Up the Amazon Without a Paddle [Paperback]

Doug Lansky (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1999

Doug Lansky searches the planet for adventures and reports them with a wry wit. CNN has described him as "having the world's most interesting job." Read about Lansky's experiences:

fending off hippos with a canoe paddle on the Zambezi River

test driving Ferraris in Italy

surviving the world's largest tomato fight in Spain

swimming with dolphins off the coast of New Zealand

blowgun hunting with the Jaguar Indians in the Amazon

riding an ostrich in South Africa

lassoing reindeer above the Arctic Circle

wrestling an alligator in Florida

playing ice golf in Finland

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Blending Dave Barry's style of humor with Tim Cahill's taste for adventure, Lansky has found the ideal combination for highly entertaining travel writing. This enjoyable pastiche of anecdotes recounts more than 60 of the author's fun-loving, hair-raising, and off-the-wall excursions around the globe. His broad and balanced travel coverage takes many formsAone moment he's elegantly cruising the Caribbean on a luxury liner, the next sleeping under the stars on Mount Sinai. Any lover of adventure will enjoy accounts of blowgun hunting, 'gator wrestling, volcano hiking, and ostrich riding. Unusual experiences include test-driving a Ferrari, enduring a Chinese opera, and playing Finnish ice golf. Through Lansky's writing, one is rewarded with the pleasures of a novel, the excitement of a thriller, and the insightful information one would expect from a guidebook. Recommended.AJo-Anne Mary Benson, Osgoode, Ontario
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Hilarious. -- The Houston Chronicle, August 29, 1999

Lansky is pure excitability and enthusiasm. He has an eye for the strange and an ear for satire. Lansky's stories are those of a funny good friend's postcards - you always look forward to the next one. -- Orange County Register, July 11, 1999

Product Details

• Paperback: 296 pages
• Publisher: Meadowbrook (June 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671316575
• ISBN-13: 978-0671316570
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,769,580 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Awful and embarrassing., February 5, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Up the Amazon Without a Paddle (Paperback)

There's a limit of 1000 words on these reviews, and I'm going to use all of them. If you're in a rush, here's the summary:

"Up the Amazon Without a Paddle" is a horrible book. Don't buy it.

If you're not in a rush, sit back and let me explain why.

Doug Lansky is an unfunny, one-note writer. In almost every paragraph, he employs a single, childish device to trick you into thinking his adventures are amusing: EXAGGERATION. Lansky's exaggeration comes so thick and fast that you a) immediately stop trusting anything he says, and b) realize how desperate he is to mine laughs out of experiences that were clearly not particularly interesting or funny at the time.

He usually exaggerates with the help of a forced and trite comparison, preferably unflattering:

"As I boarded the Trans-Manchurian in Beijing for my six-day train ride to Moscow, I was greeted by a motherly Russian train attendant who had enough facial hair to knit a pair of leg warmers."

And it only goes downhill from there. Hardly a paragraph passes without some kind of exaggeration, negative caricature, and/or mean-spirited sarcasm. If you're looking for a book where a young American traveler insults the appearance, clothing, language, eating habits, and personal hygiene of most everyone he encounters, this one's for you.

Another of Lansky's key exaggeration tactics, utilized in almost all 60 essays, is the old "cheap shot at a celebrity" trick:

"I jumped on [the alligator's] back and placed both my hands firmly in the 'safety position' on his neck, which was about twice the width of Roseanne Barr's neck."

Only a gifted comic could take a story about alligator wrestling and masterfully turn it into a cheap shot at an overweight celebrity. Bravo.

"[The Old Course at St. Andrews, Scotland] has more lumps than Robert Redford's face, bunkers the size of the Gobi Desert, and other "small" bunkers deep enough to conceal the bodies of numerous golfers who refused to stop swinging away at their ball. The rough is thicker than Don King's hair, and there's usually enough wind to blow the makeup off Tammy Faye Bakker's face."

