As a self-confessed 'full-time citizen of nowhere', Pico Iyer can perhaps take a more objective view of the world than most.
Born of Indian parents and educated in England, he pursued his writing career in the US and now lives in rural Nara with a Japanese girlfriend who speaks little English.
In his The Global Soul (Alfed R Knopf $170), Iyer has misgivings about the hi-tech invasion and its aim to turn the world into a global village ('more and more 'connections' . . . fewer and fewer in the classic human sense') but he admits he must use the very innovations he distrusts to keep in touch with his publishers.
As a much travelled 'Global Soul', having grown up in three cultures, none of them fully his own, he takes us on a thought-provoking journey. In Hong Kong, a friend gives him so many numbers where he can be contacted, 'they left no room in my address book for his name'.
On to Canada, Britain and Japan. In India, his parents' generation imagined England a land of poets and civil servants of Mountbatten's calibre. To Iyer, 'it was union strikes and fish and chips and the sound of broken glass when the pubs closed . . .' Patrick Symmes, in Chasing Che (Vintage Books $104) adopts the 'in the footsteps of . . .' genre. His subject is people's champion Che Guevara, a legend for his role in the Cuban revolution of 1959, who died fighting with the peasants in Bolivia in 1967.
Long before his rise to fame as a Marxist revolutionary, in 1952 Che started to quench his thirst for adventure by taking a gruelling motor bike journey through South America.
Symmes sets off from Buenos Aires on his own bike intending to follow Che's trail.