Elizabeth Einstein reviews Mark Jacobson’s Capturing the Jacobsons, a (nonfiction) book with a fascinating premise:
Having reveled in the unusual (smoking a joint with Bob Marley, for instance, or going for midnight sails with caviar poachers in the Caspian Sea, or driving 32 hours to see the Dalai Lama in Dharmsala) on behalf of magazines like Esquire, Outside and Rolling Stone, Jacobson never went in for typical summer holidays. He and his wife, Nancy, had always avoided theme-park vacations, preferring instead to drive through the bayous and Cajun prairies of southern Louisiana or dig for fossils in the South Dakota Badlands. But their kids seemed stuck in a cultural wasteland. So in the summer of 2000, only something truly foreign would do: Thailand, Cambodia, India, Nepal, Egypt, Jordan and Israel and the rickety planes, trains, rental cars and rickshaws that got them there.
This should knock the kids out of their “idiot culture” stupor:
It only takes 23 hours or so on a plane to rip the family from its moorings. The book’s first stop is the funeral pyres of Varanasi, where even seen-it-all Jacobson is disturbed by the sight of dismembered corpses floating down the Ganges. Torn between his bohemian dedication to the value of experience above all else and the sight of his 9-year-old coming face-to-decaying-face with a rotting body, he decides to shield his children: “In search of The Real,” he writes, “it was important to screen out the Too Real.”There’s more second-guessing at places like Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, where a mere 25 years ago the Khmer Rouge tortured and killed thousands of fellow Cambodians whose skulls now line its walls.