The palm trees bent along the Pamba River, their fronds welcoming him to a dizzy, endless horizon. "I followed the wafting trail of smoke through a mangrove forest and into the jungle," on the southwestern coast of India, "to look for a woman known as 'The Secret Lady Keeper""-and we follow, too, entranced by Mr. Stein's quest and by his refined, poetic prose. In this and other similar pursuits, he means to find the lost labors of humankind, age-old practices hovering at the edge of extinction, and the few remaining people keeping these traditions alive. It is for these people that Mr. Stein has named his book "Custodians of Wonder." Mr. Stein, a journalist and editor for BBC Travel, has globetrotting in his veins, but this book is much more than a travelogue. In those dark jungles along India's coast, he witnesses the alchemy of making mirrors from metal instead of glass, a tradition secret and longstanding but one now endangered by a catastrophic flood and waning consumer demand. On the other side of the planet and under the drizzle of a wet November, he climbs 14 stories to the belfry of a Swedish church with Scandinavia's last night watchman and listens to the watchman's call, on a 4-foot-long copper horn, signaling that all is well. From the rarest pasta in the world to the dying art of Japanese barrel-aging to an 800-year-old West African practice of record-keeping through song, Mr. Stein gives us beauty and wonder we didn't know we were missing. These are the "unheralded" heroes of human culture; the extraordinary things they do "reveal a profound and little-known truth about a place's unique identity." They likewise tell us something deep and abiding about ourselves.We are, as humans, an unbroken chain. Our lives are connected to the land and the animals. Yet we are also threads in a tapestry that stretches back into prehistory, a part of a superorganism that is culture itself. When we stand on grass-woven ropes across Peru's Apurimac River with the last Inca bridge-builder, we link arms with a tradition that goes back to the 1430s and an empire (Spain's) that spanned between the "Earth's largest rainforest (the Amazon), its driest desert (the Atacama), and the tallest mountain range in the Western Hemisphere (the Andes)." When we crouch with the Secret Lady Keeper over boiling metals to make the Aranmula kannadi mirror, we partake in a centuries-old tradition combining religion, science and wonder.At the same time, these global connections reveal the magnitude of our collective actions. To bring us the story of the mirror works in India's jungle, Mr. Stein flew 8,500 miles on a jet plane and relied on such infrastructure and consumer amenities as roads, restaurants and mass production, thus contributing to the very modern forces pushing this ancient practice into obscurity. "You can't separate the intent from the consequence; the good from the bad. It is all one," he writes. "You can travel to know the world, to fall in love with it, and to urge others to care for it while simultaneously harming it."Personal yet familiar reflections wrap each chapter, discoveries of what we gain-and what we lose-as the world's rarest cultural marvels fade from memory. But it's Mr. Stein's writing that brings these stories to life. In reading about the night watchman, alone in the dark tower above Ystad, along Sweden's southern coast, I felt the wind and rain, I awed at the sacrifice, I understood the power of tradition. Those who listen to his horn night after night, even cracking open their windows in subzero temperatures for the comfort of its lonely bellow, know that the world would be different without it. It would be poorer, less a home to mankind."Telling the bees" was a popular custom in Britain in the 19th century that all but disappeared by the 20th century. "Whenever an important event occurred in the family," Mr. Stein explains, "it was the beekeeper's job to go out to the hives" to share the news-about a death in the family, for example, or a birth or a wedding-and gossip, too. As Mr. Stein watches a beekeeper in the English countryside crouching down to whisper to her bees, he remarks that it seems almost like a prayer: Stay with us, don't leave, you are valued.Science may tell us that bees don't technically have ears, that there is no point to these proceedings. But what is a voice but a vibration? Like the waggle dance of the bees, or the buzzing of their wings-or a horn call over Ystad-it's a sound that brings comfort, communicates news, gives joy. Bees are not simply single entities. They are as molecules of a body, working in unison, a unified whole. It isn't difficult to see a similar connection among humans. So when the keeper kneels to tell the bees of her mother's death-and when the author himself speaks of the death of his own grandmother, and of grief as "love with nowhere to go"-I wept."Custodians of Wonder" bears us away on a journey across geography but also through time and family lineage. Mr. Stein's great gift-his sensitivity and his dedication to capturing joy and hope, however fleeting-is worth giving to others.

The Great Chain Of Humanity

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{{magzter}} is the World's largest and fastest growing self-service, cross-platform digital newsstand with over 88 million users since its inception in 2011 and thousands of magazines and newspapers across 40+ categories and 60+ languages. Headquartered in New York, Magzter has its local presence in Amsterdam, London, Mexico City, Chennai, Mumbai, New Delhi, Bengaluru, Singapore, and will soon be expanding to other countries. Founded by global entrepreneurs, Girish Ramdas and Vijay Radhakrishnan in June 2011, Magzter enables magazine and newspaper publishers around the world to create and deliver digital editions of their titles to global consumers.