writing my late-night review (it being my current practice to write my Goodreads reviews the minute I finish the book I'm reading), I realize that the parts I find most effective in this book are those which deal with Pico Iyer's sense of kinship with Greene. A great deal of this book is about their parallel lives. They travel to remote places as writers; they have thrive on being outsiders; they are extremely privileged insiders. When Iyer describes his own life without reflecting on Greene, he is compelling: His time in boarding school is rather unlike what Greene experienced, especially because he LIKED it. Iyer would be the first to say that Greene's boarding school experience was marred by the fact that Greene's father was the headmaster. Iyer got as far away from his own parents as possible in order to attend boarding school. I can't imagine 98 per cent of those who attend boarding school wanted to do it. Iyer asked his parents if he could, and they allowed him to fly from California to Britain in order to do it. He left the lap of liberaldom in order to sink himself into a rigid environment. But he shares, with Greene, the bond with those who went to boarding school with him. He runs into them over the years. This is where he is most like Greene. But when Iyer goes into Greene's mind (as opposed to in the thoughts Greene expresses in published writing), he tends toward hero-worship. Again, Iyer would acknowledge this. But there are moments when he simply ignores Greene's terrible behavior. His acts of generosity are rather like those which other enormously successful people with tremendous flaws commit: Elvis bought brand new cars for total strangers. Frank Sinatra paid all the medical bills for various close friends. But Elvis also went to Nixon's White House one morning, unannounced, to tell him John Lennon was Nixon's mortal enemy, and Nixon hounded Lennon with FBI men for the rest of his presidency. Frank Sinatra was a great singer and an impossible bully. Greene's personal traits are often alarming. He is no less an artist for them. But there is a bit of Pinky in him. Pinky is the sociopathic adolescent in one of Greene's most influential novels, BRIGHTON ROCK. Pico Iyer focuses on Greene, the world traveler. I like that Greene best as well. That's the Greene of the Thomas Cook itinerary, who can capture all of man's follies with a few pithy sentences about a lady walking a dog in in a hotel lobby. But there's a switchblade-carrying Greene who can't be ignored. And we know now what's happened to Thomas Cook.

[Thomas Cooney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full disclosure: By the time this book was published I had become friends with Iyer and had shared with him many of my notions of Graham Greene and how he has existed in my own head and heart for so long. At one point Iyer was considering editing a collection of essays by writers discussing Greene. It seems that by the turn into the 21st Century most writers (note not critics but those who actually WRITE) have pointed to Greene as the greatest of the 20th Century. To quote another brilliant writer, Lynn Freed: "We all cut our teeth on Greene."

However, as time went on it became clear that Iyer would end up with a book over 900 pages long, and so he quit the idea of editing an anthology and decided to go inward, using at times (I surmise) the passion evident in all of the notes passed onto him by all of us Greene supplicants, to be the fuel of this book (the engine of course being Iyer's relationship with his own father).

As a memoir between father and son the book is elegant and heartfelt and moving; as a memoir between greatest traveler of the 20th century and greatest traveler of the 21st century, it is informing, blindingly sharp, and thoroughly engaging.

[Arvind Radhakrishnan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A tad disappointing.I have been hugely impressed with Pico Iyer's abilities.His books and reviews (especially on japanese literature) have struck me as being very insightful and original. However in this book he seems to fall short on various counts.He seems unable to convey the subtle nuances present in Graham Greene's works.His attempt to interweave his own life story with the works of Greene is very commendable.That said,I feel he fails to go beyond a superficial reading of Greene's great novels (especially 'The Power and the Glory','The Quiet American' and 'The End of the Affair').Greene is a complex writer whose works are layered with meanings and cannot be classified easily.He eludes literary labels. I would desist from making disparaging remarks on Pico's prodigious talent.Just feel that Greene deserved better.

