Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel

by Shahnaz Habib

A playful personal and cultural history of travel from a postcolonial, person-of-color perspective, Airplane Mode asks: what does it mean to be a joyous traveler when we live in the ruins of colonialism, capitalism and climate change?

For Shahnaz Habib, an Indian Muslim woman, travel has always been a complicated pleasure. Yet, journeys at home and abroad have profoundly shaped her life. In this inquiring and surprising debut, Habib traces a history of travel from pilgrimages to empires to safaris, taking on colonialist modes of thinking about travel and asking who gets to travel and who gets to write about it.

Threaded through the book are inviting and playful analyses of obvious and not-so-obvious travel artifacts: passports, carousels, bougainvilleas, guidebooks, expressways, the idea of wanderlust. Together, they tell a subversive history of travel as a Euro-American mode of consumerism—but as any traveler knows, travel is more than that. As an immigrant whose loved ones live across continents, Habib takes a deeply curious and joyful look at a troubled and beloved activity.

Genres: Nonfiction, Travel, History, Memoir, Audiobook, Essays, Book Club

288 pages, Hardcover

First published December 5, 2023

Reviews

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Habib starts her fantastic essay collection in Turkey, where people are surprised to hear where she is from:

"Where are you from?" Mehmet asked me the first time we met.
"Hindistan," I said, using the Turkish word for India.
"But you don't live there?"
"How do you know?"
"Because you are traveling. Only Americans, British, Australians, and Japanese travel."
...He was not mocking me. Brown people like him and me did not fit the stereotype of tourist.

This chance encounter comes around several times in the book through related questions: are guidebooks to foreign destinations available in your language? are you able to secure a passport or visa to travel where you want to go? Habib, a native Malayalam speaker from Kerala, notes that there is no market for guidebooks in Malayalam, and many other regions of the world, and therefore none are available. She digs into the history of the guidebook as a tool, who uses them, and their European roots.

Habib's essay on passports was among my favorite, giving the history of the document itself and its relatively recent inception, alongside her struggles to secure visas while using her Indian passport.

After India secured its independence from the United Kingdom, for two decades from 1947 to 1967, the newly independent Indian state would provide passports only to those citizens it deemed capable of representing India abroad... based on the prevailing notions of caste and class.

Her own visa application to go to France is delayed so long that she must cancel her non-refundable trip plans. All of this while her American husband did not have to go through any of the same process.

Other topics covered: roadtripping, traveling with elders and small children, ancient and medieval travel and "first to reach" monikers, wanderlust from its Romantic origins to Instagram, Habib's father's armchair travel and reading, nature vs urban travel, ships and trains first for imperialism and then for travel, developing countries [deemed by Habib as "Third World" - and she writes an engaging/convincing afterword about her specific word choice here!] competition for tourists' dollars, women's safety when traveling, and uniquely and interestingly enough a brief history of the carousel and how it is a metaphor for modern travel.

HOORAH to a wonderful SELECTED BIBIOGRAPHY at the end! I wrote down several titles. Really happy that was included.

So, an "irreverent" history of travel as the book's subtitle notes? Not quite - a strange editorial decision for the subtitle. But a personal, extremely interesting and well-researched book on travel and travel-related marginalia? Most definitely. Really enjoyed this one!


Related reading (and books I've loved and reviewed!):
On a Truck Alone, to McMahon by Nabaneeta Dev Sen, translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha
Travelling While Black: Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move by Nanjala Nyabola

[BookOfCinz · Rating 4 out of 5]

The perfect book for anyone who loves to travel and has always been curious about the history of travel… hilarious, informative and filled with adventures!

I love books about travelling, but more importantly I love a memorable memoir, filled with history and personal experiences and that is exactly what you will find when you read Airplane Mode The book begs the question, “what does it mean to be a joyous traveler when we live in the ruins of colonialism, capitalism and climate change?”

We follow the author, an Indian Muslim woman as she explores various countries, but most importantly try to wrestle with her place in the world. There are so many stand out moments in this book but the ones that I loved reading about was:

- Karl Baedeker, the man who first popularized tourist guidebooks, died as a result of being overworked at the age of 58.

