Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip
Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip by Ethan Casey (2010)
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“Ethan Casey makes no claim to dispassion, and it is this personal perspective that lends the book much of its charm and veracity and makes Overtaken By Events so compulsively readable.”
- Bapsi Sidhwa
Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip is the account of Ethan Casey’s journey, entirely overland, starting in Mumbai, India – just three months after the November 2008 of that city – and ending six weeks later in Karachi, Pakistan. Beautifully illustrated by 32 pages of photographs by Pete Sabo, the book documents the human dimension of Pakistanis’ experience of contemporary history since 2004.
Updating the story told in Casey’s acclaimed travel book Alive and Well in Pakistan (2004), Overtaken By Events humanizes Pakistan and Pakistanis for a global readership and offers compelling perspectives on events during a volatile period in a chronically volatile country, from the assassination of Benazir Bhutto to the “lawyers’ movement” for the restoration of an independent judiciary. It also offers Indian views on Pakistan and glimpses of the situation of Muslims in India.
As Emma Duncan observed two decades ago in Breaking the Curfew, “Nothing is settled in Pakistan. … Every small event may hold the key to the denouement.” Overtaken By Events is a unique record of an action-packed time and place, written in graceful and entertaining prose.
From the first page of Overtaken By Events:
Zaka asked about the book I would be writing. I didn’t want to think about it yet. I was heading back to my comfy little bike-friendly Seattle lifestyle, and I needed simply to be at home for a while. Spring was coming, there was gardening to be done, baseball was about to start. I wasn’t yet ready for the writing. I knew already that it was bound to turn out like the trip itself: too much to try to squeeze in, too little time, too many distractions and commitments, too quickly overtaken by events.
I told Zaka what I had in mind.
“It’ll be out of date by the time it’s published,” he said.
“If you write a book like that right,” I said, “then the future events should echo back. I’d like people to be able to read it years from now and say, ‘He was that coming.’ I also want it to be about the personality of this country.”
“Oh dear,” Zaka said.
Purchase Overtaken By Events for $19.95 plus $3.95 shipping:
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Sponsor copies of Overtaken By Events for $15 per copy. Ethan Casey Media LLC donates sponsored copies to libraries, schools, and opinion leaders in mainstream America:
