All Around The World

In her unusually humorous and entertaining, yet surprisingly reflective and even profound book, Fein succeeds in combining, or integrating, these curiously complementary outlooks. Taking us to the most exotic, mysterious places (from Mog Mog, Micronesia, to Antigua, Guatemala), the author breathes so much life into the unfamiliar people and places she visits that we may well end up feeling that we've visited them ourselves. By zeroing in on just the right detail, the right individual, the right setting, she finds a way  to take us with her--allowing us to accompany her to the deepest depths of what she's examining. Her suggestive, translucent prose enables us to feel not simply that, vicariously, we're "inhabiting" this or that locale but that we're "imbibing" its very essence.

In short, Fein is much more than a veteran travel journalist, whose work has appeared in over ninety publications and who is currently travel editor for Spirituality & Health and blogger for "The Huffington Post." And she's more than a seasoned writer who, by proxy, has taken many thousands of readers on exciting trips all over the world. She's also a cultural anthropologist--with the notable qualification that, unlike those more academically minded social scientists, she makes absolutely no effort to maintain a "scholarly distance" from her subjects. On the contrary, she hastens to personally connect to each of them (and their life-teaching story); to participate in their celebrations and ceremonies; and (always seeking to discover some fundamental truth that she can adapt for her own "life lessons") to become--if only briefly--one of them. If readers find themselves becoming increasingly absorbed in her adventures (and misadventures), it's precisely because of her uncanny ability to animate all that she describes as the dedicated participant/observer she is.

This book cultivates some of the many cultures, rituals and journeys in different societies around the world. I definitely love this book for the simple reason that I learned about about so many cultures practice around the world that helps come closer with our inner self, that inner self that with time gets forgotten to tries fit into society. I learned forgiveness is the most important part of our inner journey, specially self-forgiveness.