- In 2003, Jay Garner used Lonely Planet guide to draw up a list of historical sites that should be secure while dropping 29,199 bombs on Iraq.

- We get a deep history of travel, the first person to travel, why passports were invented, it’s main purpose and how that changed over time.

- Sandwiches were supposedly invented in 1762 just in tome for mountain hikes and beach picnics.

One thing the author captured well, was this feeling of loneliness that engulfs you when you travel for long. Also, the pressure of being called brave just for getting on a plane. I also did not know Queen of Sheba was the first traveller in world history.

Overall, if you love history, if you love travelling, this is the perfect read.

[laurel [the suspected bibliophile] · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to be curious and intrepid; instead, I am confused and lonely.

Shahnaz Habib muses on travel and its impacts on the world and on each other, and what travel means for a woman of color with a Third World (her phrase, not mine) passport.

Ugh this book! So, so good. I first encountered Habib while listening to "Can you travel the world—ethically?" on Code Switch where she guest starred. She was so fucking amazing that I had to read her book, and I knew I was not going to be disappointed from the very first sentence.

Airplane Mode has a little of everything, and a little deep dive and sideway tumbles into a little of everything (passports, flaneuring, imperialism, natural history, carnival carousels, expressways and racism, consumption, ecosystems and climate crisis, cotton, sugar, bus ride meditation, comedy routines, etc.), with sharp commentary and gorgeous writing.

There's also the insight that while travel is fantastic, so much of white people travel is devoted to seeing things instead of people, of viewing the locals as set dressing, of turning their ventures into something that defines themselves and betters themselves as people because of where they have been and what they have seen (instead of say, who they have interacted with), and that the language of travel is often couched in terms of conquest and self-centering. Of labeling yourself as "traveler" instead of "tourist," elevating yourself above the masses.

And there are also stories of the people she meets on her own travels to places. Her own experiences and her own frustrations with the entire process of traveling that are so often wiped away in favor the glamour and spectacle.

Travel has been sold to us as the ultimate horizon-expanding, mind-broadening, self-improvement experience.

Anywho. I've known a couple of people who have made traveling as their default personality, and they are exhausting (mainly because of the really insulting point of view that not traveling is inherently lesser and worldly). This book was a lovely antidote to that mindset.

I highlighted so many passages and added so much nonfiction to my tbr that it isn't even funny anymore.

Some highlights that really stood out to me:

How intrepid you are as a traveler depends, at least on partially, on how entitled you feel to tralve. On whether there's an army base nearby with soldiers from your country. On whether guidebooks are written to ease your path through the world.

But reading is not simply a fat-free, gluten-free version of travel. Reading the world is, for the provincial, an act of self-preservation.

A woman's right to loiter is a crucial building block for an equitable city.

Through its supposedly neutral pursuit of scientific knowledge, natural history managed to reinforce the authority of European surveillance and appropriation of resources.

In other words, discovery equaled converting local knowledge into European discourse.

There are parallels here to the way the Industrial Revolution in England made tourism necessary and possible. But did that generation of tourists live with a quietly ticking clock counting the days down to the final glacier? The way we seek out nature now is tinged with mourning and alarm, and every time I looked out at the thick forests that covered the mountains in Wayanad, I felt the sad dilemma of being human in the twenty-first century.

From Uluru to the Grand Canyond to Muthanga, the tourist walks freely through lands that Indigenous people have been evicted from. This is the superpower of tourism: it can masquerade as a public good while legitimizing land-grabbing.

So can a person travel ethically?

In short, it's very, very complicated. In short, no.

[Brad Benson (moving to StoryGraph) · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am a big traveler and take that fortune and responsibility very seriously; I was disappointed in this book. It's less focused on travel, and more so on historical dynamics (admittedly problematic) that have brought travel to where it is today...

