Pico Iyer

Re "How can a Botox nation boo Bonds?" Opinion, May 17 As a victim of depression and a baseball fan, I found Pico Iyer's comparison of San Francisco Giant Barry Bonds' alleged steroid use to Prozac use offensive and irresponsible. The reason fans hate Bonds is because he cheated, plain and simple. Is Iyer suggesting that victims of depression are cheating by taking medication? DAVID GROSSMAN Los Angeles Major League Baseball is a professional sporting competition.

Re "Globalism at 35,000 feet," Opinion, June 19 What Pico Iyer seems not to understand about business and first-class seats on airlines is that most are filled by people like me: frequent fliers who have accumulated lots of miles by being loyal to a specific airline. I almost always fly first or business class, but I usually pay a coach fare and trade my many miles for the upgrade. He also paints a worst-case scenario of the price of a business-class ticket. I hope that he will disclose where he finds those $500 seats so that the rest of us can get in on that.

In his Sept. 11 commentary, "Turning a Page in History," Pico Iyer writes that in his recent worldwide travels, "Everywhere I go I come away with the same impression: It's not Islam that's on trial worldwide, but the USA." President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, with their very vocal desire to declare war on Iraq, certainly don't indicate that they are aware that this rhetoric not only acts to inflame the Arab countries but most of the countries of the world. Iraq is a problem for the United Nations; Bush should recognize this and be using his influence on that institution rather than on our individual allies.

In 1994, author Pico Iyer spent a week living at Los Angeles International Airport, studying it as both a community within itself and a metaphor for the city at large. He's made repeated trips to LAX in the years since, and in his recently released book, "The Global Soul" (Knopf), Iyer devotes a chapter to his findings. You describe airports as models of our future. does LAX model L.A.'s future?

The program schedule for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books was released Monday morning. The schedule, which is online, includes the complete list of author appearances and special events during the Festival of Books, April 20-21, on the campus of USC. More than 400 writers are to appear at the festival, and 150,000 people are expected to attend. There are to be panel discussions with authors, poetry readings, book signings and celebrity appearances. Did you know Debbie Reynolds is publishing a memoir?

The first Los Angeles Times Festival of Books will be held April 20 and 21 at UCLA's Dickson Plaza. Admission is free; parking at UCLA is $5. Times are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on April 20 and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on April 21. A full schedule of events, ranging from author panels to children's book and poetry readings, will appear in a special section in The Times on Sunday, April 14.

We polled leading travel writers to discover their favorite cinematic excursions. Mercifully, no one chose "The Accidental Tourist."--Leilah Bernstein * Pico Iyer, author of "Tropical Classical," "Video Night in Kathmandu": "Whenever anyone asks me why I travel, I point him or her to [Bernardo] Bertolucci's 'The Sheltering Sky.'

TROPICAL CLASSICAL: Essays from Several Directions by Pico Iyer (Knopf, $25). Pico Iyer is a formidable talent and a facile writer. He travels to places that interest me, and he is engaged by people and ideas, both big and not so big, which likewise happen to interest me. Also, I have recently noted the generous overlap between his fans and my friends.

The Cat's Table A Novel Michael Ondaatje Alfred A. Knopf: 269 pp., $26 Michael Ondaatje is a quiet writer. He's certainly equal to grand, sweeping, historical subjects - civil war in Sri Lanka, the closing days of World War II - but the sound of advancing armies doesn't roar in his reader's ears. Instead, there's a stillness in which his characters examine their own private crises more than the chaos of battle scenes. (Which is why Anthony Minghella's 1996 movie of "The English Patient," with its epic, David O. Selznick-sized treatment, might have misled some people into assuming things about Ondaatje's storytelling that just aren't true.)