Before you were born, I went on a journey that would take me around the world completely, a spherical, three-dimensional journey. A journey of dirt and blood. A journey of taste and bodily sensation. A journey of texture. I am writing you because I want you to live in this world, to feel it in its fullness, its depth. I want you to fall in love with the world, flawed and sorrowful as it is. Your lives and the world as a whole-these are indistinguishable to me-depend on this.

"Theodore Richards combines the storytelling gifts of a bard with the limpid seeing of a contemplative. His social commentary is penetrating without being violent and his advice to his three beloved children is exquisitely unsentimental. This is travel writing at its most luminous."

-Mirabai Starr, author of Caravan of No Despair