“My wandering may not be an addiction, but it’s close,” writes Barry Hoffner in his memoir BELONGING TO THE WORLD: an account of Hoffner’s attempt to visit every country on the planet. The effort was not made out of idleness. Hoffner, a travel enthusiast, had already visited more than a hundred countries when, in 2017, his wife Jackie (an animal activist and fellow globetrotter) died in Africa of injuries sustained during an encounter with an elephant—leaving behind Hoffner and the couple’s sons. In grief, Hoffner determined that he would become an “extreme traveler,” as they are known: Individuals who rack up every sovereign jurisdiction, sometimes even crossing war zones in the process.

As one who had already ticked off the more common travel destinations, Hoffner focuses on less visited countries—that is, less visited by Western tourists and travelers. Syria offers an example: on a trip to Aleppo 18 months before the fall of the Assad regime, Hoffner grappled with the complexities of the gruesome affair that was the Syrian civil war. This included divided loyalties, opaque political tribulations, and atrocities against Syrians of every description—not to mention the country’s unique cultural heritage. Elsewhere, Madagascar proved an especially poignant stop, providing Hoffner the chance to see lemurs in one of the country’s national parks (an animal Jackie had always wanted to see in the wild without ever getting the chance). Hoffner notes the moral ambiguities that travelling to repressive or corrupt regimes entails. Getting into such countries can apparently require the greasing of palms, but it's equally clear that cultural relativism has limits. Hoffner goes easy on the historical details pertaining to the places he visits, restricting himself to a paragraph here or a line there, but a little more narrative of this sort would have been welcome at times.

While much of the book falls into the travelogue genre, Hoffner also foregrounds the healing aspect of the journey. “I wasn’t chasing her [Jackie’s] memory; I was building a new life,” he writes at one point. Judging from the asides about the community of fellow “extreme travelers” that accepted him, it's clear that he's found one.

Poignant, moving, and filled with striking details about the globe's out-of-the-way places, Barry Hoffner's BELONGING TO THE WORLD is an uplifting celebration of life and travel.

~ Craig Jones for IndieReader