[Barksdale Penick · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you have read most of Graham Green, you will enjoy this book for the observations about those books that are mixed in to this reminiscence of a man who reads them over and over again. I found the author's observations about his own life less interesting than those about Graham Greene. Sort of a My Life With Julia kind of a tale, where we have a structure that tells us much about one famous person with a lesser figure, the author, also telling about himself. It actually gives a good biography of Greene as well. But it isn't for everyone

[Ananta Pathak · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this even amidst clutter of classroom noises and boring lectures of stern professor . in our life , even knowingly or unknowingly , we tend to mould our deeds according to the writings of our literary heroes. they are not just a writer for us, they are friend for us with whom we share our life. for pico iyer , that writer is Graham Greene . he is the man who has shaped his life like no one else. the book is a guide to the minds of both Greene and iyer , more so because of incredible writing by the author.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Iyer is has some genuinely interesting insights into Greene and his work, but for some reason his style becomes painfully awkward when he writes about himself. He often reverts to the worst sort of memoir-prose that is characterized by the overwritten banal observation of the why-use-one-adjective-when-two-will-do school. He somewhat redeems himself with the last twenty pages or so.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could have written this book. I SHOULD have written this book. I have an enormous collection of Graham Greene's first editions that I have collected for the past 30 years. I carry him around in my head in almost exactly the same way that Pico Iyer does. Not everyone will like this kind of interior writing, but I loved it. Of course, I think that Pico Iyer is one of our best writers today.

[Chaitrali Joshi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yeah I gave up this book halfway. One because I have never read Greene so I have no context. Second because even if I wanted to, he just gave away half the books. Three, I felt he had some interesting travel stories which never started even halfway through the book. The stars are for the writing, which is pretty good. Hopefully I can find a better book by him somewhere ahead.

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

The front half is highly insightful and engaging. But...as the book continues, Iyer tends to focus on his himself much more than Greene and the prose becomes relatively flat and boring.

[Gopal MS · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost an autobiography.
Also Graham Greene's biography.
and the author's father's biography.
This is a travel book like no other.

[Pascale · Rating 3 out of 5]

A rambling meditation on life with the author's fascination with Graham Greene as its connecting thread. Iyer never met Greene, having made his sole attempt at getting in touch with him when Greene was already too old to waste time on getting to know new admirers. Yet Iyer feels great affection for the man and considers him a friend as well as a kindred spirit. It's a dynamic I've experienced myself and so I was very interested in reading what Iyer had to say about it. What I found a little disappointing is that he always circled back to "The Quiet American" and failed to mention some of Greene's other important books, but then again this never set out to be an academic parsing of Greene's œuvre. Along the way we get to learn quite a bit about Iyer's larger-than-life father, an Indian man from a poor background who managed to get one scholarship after another and ended up working for a think-tank in California. While Iyer is aware of his father's achievements there is a palpable sense that he was embarrassed by Iyer Senior's garrulousness and it's quite obvious the 2 men weren't close. Iyer made the bold choice to return to England for his education after his parents relocated to California. Not every little boy in the twentieth century would choose boarding school an ocean away from his parents. Iyer had a typical public school education in Britain and that's one of the things he has in common with Graham Greene.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3064566.html

I was very much into Graham Greene in my late teens and early twenties, and have read very little of him since. I hadn’t previously heard of Pico Iyer at all, but like his father before him he is a cultural commentator - in fact, a travel writer, who has been a Graham Greene fan since his youth and has also had the opportunity to retrace a lot of Greene’s footsteps in various countries. Iyer is much more into Greene than I ever was, but I appreciate the depth and sincerity of his fannish attachment, and also his honesty in questioning the extent to which he has allowed his imagined Greene to take over the mentor role that his real father could or should have occupied. There’s a lot here about engagement and betrayal, participation and observation, loyalty and betrayal, fascination and destruction, and yet it is quite a short book. Very thought-provoking.

[Clivemichael · Rating 4 out of 5]

well written narrative with personal accounts and much reflective examinations

[Sumit Bhagat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything that Pico Iyer says, writes or does has a meditative quality about it. I still remember my first exposure to his writing when I came across an article on the virtues of punctuation titled ‘In Praise of the Humble Comma’, in the Time magazine. It is a breathtaking piece, quite literally so, and I have lost track of the number of times I have shared it with my friends, often, for the lack of a better memory, multiple times with the same friend.