...but, inconsistently --and conveniently ignorant of moments of the author's own privilege and with use of broad generalizations that reinforce her already-established opinion; as an example: she laments the replacement of local populations as a result of globalization... from a converted indigenous-to-farm-to-tourism chalet. She condemns ridiculing busloads of Chinese tourists (agree), but just pages later ridicules American tourists ordering Thai food in Barcelona --failing to recognize this embedded community of immigrants (and, FWIW, if you haven't sampled seemingly-familiar immigrant food through the lens of a foreign country, I highly recommend it). I think what sat least well with me was her repeated practice of assuming and presenting intent, not just with people but including one moment after seeing wild elephants when she assuredly stated that any "domesticated" version merely slogs through life.

I fundamentally agree that classism, sexism, racism, homophobia, et. al. are certainly problems that are systemically embedded within the act of travel, and actively work to identify and counter these, but this book description mis-represented it's content. A few fun anecdotes, but not enough to counteract the overall sentiment.

[Audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thought provoking read about the origins of travel and how it intersects with class, race and colonialism. Loved the term, pseudiscovery, and how it centers the white experience in "foreign" lands. Both personal and informative, Habib interweaves her life experience with her own migration and travel, with things that aren't often thought about: how travel became a thing, the origins of passports, and how discovery is in the eyes of the beholder. While this it subtitled as irreverent, it's anything but.

I received an arc from the publisher but all opinions are my own.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are a lot of reflections I’ve never considered before that are important to understanding the world better.

[Ugvaja Maks · Rating 5 out of 5]

The audiobook, “Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel” by Shahnaz Habib , is now available for purchase to listen to on the go. This audiobook tells the colorful and rich history of travel from ancient pilgrimages to the modern era's travel of cross-continent distances. Habib's tale is both insightful and sharp, bringing an unexpected view to how travel influenced societies and cultures over time. From the rapid rise of commercial airlines to the emergence of lower-cost travel, “Airplane Mode” investigates the changes, characters, and revolutions that have made travel a fixture of the global ebb and flow.

This auidobook is more than just words – the warmth with which the narrator speaks the words really allows you to experience the comical, and historical content. For each chapter is a combination of history and entertainment, the book “Airplane Mode” delivers to those who love adventure, history, cultural history, and the world. This book is a successful benefit of the education of travel, complete with full-on entertainment you can put on full blast. This audiobook is an amazing and historically reverent audiobook that explores the joy and frustration of travel globally.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Post-pandemic, many people have been eager to travel and to indulge in wanderlust, with advertising and media feeding that desire to see other places. But as Habib points out in this thoughtful and often pointed history of travel, the conditions of your travel plans will vary based on the color of your passport and the color of your skin (and possibly your gender). As a woman of color with family scattered around the world, Habib knows all too well the hurdles that people with Third World passports (yes, she uses the term Third World and explains why) must go through in order to travel from one country to another, and she also knows that visiting a new place more likely calls for caution rather than adventure.

Habib's research into the history of travel reveals how much the modern tourism industry is based on European and American consumerism, dating back to the era of colonialism and the age of "discovery" (which she refers to as "pseudiscovery"). She also unravels the connections between military presence and tourist development, as seen in the South Pacific following World War II. Throughout the book, she points out how privilege (in whatever way) influences how entitled a person may feel to travel and explore different areas of the world -- but also how that same privilege can block someone from true awareness of the political, social, and cultural life of the places they visit. Habib uses examples from her own travels as a Brown Muslim woman originally from India to shore up her points, and she makes a convincing argument that travel as we now know it still often falls into the old patterns and viewpoints of "discovering" and valuing the world through a Western lens.

Reading this book gave me many opportunities to reconsider not only the history I was taught in school but also my own experiences with traveling and how I feel about travel now. If travel should help us expand our horizons and learn more about the world outside of our own comfort zones, then this book is an essential read for anyone who welcomes the perspective of someone whose experiences are different from our own. 5 stars.

Thank you, Catapult and NetGalley, for providing an eARC of this book. Opinions expressed here are solely my own.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Airplane Mode isn’t really a history of travel, irreverent or otherwise. It’s more of a meditation on the intersection of culture and travel. It’s a pleasant read.

