Mark Boyter's Crescent Moon Over Laos is a true account travel narrative of an 18-day journey in Laos, just months after the country had been re-opened to Western travel after ten years being closed. For Boyter, after three years living and travelling in Asia, Laos was a setting both familiar and foreign, comforting and disquieting. About to return to a North America three years removed from familiarity, leaving behind an Asia that had grown into "e;home"e;, dancing on the edge of a new love relationship, Laos was the lynch pin that tied these worlds together. Written in journal form, Crescent Moon Over Laos is a voyage of discovery that unfolds in the parallel stories of an emerging soul and a re-emerging country. It is about Laos and it is about a traveler: a novella in non-fiction. On the surface, Crescent Moon follows the simple story of the traveler. But like an elaborate wrought iron fence, the story filigrees off into tangential questions and observations of ethics, of personal place in the world, of self; of Asia, of Buddhism, of travel; of love and relationships, both with others and with ourselves. What begins as a travel memoir ends as a discussion of life, of what it means to be human.