I chanced upon ‘The Man Within My Head’ through a chain of events. A tweet by the Bangalore Lit Fest led to a wonderful chat session between Samanth Subramanian and Pico Iyer, and then a subsequent blog post by Samanth highlighting the session led to me this book. Having held Pico Iyer in ridiculously high regard despite having read so little of him, I was prepared to be disappointed. Thankfully, I ended up being overwhelmed.

The Man Within My Head is a very atypical book. It is a memoir but not quite one, a travel book but only in parts, a biography of Graham Greene that doesn’t read like it at all and a philosophy book if you care to follow Pico into the dark depths of his, and consequently into that of Graham Greene’s, mind.

There are several scintillating parts in the book. One of my favorites is the point at which Pico ruminates about how writing turns friends into strangers, and strangers into friends.

“…the man who bares a part of his soul on the page soon finds that his friends are treating him as a stranger, bewildered by this other self that they have met in his book. Meanwhile, many a stranger is considering him a friend, convinced that he knows this man he’s read, even if he’s never met him. The paradox of reading is that you draw closer, to some other creature’s voice within you than to the people who surround you (with their surfaces) every day.”

Like most of Pico’s work, at 200 odd pages, it is an incredibly short read, but do not let the brevity of the book fool you into the demands it makes of you. The writing is dense and extremely profound. Another aspect of the book that I thoroughly enjoyed was how Pico, much like Greene, does not seem to belong anywhere or rather seems to belong everywhere depending on which way you look at it. Born to Indian parents in Oxford and educated both in the UK and the US, Pico has lived a better part of his life in Japan. He exists in, and indirectly talks about, those liminal spaces (Samanth & Pico talk at length about this in their chat), where one is neither an insider nor an outsider — a vantage point both exciting and terrifying at the same time.

The book provides enormous food for thought as to the homes we inhabit inside of us and those outside of us, the fathers we are given and the fathers we choose and the darkness within the light and the light surrounding the dark spaces within us. If you’re someone who treasures memoirs, travel writing or philosophy, it is definitely worth a slow, savory read.

“…home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down.”

[Uwe Hook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pico Iyer's latest book is not exactly a memoir, not quite a literary biography--or an homage--to Graham Greene, and certainly not a book of travels. But it is, of course, something of all of those things, a hybrid creature that carries the reader along, thanks to Iyer's usual facile way with words. It is Iyer's most enjoyable book I've read, and not surprisingly, it's his most personal.

He opens the book during a visit to La Paz, Bolivia, and I can picture being back there myself, along the main streets with cholas selling M&Ms and lottery tickets, bowler hats perched on their heads. I picture a simple hotel room--and that's where Iyer is: sitting at a desk thinking about Graham Greene and writing, always writing or reading. When he was at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge in February 2012, Iyer said he had been working on this book for more than eight years, and had accumulated more than 2,700 pages in drafts: the words kept spilling out of him. (Happily, he trimmed it down to its current 238 pages.)

The man within his head is Graham Greene. Like Iyer, Greene was a bit too popular to be admitted into the literary establishment, and a man who was always an outsider, more by choice than anything else. Greene spent many years toward the end of his life in a small apartment in the Antibes, far smaller and almost hidden compared to his neighbor, Somerset Maugham, not too far a way in an impressive mansion. Iyer, too, willfully sets himself apart: he's lived for years in a small two-room apartment outside of Kyoto.

Iyer recounts his childhood: born to Indian parents, initially growing up in Oxford; a move to California in the 1960s, where his father teaches and accumulates acolytes; traditional boarding school back in England; always split between worlds. Much like Graham Greene, who never quite felt at home anywhere, and whose characters had the same experience of, well, not exactly alienation, but a clear sense of being apart. Iyer returns often to Greene's The Quiet American, and its prescient understanding of how the British and Americans are swapping not just positions of dominance in the world but also those of certainty and doubt. Iyer travels to Vietnam, and we see how the types Greene writes about linger on still. (Readers would probably get more out of this book if they are familiar with the Greene originals; maybe it will inspire me to read him again.)

