Airplane Mode

An Irreverent History of Travel

By: Shahnaz Habib

Narrated by: Deepa Samuel

Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals of Excellence

The conditions of travel have long been dictated by the color of passports and the color of skin.

The color of one's skin and passport have long dictated the conditions of travel. For Shahnaz Habib, travel and travel writing have always been complicated pleasures. Habib threads the history of travel with her personal story as a child on family vacations in India, an adult curious about the world, and an immigrant for whom roundtrips are an annual fact of life. Tracing the power dynamics that underlie tourism, this insightful debut parses who gets to travel, and who gets to write about the experience.

Threaded through the book are inviting and playful analyses of obvious and not-so-obvious travel artifacts: passports, carousels, bougainvilleas, guidebooks, trains, the idea of wanderlust itself. Together, they tell a subversive history of travel as a Euro-American mode of consumerism-but as any traveler knows, travel is more than that. As an immigrant whose loved ones live across continents, Habib takes a deeply curious and joyful look at a troubled and beloved activity.

©2023 Shahnaz Habib (P)2024 Tantor

Chapter 3 about traveling virtually.

Way too scatterbrained. What was the story it was trying to tell?? On the plus side, it would make a good bathroom reader since it's a bunch of unrelated stories.