Customer Reviews

The Adventure of Food : True Stories of Eating Everything (Travelers' Tales Guides)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

After reading this book's predecessor, "Travelers' Tales: Food," I had been eagerly waiting for the next collection of stories. This book falls far short of the standard set in "Food." None are particularly memorable. Many have little to do with travel experiences. While I really love the Travelers' Tales books in general, this one was truly dissapointing.

I guess I'm a functional eater, you know, food is fuel. So this book really opened my eyes (my mouth?) and got me thinking about food in a completely new way. Great stuff, and funny too. Quirky, philosophical. Excuse me, I've got to go eat something new.

How can you resist a book that includes an essay about the wonderful experience of eating one potato chip? I finished reading these essays in a jiffy and still hunger for a new collection of essays about food as good as this one.

Some words that immediately popped into our mind when we devoured this collection of short stories that dishes out our obsession with foods: Tasty. Terrific. Totally fat-free. The 55 well-written, well-seasoned tales here, drawn from the pages of various magazines and best-selling books, as well as original works, take us from Fiji to France, the Amazon.comto the Big Apple. Jeffrey Tayler encounters the pain of post-Soviet Russia in a humble sausage. Robert Strauss nibbles on a potato chip and experiences an exercise in Zen meditation. Jonathan Raban goes nuts s he discovers people eat squirrels in Wisconsin. David Lansing's cheese-smuggling confessional. Betcha you can't read just one!

Some words that immediately popped into our mind when we devoured this collection of short stories that dishes out our obsession with foods: Tasty. Terrific. Totally fat-free. The 55 well-written, well-seasoned tales here, drawn from the pages of various magazines and best-selling books, as well as original works, take us from Fiji to France, the Amazon.com to the Big Apple. Jeffrey Tayler encounters the pain of post-Soviet Russia in a humble sausage. Robert Strauss nibbles on a potato chip and experiences an exercise in Zen meditation. Jonathan Raban goes nuts s he discovers people eat squirrels in Wisconsin. David Lansing's cheese-smuggling confessional. Betcha you can't read just one!

After reading this book's predecessor, "Travelers' Tales: Food," I had been eagerly waiting for the next volume of stories. This book falls far short of the standard set in "Food." None of the stories are particularly memorable, enlightening or even entertaining. Many have little to do with travel experiences. While I really love the Travelers' Tales books in general, this one was truly dissapointing.

Imagine the biggest bore or show off you have ever had the misfortune to be waylaid by in a plane or at a party. Now you've got the idea of this book. Apparently, the writers, instead of sharing their travel and food adventures, engage in a sort of "Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, I've been to Timbuktu and you haven't," monologue. Since the Travelers' Tales series books are usually pretty good, this was disappointing. An example of how very bad it was, in one article about bad road coffee, in the first paragraph Tom Bently reminds us how he kissed his Krups. He couldn't just say "coffee-maker," but he must share with us the upscale brand name of his coffee maker. How gauche can you get?