"A man within your head whispers his secrets and fears to you, and it can go right to your core," Iyer writes. For much of Iyer's life, that man is Greene, but he comes to realize there's another man he really barely knows who has also taken up residence in his head: his father, with whom he's never been very close. It's that old inheritance: we are our father's sons, even if we'd prefer to think that our literary heroes are our pole stars. In the book, Iyer slowly learns these lessons, and he tells the story with ease.

[Christian Blum · Rating 3 out of 5]

I heard about this book through the New York Time Book Review. An admirer of Pico Iyer, I expected it to be a work of fiction. Instead, it was a great biographical study of the British writer Graham Greene. I found his paternal treatment of Graham extraordinary. I also thoroughly enjoyed an aspect that most readers encounter but rarely vocalize--how writers we enjoy often exist as voices in our head. They have a rare ability to take experiences before we ever encounter them and contextualize them. More so, these writers have an ability to help us understand these experiences afterward since they often view the world through a verisimilitude prism. I also enjoyed the life lessons and perspectives which Iyer offers based on his experiences as well as that he learned through Greene.

I did have to give this text a lower rating, though then you may expect given the first paragraph. I wish Iyer would have provided additional context to the novels he cited regularly in the text. I often found myself lost, especially at the beginning. Perhaps that is because I expected a work of fiction and found myself within a biography instead. Still, some additional background info would have helped. About 1/4 of the way through, I thought perhaps Iyer would inspire me to read Greene... yet that never quite happened.

For scholars of Graham Greene, I am certain his unique treatment of the author and his writings will be enlightening and entertaining. I suspect readers interested in biographies would find enjoyment as well. For those looking for a Pico Iyer work of fiction, I don't think this will be for you unless you are interested in a metacognitive exploration of the structure of Iyer as a writer and his approach to the writing process, as well as an explanation for the subjects he chooses to write about as well as the character archetypes and plots common among his texts.

[Mark Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came across Pico Iyer while reading and reviewing Ronald Wright’s Time Among the Maya, published by ELAND Press, as he wrote the introduction. His overview was insightful and concise, and I learned he’d written over 50 such openings. Initial research revealed that he was a revered travel writer and that he’d written a book about his fascination with one of my favorite writers, Graham Greene.

The book is a meditation about Graham, as well as the author. Greene is the virtual man in Iyer’s head, raising the question, what causes a particular writer to resonate in our souls? I’d grappled with this question regarding the iconic writer Moritz Thomsen. I explored my fascination with his life and writing in an essay in which I followed him on a trip from the Pacific coast of Ecuador to the deepest reaches of the Amazon River in Brazil entitled, “The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey of Two Writers.”

A Los Angeles Review of Books provides the most lyrical description of this book, “Part memoir, part literary excavation, part travelogue, and existential inquiry, it’s a story about finding one’s voice as a writer and one’s place in the world (or lack of place).”

