Airplane Mode

I was expecting a fairly straightforward treatise on travel, its complexities, the privilege inherent for white Westerners in contrast with people of color and people of the Third World*. Maybe because so much of the nonfiction I've read lately has been so clear-cut and written primarily from the researcher's and self-help guru's point of view, a vantage point of instruction and enhancement. I didn't realize until I picked up this book how much I missed memoir, mysticism, stumbling around alongside an essayist.

Habib combines fascinating passages on the history of elements of travel from passports to highways, as well as personal stories and beautiful travel writing of places she has been and conversations she's had with "locals" (an ever-shifting identity) and tourists alike. She interrogates so much of the hallmarks of modern (and earlier...) tourism: suspicious of the idea that travel itself enlarges us, cognizant of the way that tourism economies transform cities and towns especially in the Third World, doubtful that a distinction can ever be made between a traveler and a tourist, recognizing that the expansion of leisure travel is both a matter of cross-class access and one of ecological devastation. Despite being markedly more well-traveled than I am and less steeped in the white Western world, Habib asks many of the questions I do and is enmeshed in the complicated politics of travel. There are also explorations of other kinds of travel: news and reading as the originator of cosmopolitanism, the city bus as a method of flaneuring and wanderlust, the sweet reciprocity of a pair of vagrant music students cooking French food.

It was just such a compelling book to read, from the perspective of a history buff, a lover of lyrical language and braided essay, a would-be traveler, a daughter or mother or spouse, or just a person mildly self-aware of their own hypocrisy. I want to read it again immediately.

*Habib explicitly used the term Third World and explains why she chooses to in an epilogue