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was FANTASTIC! One of the best books I have read this year.

[Dave Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Its harder than it seems to find a really good book on travel.
An important distinction there. Not a travel book,, but a book on travel. Every once in a while I come across a gem though, and this is the newest addition to that ever growing collection on my shelf.

The irreverent part of the book's title (or subtitle) comes from the author's uncensored approach. She is not afraid to pull the illusioned covers stralight off our wanderlust in order to bring us face to face with the reality of travel as it is, for what is, examing how these realities shape our experiences as travelers. There is an element of this that is meant to shake up our ignorance, which is perhaps more willful than we like to admit. But what makes Habib so accessible is that she also admits and embraces her own willful ignorance. She knows these realities, many of them first hand, and she also knows that the lust for travel, or to travel as a "tourist", has a hold on her. This is a tension more than it is a wrong, and something she has learned to be okay with, and even come to appreciate over the years.

This is her writing debut, and her debut as a travel wrtier, and she manages to write in a way that captures her unique vantage point while expressing and exploring universal ideas and experiences. Part of this uniqueness is her experiences with travel as an immigrant, as a black woman (from India), and equally as a western American living in Brooklyn. So when she writes of what it is to travel with a passport from a Third World Country, she speaks from a particular knowledge of these obstacles. This is an experience that I did not know and understand before, and Habib does a wonderful job of helping to show the limitations that Third World passports can have, the challenges of having to navigate visas, and the many stereotypes and perceptions that have to be faced and sidestepped along the way. And this is just as true for someone living and residing in Brooklyn as an American citizen. This is all wrapped up as well in a fascinating, and quite concise and pointed, history of the passport.

Much of what Habib writes here follows the shape of the world's global history. The history of travel is the history of colonialism. It is shaped by a Western view of what is percieved to be the unconquered world

"While such extreme prejudices have mostly been weeded out of guidebooks, the Baconian understanding of the world as a subject to be observed by an objective European male observer for the benefit of other Eurooran males has continued well past the nineteenth century. Even today, guidebooks tend to assume a young Western backpacker as their Platonic-ideal reader."

One of the more fascinating insights she provides is the way a percieved homogenous culture in the West, built as it is by immigration, travels in order to experience culture. We deem culture to be those things that do not adhere to our own, normalized (by which we typically mean developed) way of life, and thus when we encounter what are deemed to be "less civilized" environments, we feel like we are experiencing the world. It is the thing that feeds wanderlust. At the same time, travel is built on forced global relationships between western power and third world opportunity. Tourism is designed to import western culture into foreign territory, but in a way that effectively hides it within "the cultured experiences" that we, as tourists, seek, however real or illusioned they might be. The reasons this is so successful reaches back to the problematic nature of conquest of course, but in a post-enlightenment world, conquest takes on different language and different forms. It is, in a way, a much more cooperative effort, even if this cooperation is largely a forced byproduct of the modern world. As she writes,

"Western dominance has increasingly reduced the Western imperium to a provincial, monocultural existence. World domination comes at a price. This is the paradox by which European and North American cultures are increasingly losing their cosmopolitanism, because their definition of cosmopolitanism hinges on the universality of their own culture, from its version of coffee to its brand of human rights. On the other hand, the quiet, calculating cosmopolitanism of the non-Western provincial takes care to disguise itself as non-cosmopolitsnism, to camouflage itself like an Amazonian butterfly. It takes on more layers of subversiveness the farther it moves away from the center."

I loved the anecdottal stories she provides regarding her family as well, especially the ones with her father. There is something quintessential and necessary to the way she compares her experiences as a tourist with her dad's experience of being a tourist in his own backyard. She allows these insights to shape the way she travels abroad, suggesting that she no longer feels like she needs to do the things one is supposed to do to be considered a traveller, instead treating her travels abroad as an opportunity to experience the world the same way she would back home. It is not necessary to see the Eiffel Tower in order to see Paris, although she fully admits to giving into this lustful need as well. She can experience Paris by having a picnic in a park with food from an authentic Indian restaurant (part of the reality of the colonized world).

