Since childhood, Kate Harris has wanted to be an explorer. Reading Marco Polo's account of his journey on the fabled Silk Road, Harris was determined to make her own way there. But, like the Venetian explorer, her travels took a winding course. In Lands of Lost Borders, her luminous, incisive memoir, Harris chronicles her permanent wanderlust, her twisting career path and the months she spent cycling the Silk Road with her best friend.
Harris's journey took her first to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, then to the laboratories of MIT, where she began work on a Ph.D. But hours in the lab or the library never proved as fulfilling as exploring the byways and back streets of wherever she happened to be. Disillusioned and hungry for adventure, Harris and her friend Mel decided to go for it: to fly to Istanbul and bike as far as they could. The goal, in a sense, was the remote Tibetan Plateau, inaccessible to many of the world's citizens. But the greater aim, as for any explorer, was simply to go, to see: to "learn enough landmarks by which to love the whole world."
Harris doesn't spare the gritty details of the trip: stern checkpoint guards, exhausting traffic, much sweat and countless flat tires. But she is also awed repeatedly by the world as seen from a bicycle: a far-off river glittering "like an artery of light," the vast icy sweep of the Siachen glacier.
Lyrical, brilliant and sharply observed, Lands of Lost Borders is a paean to wanderlust and a call for readers to launch their own explorations. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams