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The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home, by Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer's new travel memoir is an inventive take on the increasingly elusive nature of cultural identity in the modern world. With the help of Teilhard de Chardin and Emerson, Iyer first defines the idea of the global soul as a collective unconscious. But after the first 30 pages the collective "global soul" shifts to designate the individual--Iyer and people like him.

Peter Sedgwick has provided a fine service in reviewing a vast number of sources related to economic life today, though the title of his book should have been Consumption, Work and Human Identity: A Treatise in Christian Anthropology. Readers misled by the present title into expecting to learn what Christian ethics has to say about the morality of markets will be left scratching their heads.