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kareila_booksAfter reading fantasy and sci-fi books by a couple of my favorite authors over the last two months, my local book club decided it was time to try contemporary nonfiction again. This selection turns out to be a recent travel memoir, but it is distinguished by the fact that the author is extremely smart (Rhodes Scholar, MIT Ph.D candidate) and gifted with anecdotes and metaphors.
She has a passion for the outdoors and long distance cycling, so when she realizes that her future at MIT would mean a life of sitting behind a desk crunching data on a computer, she bails out and pursues her dream of following the path of the fabled Silk Road on her bicycle, with only her childhood best friend for company. There's not much of a "why" given beyond "because it's there," but her thirst for new frontiers is palpable - it was her desire to go to Mars that guided her to MIT in the first place. Along the way she compiles ample evidence for the harmfulness of political borders, how they contribute not just to human suffering, but also to the depletion of the planet's natural resources: the tragedy of the commons on a global scale.
She has a passion for the outdoors and long distance cycling, so when she realizes that her future at MIT would mean a life of sitting behind a desk crunching data on a computer, she bails out and pursues her dream of following the path of the fabled Silk Road on her bicycle, with only her childhood best friend for company. There's not much of a "why" given beyond "because it's there," but her thirst for new frontiers is palpable - it was her desire to go to Mars that guided her to MIT in the first place. Along the way she compiles ample evidence for the harmfulness of political borders, how they contribute not just to human suffering, but also to the depletion of the planet's natural resources: the tragedy of the commons on a global scale.