There are so many tidbits and interesting sideroads here (such as her reflections on Around The World in 80 Days, for example, or the way France saved its own culture through a calculated move to build a tourism ecosytstem, or travel's association with war and the ensuing history of the carousel), and Habib writes in such a way as to make her seem like someone you would want to sit down and have a coffee with. But it does have a clear, overarching vision that seeks to reimagine the notion of the "Third World". She dismantles the illusion that history as a singular trajectory, from less developed to the developed world, looking at the way in which we "divide our stories into eras", imagining that "we have come so far from our ancestors", by which we typically mean a better world, whatever we mean by better. She speaks of a "multi-temporal" world, one that is constantly changing, here today, gone tomorrow, circumventing and stripping away our self created and self imposed notions of progress. We exist in a world that is as transient as it is fixed, and as travelers we experience it in the shape that history brings it to us, the same world from as yesterday seen from todays perspective. The questions we ask of this world then, are the same questions we ask of ourselves. However much our wanderlust exists to make us feel like we are seeing beyond ourselves, it remains a phenomenon fueled by the need to esscape this sense that we are in fact stuck in time without any sense of movement. Travel creates these movements for us. Which is precisely why its so easy to miss that we exist as part of a broader movement, be it in a circle rather than a straight line. Its in these broader movements that, even as we enjoy the wanderlust and the tourism, we can, at the same time, recognize the realitie of our world's (and indeed our own) problems and potentials.

If I was to sit down for coffee with Habib, I imagine I probably would challenge some of her perecpetions on religious experience, and certainly her observations about our relationship to nature (she has an uneven chapter that explores the history of travel in nature, our relationship to the mountains, and to climate change). But I would do so wanting to probe her mind on her knowledge of travel and of us as traveleres, and how that fits into the spectrum of our lives as physical, social and spiritual travelers. As it is, this book will suffice as a great conversation partner to that end.

[Brendan Monroe · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Patriotism is the conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it."— George Bernard Shaw

I hear it all the time. "I'm proud to be American," "I'm proud to be Irish," "I'm proud to be (insert here)."

What is this, and why do we encourage it?

The flags, the nationalist days, the anthems, the pledges, the stadium flyovers ...

How, in supposedly "enlightened" society, is such nationalist pablum still so routine?

"Oh, but being a patriot is a good thing! we should be proud of the country we've been born into!"

Why? And why you, exactly?

One of the things I love about "Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel" is that author Shahnaz Habib draws a direct line between our "patriotism" and our sense of entitlement.

Born in the US? Congratulations! You can visit 186 countries without applying for a visa in advance!

Born in Afghanistan? Sorry — you can only visit 25.

Do we question this? Not if we're a citizen of one of those countries with a strong passport! After all, why would we? The system benefits us!

Despite her dual US-Indian citizenship, Habib does ask, and it's a question that leads to some fascinating answers.

"Airplane Mode" also delves into the history of tourism — why it started, who started it, and who's benefitted. I never thought about how tightly tourism was tied with colonialism until hearing about what actually prompted the construction of railways across India and America, though in hindsight it's all so obvious.

The democratization of tourism, too, and its spread to the masses — beyond just the aristocrats and elites who could afford it — is something Habib explores in detail as well, including the way that tourism is marketed to us and the continued orientalizing of the so-called "Third World."

What does it mean to travel today? Is there a way to do it ethically, that doesn't see us contributing to a housing crisis at our destination?

At times, especially in these times, it all feels like too much to worry about, too much effort to have to expend on doing the right thing, traveling the right way.

Stop traveling? Never. But gaining some awareness of the baggage that tourism carries with it? If what ultimately drives the traveler is the search for knowledge and enlightenment, then that feels like something we should all be able to take on board.

