preview

Leon Yacher Essay

Satisfactory Essays

When Leon Yacher was young, his father spent about five years traveling all over Peru. Through this, Yacher was introduced to different areas and cultures and landscapes. He learned that there were different places, that not every area was the same. Looking back, Dr. Yacher believes these early travels to have planted seeds of curiosity and interest inside him. These seeds experienced a growth spurt when he moved to the United States and attended the University of New Mexico. While there, he took a geography class taught by Professor Richard Murphy that sparked his interest in geography and changed his life. Today, Dr. Yacher is one of the most eclectic geographers, having traveled to the cities of more than 150 countries. When he enters a city, he immediately begins to search for commonalities and differences, what makes this city unique and how it is like every other city in the world. Because he is not interested in the superficial, he stays away from any tourist attractions, choosing to sleep in local boarding houses rather than hotels so as to build a relationship with the city. He walks the streets untouched by wealthy visitors and talks to real people. By so doing, he is able to see and know the real …show more content…

Along with Professor Joesph Manzella, a colleague at Southern Connecticut University, Dr. Yacher has been watching Central Asia begin to come out of its totalitarian phase. Kyrgyzstan especially has made significant strides away from totalitarian journalism, in which the government is the final word on truth, and toward the Western method in which the media acts as a watchdog. Halfway between these two schemas, Kyrgyzstan does not neatly fit under any of the labels representing the different types of journalism. Instead, Kyrgyzstan, like Indonesia and Venezuela, is in a transitional phase, neither totalitarian nor

Get Access