A Letter to My Daughters

<p>Before you were born I went on a journey that would take me around the world completely a spherical three-dimensional journey. A journey of dirt and blood. A journey of taste and bodily sensation. A journey of texture. I am writing you because I want you to live in this world to feel it in its fullness its depth. I want you to fall in love with the world flawed and sorrowful as it is. Your lives and the world as a whole-these are indistinguishable to me-depend on this. </p><p></p><p>Theodore Richards combines the storytelling gifts of a bard with the limpid seeing of a contemplative. His social commentary is penetrating without being violent and his advice to his three beloved children is exquisitely unsentimental. This is travel writing at its most luminous.</p><p><strong>-Mirabai Starr author of <em>Caravan of No Despair</em></strong></p>