Take Me with You: A Round-the-World Journey to Invite a Stranger Home (Travelers' Tales Footsteps : the Soul of Travel)

After two decades of travels around the world, Brad Newsham decides to pack his bags again to return the gift of magic that travel has brought into his life. His plan is to give a little of that back to someone he meets along the way--to invite a new untraveled friend to visit him, all-expenses paid, in America. Over the course of 100 days through the Philippines, India, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, he asks, "What would these [people] make of my culture? Wouldn't the Grand Canyon or a redwood grove or a Safeway store, gleaming and fully-stocked at two o'clock in the morning, amaze them the way their culture and all the other cultures I've stumbled into recently have amazed me?"

Three months through so many diverse countries could easily be nothing more than a superficial jaunt. But Newsham's goal gives him and the book a purpose, for any chance encounter is significant. His stance is no longer, "What does this person want from me?" (a valid concern in countries where begging takes a hundred forms), but "What miracle might our meeting produce?" Newsham easily makes friends with his quick and quirky sense of humor and ability to elicit their wishes, truths, pains, and pleasures. He asks each person he meets--from a sadhu at the banks of the Ganges to a 110-year-old Tanzanian on the flank of Mt. Kilimanjaro--what the best and worst times in their lives have been, and the answers take us straight into their lives. While Newsham is skilled in drawing each exotic city and village, it is these meetings with strangers-quickly-turned-friends that make Take Me with You such an engrossing read.

The "round-the-world journey to invite a stranger home" plan could be just a gimmick, but Newsham is too self-aware for that. In India, he recognizes that his desire to add some small joy to someone else's life is nothing more than a frivolity amidst the masses of people sleeping under newspapers at a train station. And watching a linked line of elephants walking noiselessly across a river in Kenya, the babies' wee trunks grasping their mothers' tails, he asks himself, "How do I repay this?" Whoever ends up winning this lottery (will it be the Kenyan safari guide who saves him from the lions, the ear cleaner with his Q-tip and tweezers in the park in New Delhi, or the teenager with the boom box playing "What a Wonderful World" at Victoria Falls?), we have been blessed with a terrific travel memoir that takes us to some fascinating places and shatters plenty of assumptions along the way. --Lesley Reed