Michael Pearson

Innocents Abroad Too recounts two journeys around the world aboard ships (in 2002 and 2006) with 600 college students. Fundamentally, it is a story about the nature of travel in the 21st century, in the new world context of terrorism and a declining opinion of American foreign policy and the American republic in general. But it is also a love story that details the inextricable connection between the author's travels and his relationship with his wife of four decades. Ultimately, it is a literary adventure, into both foreign lands and the mysterious landscapes of the human heart created by writers such as Orhan Pamuk in Turkey or Haruki Murakami in Japan. It is a story about the nature of stories, an intimation of how entering the fractured and troubling unknown can lead us to a clearer understanding of the meaning of home.


Excerpt:

"In our five days in Burma (what the military dictatorship calls Myanmar), Jo-Ellen and I entered an Orwellian reality in which the only thing guaranteed and expected was the unexpected. We broke the law, bought ice cream cones at a Buddhist temple, considered the possibility that we might be spies without knowing it, lived like Rudyard Kipling in the Savoy Hotel, and came within a New York minute of becoming Baptists and then prisoners of the state."