Some might call this funny. I call it desperate and grasping. And embarrassing. Good travel humor isn't something you impose on your subject with exaggeration and phony comparisons. Good travel humor comes from observing genuinely interesting and amusing things that are inherent in your subject, and rendering them in a way that not only communicates this humor, but also gives your reader a rich and authentic portrait of what you actually experienced. That's not what you find in this book. You find the above. Half the time Lansky goes for the cheap laugh, and the other half he goes for the nonexistent laugh.

Now let's see how Doug generates additional "humor" by flaunting his ignorance and laughing condescendingly at other people's poverty. This is where Lansky's writing goes from bad to downright ugly. Writing about a bus trip in Guatemala, Lansky has this to say:

"All of the windows [of the bus] were jammed shut, probably with thirty-year-old chewing gum left by junior-high baby-boomers in Nebraska before the bus was sold to the Guatemalans."

These sorts of 'wacky' observations display Lansky's essential malevolence. Isn't it funny that Guatemala is so poor they're using ramshackle, decades-old school buses America threw away, and they're such filthy people that they (apparently) haven't cleaned the bus once since they bought it? No, actually, it's not funny at all. And it's even less funny when you're not completely ignorant, and you know that in 1954, when those Nebraskan baby boomers were just being born, the CIA sponsored the overthrow of Guatemala's democratically-elected president and replaced him with dictator Castillo Armas, kicking off 40 years of brutal repression that put a lot more emphasis on liquidating hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans than maintaining a state-of-the-art bus fleet for Doug Lansky to ride around in. A good travel writer might have thrown in a paragraph or two about recent Guatemalan history (you know, context and all), but Lansky isn't here to educate us. No, his schtick is just having a cheap laugh at dirt-poor Guatemala.

The closest he gets to historical background and commentary on Guatemala:

"I liked the idea of being isolated in a third-world country, nothing to do but speak Spanish... and avoid death squads."

Yes, mass murder is hilarious when it isn't your people being killed. I can't wait to read about Doug's zany visit to Auschwitz. Whoops, his last name is Lansky. Bet it'll be a while before we see that one. Let's just stick to giggling at the slaughter of those dirty Latin Americans, shall we?

I'm sorry folks, but the oft-repeated charge that Doug Lansky is an "ugly American" sticks. I'll bet that most of those who say "lighten up, it's all in good fun" are American, and therefore unaware of how it feels to be on the receiving end of the smug American superiority complex. It's not funny to be laughed at. And that's what Lansky does.

Just so you know, I'm not a humorless or overly political person. I am in fact a professional comedian who loves travel literature. I wrote this review, my first, because Lansky's book was awful enough to shake my out of my complacency. Where writers like Tim Cahill entertain and enlighten, Lansky just insults. His flippant and callous ignorance does nothing but perpetuate the harmful mentality that the rest of the world is a playground for rich American kids to frolic in, make fun of, and feel superior to. And I hope this review, and more importantly, the bits of his book that I've quoted here, will convince you to give this one a miss.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hilariously honest--and it's about time, June 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Up the Amazon Without a Paddle (Paperback)

I've been following Doug's column in my local paper and I was thrilled when this collection came out. I didn't realize how many columns I'd missed and it made me wish I'd started reading Vagabond sooner. I'm so sick of those overly politically correct takes on other countries I find in other books. They either read like ads or a bunch of euphemisms. Say what you really think, people! Doug's humor strikes a perfect balance between poking fun at other countries and poking fun at himself. I can't believe he actually finds jobs in these places! God. I couldn't do it. I guess I kind of travel through Doug. He's the only travel writer I've read, except maybe Dave Barry or P.J. O'Rourke, who isn't afraid to tell it how he really sees it. The adventures themselves are great and all, but I've found that it doesn't matter what he's writing about, his goofy self-effacing style makes any topic interesting. Sorry, I'm rambling. I've never written one of these before, but I just had to send something in. This book is just so different than any other travel book I've read.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars It's good for a funny line here and there...., June 5, 2002

By 

J. Yaskoir (Arlington, VA, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Up the Amazon Without a Paddle (Paperback)

Basically...he drops a few funny lines, but doesn't really write about his travels in any depth. If you are actually interested in the travels themselves...don't read this book. If you want a few laughs....from a skimpy and slightly dull book, read it. It's not horrible. I just expected more.