In The Man Within My Head, Pico Iyer unravels the mysterious closeness he has always felt with the English writer Graham Greene; he examines Greene’s obsessions and his elusiveness and traces some of his mysterious influences. Iyer begins by following Greene’s trail from his first novel, The Man Within, to such later classics as The Quiet American and begins to unpack all he has in common with Greene: an English public school education, a lifelong restlessness, and refusal to make a home anywhere, a fascination with the complications of faith. The deeper Iyer plunges into their haunted kinship, the more he begins to wonder whether the man within his head is not Greene, but his father or perhaps some more shadowy aspect of himself.
The author would follow Greene’s footsteps across the globe from Cuba to Sri Lanka, including stopovers to the heights of Bolivia. After high school, the author “bumped across Central and South America on buses, taking in the tough and unaccountable world that school had trained us for….” It was Bolivia that he remembered twenty years later, as I also did, since I’d made a similar trek, which included Bolivia “..the bowler-hatted women laboring up the steep streets and near the cathedral, unsold goods slung over their shoulders; the billowing, snow-white clouds that looked fantastical in skies as sharp as those of Lhasa; the square-headed statues in the Altiplano, barely excavated in centuries.”
While reading the book, I learned that the author ran into some of my favorite writers who knew Greene, although in one case, Iyer only referred to him as “my friend Paul…” with whom he sipped tea after lunch on “an expansive estate in Hawaii” where geese clucked along the path. In the bungalow “where Paul wrote, fierce tribal masks from Angola and the Pacific Islands grinned down unnervingly.” He goes on to reveal that Greene had offered words of public praise for Paul’s first travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar, “perhaps because he saw strong echoes in it of his early book and first commercial success, Stamboul Train….”
In a conversation between Paul and Graham Greene about infidelity, Paul says he had an image of Green as a “power figure, a Shaman” and revealed some interesting characteristics of Greene, “…he didn’t type, he didn’t drive, he couldn’t boil an egg.”
The author provided one final piece of information that confirmed my suspicion that his friend was Paul Theroux with a quote that tied my favorite authors, Theroux, Greene, and Moritz Thomsen. The connection was to one of Theroux’s novels, Picture Palace, in which an imaginary Maud Pratt is talking to an aging Graham Greene:
“I’m going to wind it up. Call it a day.”
“Whatever for?”
“I’m too old to travel, for one thing.”
“Which Frenchman said, ‘Travel is the saddest of the pleasures?’”
“It gave me eyes.”
This last quote inspired the title of Moritz Thomsen’s My Saddest Pleasure. (Theroux met Thomsen in Ecuador twice in the late seventies and considered him a friend). And that would inspire the title for my most recent book, My Saddest Pleasures: 50 Years on the Road, which contained my travel “horror stories.”
For Iyer, Greene was his adopted father, although the two never met. Iyer didn’t need Green’s manuscripts or letters in research libraries; “…I made no conscious effort to track down those who’d known him. He lived vividly enough inside me, in some more shadowy place….” The author sums up his virtual relationship with Greene in the book’s last paragraph as follows, “…But with Greene, there’d be no need of words at all. He knew me better than I did myself. I knew him better than I knew Louis or my father or many of the people closest to me, when it came to his secrets, his sins, his most intimate needs….” All of these recall Donna Seaman’s words: “A writer is a palmist, reading the lines of the world.”

The Author: Pico Iyer was born in Oxford, England--to parents from India--raised in California, and educated at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard. Since 1987, he has been based in Western Japan, traveling everywhere from Bhutan to Easter Island, North Korea, to Los Angeles airport. Apart from the two novels and ten works of non-fiction he has published, he has written introductions to more than fifty other books, screenplays, librettos, and many liner notes for Leonard Cohen. He regularly speaks everywhere, from West Point to Davos and Shanghai to Bogota, and between 2013 and 2016, he delivered three talks for TED.com.

Product details
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0050DIWD4
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage (January 3, 2012)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 3, 2012
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 2620 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 255 pages
• Best Sellers Rank: #632,497 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
o #35 in Literary Travel
o #202 in Literary & Religious Travel Guides
o #211 in Fatherhood (Kindle Store)

The Reviewer

Mark Walker was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala and spent over forty years helping disadvantaged people in the developing world.
He’s a contributing writer for The Authors Show, Wanderlust Journal, Revue Magazine, and the Literary Traveler. His column, “The Million Mile Walker Review: What We’re Reading and Why,” is part of the Arizona Authors Association newsletter. His first book is Different Latitudes: My Life of the Peace Corps and Beyond. His latest book, My Saddest Pleasures: 50 Years on the Road, is now available on Cyberwit.net. His wife and three children were born in Guatemala. You can find over 65 book reviews and 25 of his articles at www.MillionMileWalker.com.