- Paperback: 384 pages
- Publisher: Ballantine Books; Reprint edition (Feb 26 2002)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0345449126
- ISBN-13: 978-0345449122
- Product Dimensions: 21.1 x 14 x 2.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 476 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #576,921 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
After two decades of travels around the world, Brad Newsham decides to pack his bags again in order to return the gift. Travel has brought magic into his life and his plan is to give a little of that back to someone he meets along the way--to invite a new untravelled friend to visit him, all-expenses paid, in America. Over the course of 100 days through the Philippines, India, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, he asks, "What would these [people] make of my culture? Wouldn't the Grand Canyon or a redwood grove or a Safeway store, gleaming and fully-stocked at two o'clock in the morning, amaze them the way their culture and all the other cultures I've stumbled into recently have amazed me?"
Three months through so many diverse countries could easily be nothing more than a superficial jaunt. But Newsham's goal gives him and the book a purpose, for any chance encounter is significant. His stance is no longer, "What does this person want from me?" (a valid concern in countries where begging takes a hundred forms), but "What miracle might our meeting produce?" Newsham has an easy way of making friends with his quick and quirky sense of humour and ability to elicit their wishes, truths, pains and pleasures. He asks each person he meets--from a sadhu at the banks of the Ganges to a 110-year-old Tanzanian on the flank of Mt Kilimanjaro--what the best and worst times in their lives have been, and the answers take us straight into their lives. While Newsham is skilled in drawing each exotic city and village, it is these meetings with strangers-quickly-turned-friends that makes Take Me With You such an engrossing ride.
The "round-the-world journey to invite a stranger home" plan could be just a gimmick, but Newsham is too self-aware for that. In India, he recognises that his desire to add some small joy to someone else's life is nothing more than a frivolity amid the masses of people sleeping under newspapers at a train station. And watching a linked line of elephants walking noiselessly cross a river in Kenya, the babies wee trunks grasping their mothers' tails, he asks himself, "How do I repay this?" Whoever ends up winning this lottery (will it be the Kenyan safari guide who saves him from the lions, the ear cleaner with his q-tip and tweezers in the park in New Delhi, the teenager with the boom box playing "What a wonderful world" at Victoria Falls?), we have been blessed with a terrific travel memoir which takes us to some fascinating places and shatters plenty of assumptions along the way. --Lesley Reed, Amazon.com --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
“Newsham brings back treasures that every wanderer might envy. His journey, at heart, is into humanity.”
–PICO IYER
“TAKE ME WITH YOU IS NO LESS THAN A PAGE-TURNER OF A TRAVEL MEMOIR.”
–MSNBC.com
“What gives this offbeat travelogue its interest is . . . the spirit of innocent generosity that inspires it, and that generally infuses Newsham’s experiences of people and places.”
–The Boston Globe
“UNFAILINGLY ARRESTING AND PROVOCATIVE.”
–San Francisco Chronicle
–PICO IYER
“TAKE ME WITH YOU IS NO LESS THAN A PAGE-TURNER OF A TRAVEL MEMOIR.”
–MSNBC.com
“What gives this offbeat travelogue its interest is . . . the spirit of innocent generosity that inspires it, and that generally infuses Newsham’s experiences of people and places.”
–The Boston Globe
“UNFAILINGLY ARRESTING AND PROVOCATIVE.”
–San Francisco Chronicle
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
The cab driver glanced back at me, "You..." he said. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
The cab driver glanced back at me, "You..." he said. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
LOVED IT,
By A Customer
This review is from: Take Me With You: A Round-the-World Journey to Invite a Stranger Home (Paperback)
I just re-read this book and loved it all over again. Perfect for anyone who has traveled and longs to travel more. I could really empathise with the author's near-painful lust for seeing new places. The book is insightful, thoughtful, warm and funny. It has a beautiful and heartwarming surprise ending when you discover what happens after he invites that mystery person home to see the US. Highly recommended!
4.0 out of 5 stars
Longing for the second part of the story,
By "lbkinglet2" (Ben Lomond, CA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Take Me With You: A Round-the-World Journey to Invite a Stranger Home (Paperback)
The only unsatisfying thing about this book is that to date Mr. Newsham has not written the flip side of the story, that of the U.S. visit of the individual he finally invited home. I await it eagerly because the impulse behind it was good and the trip to find that person was as interesting as the other reviews indicate, so much so I often think back on many memorable scenes and encounters. And that's so even two years after I read the book. One of the lessons of Newsham's trip is that while many people are indeed less free to decide where they will live or go than most of us in the industrialized West, it remains true that for women in paternalistic cultures that lack of personal authority is worst of all. Newsham understands this, and early on he explains regretfully but realistically why he won't be able to invite any of the females he has met or will meet along his travels. The risk to them from within their own cultures is simply too great -- at the least they risk loss of status within the family if not loss of public reputation or worse -- and this book is not about helping someone immigrate. It's an extra layer of sadness that the author doesn't return to, but one which I could not stop thinking about. For almost every man he met there is a wife, sister, mother, or daughter whom I dearly wished could also be in the running for Newsham's selection process. There's simply no way to fully calculate what it means in anyone's life that we are born where we are born, and while that's not a new insight for a travel book this one reveals it in a fresh way.
5.0 out of 5 stars
BUY THIS BOOK!,
By
This review is from: Take Me With You: A Round-the-World Journey to Invite a Stranger Home (Paperback)
This is a wonderful book for backpackers as well as arm chair travellers. The author manages to communicate how it feels to be in the countries he visits, both the wonderous and the ugly. He also describes places many of us will never have the chance or inclication to visit so we get to at least see them through his eyes. Another added element is that the author is not a well-financed travel writer staying at the best hotels but rather a cab driver who has to watch his budget along the way. This means he is actually mingling with the ordinary people in the places he goes. I really enjoyed this book. It make me want to check out the newest backpacks, sleeping bags and other equipment and hit the road again.
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