I picked up this book after I saw it on a book blog I frequent. I must say before reading it I never had any thoughts about traveling to Asia. However, now I am geeked out over the opportunity to experience the culture as the author expresses it. Back your bags people and let’s go… -Amazon Review
Asian Trail Mix:
True Tales from Borneo to Japan
MIXING IT UP ON THE ASIAN TRAIL …”So I get up at dawn … marveling at fog burning off into mist tumbling down like the finest mosquito netting of silk …
The hills beyond the confluence, like shoulders of a woman undressing, the way the shroud of mist lifts off feminine curves, higher and higher … I tingle all over, feeling there on Borneo the dream tug of Joseph Conrad’s fiction.” By turns pathbreaking and intimate, this smorgasbord of travel essays scales down the sprawl of Asia by focusing on the unique and revelatory in sharp, crisp prose.
See up close and personal the razzmatazz of novice monks at play in northern Laos, the hustle of pedicab drivers in Ho Chi Minh City, the rainforests blazed on gutsy treks across Borneo and Thailand’s Elephant Island …Served up nice and spicy, Asian Trail Mix is travel at its most sumptuous. Snack on it!
About the Author
Eric Madeen is an award-winning author and an associate professor of modern literature at Tokyo City University and an adjunct professor at Keio University. His writing has been published widely – in Time, Asia Week, The East, The Daily Yomiuri, Tokyo Journal, Kyoto Journal, Mississippi Review, ANA’s inflight magazine Wingspan, Japanophile, The Pretentious Idea, several academic journals and so on. Sharpened in then world’s largest ad agency for clients as diverse as Mazda and Sony (Sony No Baloney!) his prose allows for an immediate emotional entry into a sublime, exotic land. His two-plus years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Gabon, Africa, where he built a primary school complex in an equatorial village surrounded by rain forest, inspired him to write the multicultural love story Water Drumming in the Soul, which resonates with the personal and passionate. Originally from a Chicago suburb, he lives with his family in Yokohama.
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