There has been a lot of chatter about how good a book Phil Knight's Shoe Dog is, so when I got through with listening to Eric Foner's A Short History of Reconstruction, surely a good and important book but rather dry, I downloaded it.
Very early in Knight's book still -- and yes it is quite good --, he has gone on a journey around the world as a 24-year old in 1962. Some of his travel observations are very insightful -- certainly his description of still-bombed-out Japan is worthy, and generally his reminder of just how top of mind WWII still was is instructive. Nonetheless, as he travels the world from Tokyo to Manila to Hong Kong to Calcutta to Instanbul to Athens to Rome to.... I found myself drifting off in the generic travelogueness of it all. It reminded of nothing so much as being 28 and having traveled a lot myself and realizing that I had traveled a lot and that there was just pretty much a limit as to how much one could experience the world as one person, that I needed to settle down and produce more eyes through which to see the world, more cogitos through which to refract it.
Knight definitely does perk up in his writings, however, when reflecting on the subject of shoes.
It's also very interesting to see how much he thinks about "Great Men" as he travels. Churchill was here, Patton was there, Hitler did this there, and so on. Even at that age those are the peers he had self-selected. I definitely was not like that. I was always thinking that Mayakovsky was here, Akhmatova there, and so on. We choose our peers. I have to wonder if he was really thinking about those guys then or if he changed his mental peer group later in life and inserted them in his narrative.
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