Word: barre
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Once guaranteed to send parents into spirals of anxiety and friends into paroxysms of envy, the Asia trek now elicits a shrugging, "Send us an e-mail when you make it to Kathmandu." Trouble is, no one seems to have told Tansy Harris, the self-absorbed heroine of Emily Barr's debut novel Backpack (Plume; 310 pages). Tansy is a glamorous young Englishwoman with glamorous friends and a glamorous media job who has no more direction in life than the location of the next line of coke. When her monstrous alcoholic mother dies, Tansy survives an overdose and decides...
...Barr may be aware of this failing, because she loads Backpack with enough neurotic angst to fill a season's worth of Ally McBeal, then grafts on a murder-mystery subplot centering around a backpacker serial killer stalking Tansy look-alikes. The murderer can be spotted within a few paragraphs of the title page, but provides a diversion from a suddenly at-one-with-Asia Tansy looking down upon the "tourists" in Bangkok or musing with unconscious irony upon "deluded Westerners" at the base of Mount Everest. Barr even includes Tansy's rambling e-mails home; most people...
...Barr has managed to throw Bridget Jones onto The Beach. But The Beach gave some insight into the backpacking scene, while Backpack rarely ventures from the tourist quarter...
...Donald Barr Chidsey, "The Wars in Barbary: Arab Piracy and the Birth of the United States Navy...
...Laden Bios, "Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America" by Yossef Bodansky and Bergen's "Holy War, Inc." and 4)Relevant History, including "Five Days in London May 1940" by John Lukacs, "Pirate Utopias" by Peter Lamborn Wilson and "The Wars in Barbary" by Donald Barr Chidsey...