This June, the pages took me across continents, kitchens, and codebases—with three wildly different books that, surprisingly, share common ground. On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu by Rick Steves, Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, and Empire of AI by Karen Hao each dive into cultures—some vanishing, some hidden, and some just beginning to form. At their core, all three books explore how people navigate chaotic systems in search of freedom, meaning, and control.
On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu by Rick Steves captures the golden era of overland travel in the 1960s and ’70s, when young Westerners traded conventional lives for a spiritual road trip through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and India. Steves recounts dusty bus rides, hashish dreams, and an innocence that bordered on ignorance. But the beauty lies in how these travelers surrendered to the unknown. They weren’t just looking to escape the West—they were looking to find themselves.
That spirit of grit and romantic recklessness echoes through Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain’s searing memoir about life behind the line. With brutal honesty and dark humor, he lays bare the chaotic ballet of restaurant kitchens: the drugs, the egos, the 120-degree heat, and the fragile alchemy of service. Like the hippie trail wanderers, Bourdain wasn’t following a traditional path. His journey through the culinary underworld was a rebellion against order, a search for identity through experience, pain, and artistry.
Then comes Empire of AI by Karen Hao, a sobering look into the power structures shaping our future. Hao, a former MIT Tech Review journalist, documents how governments, corporations, and engineers are racing to dominate artificial intelligence—often with little concern for ethics or equity. She pulls back the curtain on how AI reflects and amplifies existing social biases, and how the drive for innovation frequently leaves humanity behind. Unlike the other two books, which embrace chaos to find meaning, Empire of AI warns of systems becoming so complex that they eclipse human agency altogether.
Still, parallels emerge. All three books reveal what happens when people step into—or create—systems they can’t entirely control. The hippies sought transcendence and found the limits of idealism. Bourdain romanticized rebellion until it consumed him. And in the AI world, technologists now face a reckoning: what happens when the machine outpaces the maker?
Each book also reveals a tension between authenticity and power. The travelers on the hippie trail wanted “authentic” cultures but often did so through a lens of privilege. Bourdain romanticized authenticity in cuisine but also saw how exploitation was baked into the restaurant business. And in Empire of AI, “authenticity” becomes meaningless as machine-learning systems churn out predictions designed to manipulate human behavior.
Together, these books paint a picture of a world in flux—where people search for truth, purpose, and control through different frontiers. Whether it’s through the deserts of Central Asia, a midtown kitchen, or the backend of an algorithm, the journey is always more complex than expected.
And in every case, it begs the question: are we steering the system, or is the system steering us?
June Book Review: Wanderers, Workers, and the World They’re Building
This June, the pages took me across continents, kitchens, and codebases—with three wildly different books that, surprisingly, share common ground. On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu by Rick Steves, Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, and Empire of AI by Karen Hao each dive into cultures—some vanishing, some hidden, and some just beginning to form. At their core, all three books explore how people navigate chaotic systems in search of freedom, meaning, and control.
On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu by Rick Steves captures the golden era of overland travel in the 1960s and ’70s, when young Westerners traded conventional lives for a spiritual road trip through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and India. Steves recounts dusty bus rides, hashish dreams, and an innocence that bordered on ignorance. But the beauty lies in how these travelers surrendered to the unknown. They weren’t just looking to escape the West—they were looking to find themselves.
That spirit of grit and romantic recklessness echoes through Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain’s searing memoir about life behind the line. With brutal honesty and dark humor, he lays bare the chaotic ballet of restaurant kitchens: the drugs, the egos, the 120-degree heat, and the fragile alchemy of service. Like the hippie trail wanderers, Bourdain wasn’t following a traditional path. His journey through the culinary underworld was a rebellion against order, a search for identity through experience, pain, and artistry.
Then comes Empire of AI by Karen Hao, a sobering look into the power structures shaping our future. Hao, a former MIT Tech Review journalist, documents how governments, corporations, and engineers are racing to dominate artificial intelligence—often with little concern for ethics or equity. She pulls back the curtain on how AI reflects and amplifies existing social biases, and how the drive for innovation frequently leaves humanity behind. Unlike the other two books, which embrace chaos to find meaning, Empire of AI warns of systems becoming so complex that they eclipse human agency altogether.
Still, parallels emerge. All three books reveal what happens when people step into—or create—systems they can’t entirely control. The hippies sought transcendence and found the limits of idealism. Bourdain romanticized rebellion until it consumed him. And in the AI world, technologists now face a reckoning: what happens when the machine outpaces the maker?
Each book also reveals a tension between authenticity and power. The travelers on the hippie trail wanted “authentic” cultures but often did so through a lens of privilege. Bourdain romanticized authenticity in cuisine but also saw how exploitation was baked into the restaurant business. And in Empire of AI, “authenticity” becomes meaningless as machine-learning systems churn out predictions designed to manipulate human behavior.
Together, these books paint a picture of a world in flux—where people search for truth, purpose, and control through different frontiers. Whether it’s through the deserts of Central Asia, a midtown kitchen, or the backend of an algorithm, the journey is always more complex than expected.
And in every case, it begs the question: are we steering the system, or is the system steering us?
dhavalilama
Next ArticleHow to Spend 72 Hours in Mexico City