[Lainey · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m giving it 2 stars bc tbh I did not finish it. I liked the personal stories that were woven in, but there was so much history that was not super interesting to me. I think I just was expecting the book to be different based on the title. The beginning did make me think differently about the way that we often view traveling and the ease at which Americans are able to travel vs people from other countries.

[Leigh Kramer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating history of travel and tourism, as well as an exploration of who gets to travel. The author is Indian Muslim so her personal experiences offer depth and nuance to these topics, particularly the intersection of travel and privilege. I was impressed by how many vantage points she covered, from passportism to homebodies to carousels. It gave me so much to think about.


Content notes: police harassment, risk of rape, terrorist acts, suicide statistics, caste oppression, anti-Indigenous violence and land theft, Orientalism, racism, Islamaphobia, Romani slurs, colonialism, human trafficking/slave trade, immigration, passportism, classism, sexism, gentrification, pregnancy, leeches, snakes, animal abuse, war, building fire, COVID-19, cigarettes, chat (stimulant), hyperbolic language around addiction, mention of patient who had a miscarriage

[Kimberly · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book full of tidbits of information. The author jumps around quite a bit which does prove the title of "irreverent" to be somewhat correct. Fortunately, I have visited Kerala, its backwaters and even Kochi. If I didn't recognize much of what she discusses about Kerala, I think the book would be difficult to understand since she uses Kerala as her point of reference.

[angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ★

compelling, incisive commentary on travel with a focus on colonialism, imperialism, orientalism, and “passportism.” although the author is funny, i think this is mis-titled as an “irreverent” history; “critical” history seems more appropriate.

[Homerun2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 stars

This quirky hard to classify book was quite readable and thought-provoking. It definitely spends a lot of time pointing out the racial and class limitations of travel: who can go where, why, the history of tourism, the ethics of tourism etc. And there is some personal history by the author who is from India that fleshes out the various statements. She illustrates with yet another calm listing of situations that white American travelers (U.S. passport holders) rarely think about -- having to have a visa for visiting another country, what documents to provide and so on.

There is a lot to think about here but Habib just lays it out there and doesn't bludgeon anyone with it. I appreciated her thoughtful approach and interesting historical tidbits and I also enjoyed the personal stories that she threw in which often detoured a bit from the main point but always circled back around. An expansive read that it will take a while to process. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Danalisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Checked my white western privileged ass at the door. Took me a few chapters to get into and then I learned a Ton!!

[Thom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Travel, tourism, wanderlust - a history with solid perspective on nationality, gender, perceived class and race. Connects a lot of dots and is quite effective in opening the eyes.

I really appreciated the author's history of passports and her personal experiences with them. This mix of informative and interpersonal continues throughout the book, which ends with a history of the carousel. Tourism, colonialism and discovery (actually pseudo-discovery) and differences in privilege each lend an interesting perspective on the topic.

I took my time reading this relatively short volume. Recommended!

[Carolyn Whitzman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Airplane Mode is about everything everywhere all at once. A Muslim from Kerala who now lives in New York, Shaznaz Habib takes on the relationships between colonialism and tourism, carousels, the joys of inner-city bus travel, female flâneurs, the joys of newspapers, and much more in this wide-ranging and somewhat scattershot book. I enjoyed its insights while finding it a little incoherent.

[Marcy Mount · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not what I was expecting, but I enjoyed it.

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5* An interesting and different look at the history of travel. This is written from a female immigrant's perspective on travel today and a look back at how tourism had evolved through the years.

[Farah · Rating 5 out of 5]

In full disclosure, I'm a bit biased in that the author is a friend of a family member and, while I don't know her super well, I do go into this reading already thinking of her as a brilliant, wry, witty person and so was hearing this book with her voice in mind.

Part memoir, part history of travel especially for minorities, part musings, part something over my head but that I may get more out of when I reread this book someday...this book's existence calms that part of my soul that has been so angry at some other "history of travel books" I have read where the assumption has been that the experience of the white man is the experience of all readers and, by virtue of the silence, seeming to say it is the only point of view worth considering.
I especially loved this part in pointing out how Eurocentric the history we are taught is: "Why is it an achievement to be the first European to reach China? Who is that achievement for? We rarely hear about the first Asian to reach Europe or the first African to reach the Americas. But the first European to reach China and the first European to reach India by sea and the first European to reach the Americas? Their names are household names, not because this is a major achievement, but because of the European investment in the idea of the first European to reach these "other" places."

