[The] variety leads to an inconsistency of tone: Some are lighthearted, others somber. The short ones should be longer, the longer ones shorter. But does this matter? Probably not. This is an untidy book, but a great one. In truth, this is not really travel writing in the recognized form of the genre. The reader who expects a collection of quirky anecdotes about fascinating places will be disappointed. Far & Away is not just a voyage around the world; it’s also a voyage around Andrew Solomon ... intense purposefulness is what makes this book extraordinary. Travel is usually self-serving. Solomon’s is seldom that. Hope fuels his voyages ... This is a very noble book. It’s also a very depressing one.
Solomon’s pieces occasionally read as though he is emptying his notebooks, with long, rambling quotes from a succession of interview subjects. Far more often, his prose sparkles with insights and captivating description, whether he is observing camels in Mongolia (When they lack water, their humps droop like aging bosoms. At night, they howl — an eerie sound, like the spirits of purgatory crying out') or eating his way through China.
His voice and eye are always curious, never hurried; his sentences unspool elegantly, and are sharply alive to social cadences and cultural nuance. He travels hopefully, looking not always for tragedy or strife but for moments of commonality in extreme and conflicted places ... He tries to approach this cultural immersion from as many vantages as possible, while never quite forgetting his privileged interloper status.
On occasion, Far and Away feels stale and bloated, an overstuffed monument to authorial vanity, built from old magazine articles. But more often, this is an improbably well-timed collection ... Arriving at a moment when the ideological and political gaps between us can seem insurmountable, Solomon’s imperfect yet deeply humane book cuts against the grain, urging readers to exit their comfort zones and engage with new people and unfamiliar points of view ... Content-wise, these pieces don’t always have a lot in common, and individually some aren’t terribly effective ... But there’s a democratic spirit that binds the best of these chapters, and, in the aggregate, Solomon’s reporting from far-flung places is surprisingly powerful.
Solomon is foremost a keenly sympathetic observer; in every one of these reprinted pieces, he's carefully watching the everyday people on whose homes and plights he's also reporting ... as dramatic as these and other stories are in recounting Solomon's adventures all over the world, equally memorable as a strand running through Far & Away is the picture it presents of the evolution of a traveler.
The pieces, covering 25 years, are brilliant if occasionally overwrought. For all Solomon’s stylistic verve (camels howl at night 'like the spirits of purgatory crying out'), he displays a weakness for hyperbole and pseudo-aphorism ... Solomon is admirably quick to empathise with the downtrodden and marginalised ... In the best of the 28 collected pieces, though, Solomon is acutely aware of his status as a privileged, self-involved and confessedly 'Anglophile' white male ... [a] fascinating if occasionally irksome collection.