I really appreciated how she wrote about concepts like the idea of psuedo-discovery, the entitlement of who gets to be an "expat" versus an immigrant, having to consider differences around safety and the way this is often ignored in writing by men, historical attempts to control physical bodies of the "wrong" type of people, the body of travel writing and explorers that are taught about and those that don't make the pages, the way climate change is affecting travel, etc. The discussion of who experiences restrictions or not makes me sad at how common it was in my life that members of the extended family who lived in other countries would not be getting visitor visas approved to come to the US for a child's wedding, a funeral, or to meet grandbabies.

Shahnaz can be scathing at times in calling out white entitlement (and I'm wondering how this will be discussed in my upcoming book club meeting) but I feel like she turns that critical lens to herself as well and all of us as we think about how we move through the world.

Definitely recommend and definitely will be revisiting parts of this book again and again.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Post-pandemic, many people have been eager to travel and to indulge in wanderlust, with advertising and media feeding that desire to see other places. But as Habib points out in this thoughtful and often pointed history of travel, the conditions of your travel plans will vary based on the color of your passport and the color of your skin (and possibly your gender). As a woman of color with family scattered around the world, Habib knows all too well the hurdles that people with Third World passports (yes, she uses the term Third World and explains why) must go through in order to travel from one country to another, and she also knows that visiting a new place more likely calls for caution rather than adventure.

Habib's research into the history of travel reveals how much the modern tourism industry is based on European and American consumerism, dating back to the era of colonialism and the age of "discovery" (which she refers to as "pseudiscovery"). She also unravels the connections between military presence and tourist development, as seen in the South Pacific following World War II. Throughout the book, she points out how privilege (in whatever way) influences how entitled a person may feel to travel and explore different areas of the world -- but also how that same privilege can block someone from true awareness of the political, social, and cultural life of the places they visit. Habib uses examples from her own travels as a Brown Muslim woman originally from India to shore up her points, and she makes a convincing argument that travel as we now know it still often falls into the old patterns and viewpoints of "discovering" and valuing the world through a Western lens.

Reading this book gave me many opportunities to reconsider not only the history I was taught in school but also my own experiences with traveling and how I feel about travel now. If travel should help us expand our horizons and learn more about the world outside of our own comfort zones, then this book is an essential read for anyone who welcomes the perspective of someone whose experiences are different from our own. 5 stars.

Thank you, Catapult and NetGalley, for providing an eARC of this book. Opinions expressed here are solely my own.

[Migdalia Jimenez · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book of essays on the experiences of traveling as a woman of color on a 'Third World' passport.

It was so great to read about travel that's not centered on a white colonialist point of view. But it was so much more than that- it was a memoir and a historical and literary analysis, ad somehow Habib was able to make that mix seem effortless and engaging.

I will say that I had to push through the first part which was a bit dry- but I'm glad I did because this is a gem of a book.

This would be a good companion to The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives by Naoíse Mac Sweeney which skewered the racist ideologies that are at the foundation of the vaunted 'West' versus the rest of the world.

Thank you to Netgalley and Catapult for providing me with a complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Cindy Baker · Rating 1 out of 5]

Traveling is cultural consumption.

Her understanding of the links to Kerala and Kuwait then Kerala and the UAE. She’s talking our regional languages and understands our nuisances. A deep dive into bougainvillea even. She’s lived our lives.

I find her spot on in her observation. Whether it be about travel, the way of life in the uae or the USA road system. However, I find her quite negative about things. She’s missing the positive spin / positive attitude and outlook that people raised in American tend to have.

What was her message? To travel or to guilt you into not traveling?

Judgmental and shaming. Preachy. Disjointed. Just calm down. Condescending. Off putting.

[Marni · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author is a talented writer and there were many lyrical passages I greatly enjoyed. I also learned a lot about the experience of passportism and attempting travel as someone from the “third world.” That information alone was worth reading this book for, and I feel it will make me a better and more aware human going forward.

There were several chapters that didn’t capture my interest and I ended up skimming.

Overall a good read and I will look for more books by this author!

[Chris Leuchtenburg · Rating 2 out of 5]

The narrative jumps around so much in time, subject and place that it can be called a history only in that it comments on the past. But the core of the narrative arises from the author's very contemporary resentments.

[Kristine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ambitious in scope, Habib succeeds in weaving together thousands of years of history and storytelling with extensive research, providing new insights into a fundamental human experience.

Couldn't put it down!

[T.J. Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

I think "Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel" is a misleading title. It is both less than and so much more than what it promises. "Airplane Mode" is a fascinating and very readable mix of memoir, travelogue, and history, but the history elements are not linear and are served in irregular (but delicious) little dollops. The book especially looks at the racism and colonialism that built the modern travel industry, through the experiences of a brown-skinned traveler with a "third world" passport. I found the whole book extremely eye-opening, thought-provoking, and also just plain entertaining.

In little snippets, Habib shares about the history of travel guidebooks, passports (and passportism) (this section neatly intersected with another of my current reads, Les Miserables, where Jean Valjean's internal passport noting him as a convict causes him so much trouble; I love when that happens), Marco Polo, the beginning of modern tourism in 19th century Britain, carnival carousels, and so much more.

Habib thoughtfully touches on fascinating topics like reading as a form of travel, the concept of pseudodiscovery (Europeans "discovering" places that were already inhabited by indigenous peoples), the idea of tourists vs. travelers, and the insatiability of modern consumption.

My favorite parts were where Habib shares about her family and her childhood growing up in Kerala, India. (Her homebody father is my kindred spirit. When she takes him on a helicopter ride over New York City, his response was "Eminently avoidable." 😂) The chapter about her trip to a sustainable guesthouse in the forest hills of Kerala was another favorite. (But that's a big no to leeches!) ("But the air. Let me try to tell you about the air. Air as cold and sweet as ice cream. Air so rich my poor, sad lungs, fed on smoke and exhaust and mold, felt like thieves to be breathing it so freely.")

I also loved how she references books and authors as disparate as Agatha Christie to Robin Wall Kimmerer's "Braiding Sweetgrass."

Truly, this book is a treasure chest of interesting, educational, and delightful tidbits. I never knew what was coming next, but I liked that. Some parts were hard and discouraging to read, as the impact of racism is threaded through everything, but I think this is a very important book (for that reason and others). "Airplane Mode" has certainly given me a lot to think about.

A few quotes I highlighted: 

"An April 2021 article analyzed data sets of visa-application costs across the globe and concluded that while Western, Northern, and Southern Europeans, North Americans, and Australians and New Zealanders have to work for less than two hours to pay for the average tourist visa, Central Asians have to work more than ten days, Southern Asians have to work two weeks, and sub-Saharan Africans have to work three weeks to pay for the same document."

"The current dominance of Western culture means that one does not have to travel to the West to find it, so non-Western cultures have learned to live alongside it, carefully assessing its predatory nature while attaining fluency in its tropes."

"It is getting harder to claim that travel is an uncomplicated good. Even the most hardened of us cannot ignore how travel is changing ecosystems, how travel has rendered so many places in the world into Disneyfied versions of themselves."

"Both of these high moral grounds - tourism is terrible for the world, tourism is the best way to change the world - are terribly hard on the knees and shins. Having lost my footing on both again and again, I am more interested now in the low moral ground, which is located somewhere between absolute apathy and an obsession with purity. It is the place where one makes compromised choices and lives with some regrets and celebrates small victories, while muttering to oneself."

"Wonder emerges from a willingness to see the other not as something to be explained but as something that cannot be fully understood within the limitations of the traveler's subjectivity."