Customer Reviews

The Best American Travel Writing 2008

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Anthony Bourdain, the guest editor of The Best American Travel Writing 2008, is determined to shake us up, get our attention, make us uncomfortable. No package tours here, no excursions to familiar places, and believe me, no one is enjoying his travels in this collection. This might well have been subtitled, "Trips to Avoid."

I shouldn't be surprised I suppose. Bourdain's first book, Kitchen Confidential Updated Ed: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (P.S.) was horrifying, yet I couldn't put it down. But I found his shtick less compelling with his second book, A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines, and I didn't bother finishing The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones. Bourdain is becoming a caricature, a posturing bad boy who thinks he can still shock us by eating bugs.

Still, I never miss each year's Best American Travel Writing collection, and the format is pretty forgiving of the inexperienced guest editor. The series editor, Jason Wilson, selects about a hundred articles from magazines, newspapers, and the web. Then the guest editor's assignment is to choose twenty-five from those. It's difficult, but not impossible, to screw up.

I wouldn't categorize this year's anthology as a screw-up, but it isn't one of my favorites, and I would recommend it only to those who are seriously into adventure tales. Nothing wrong with adventure tales. I have loved Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (Travel Literature) with every re-reading. Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild had me hooked from beginning to end. But someone at the Best American Travel Writing forgot that women are adventurous too. A grand total of 25 pages out of this year's 284 pages are written by women.

Some of the pieces from the collection that stood out were Peter Hessler's article about the hazards of driving in China, Calvin Trillin's street food marathon in Singapore, Paul Theroux's swing through Turkmenistan, and Thomas Swick's book signing tours. Of course, it was fun to re-read David Sedaris's account of traveling in business class, but that piece seemed out of place, almost as if the series editor slipped it in with Bourdain's picks, so that readers who might be exhausted from yet another testosterone-fueled trek in a god-forsaken hell-hole would have a brief respite. Thanks, Jason.

I loved almost every piece in this collection. The River is a Road is amazing. Dark Passage is amazing. David Sedaris' piece... amazing. I read through this way too quickly. Must go back and really savor some I went over too fast!

The problem of misprinting disclosed by Terri Ph.D. below seems to have been fixed. I received my copy of this book today, and it contains none of the problems she discussed. Thanks to Terri Ph.D. for the helpful warning, but the problem appears to have been corrected, so don't be discouraged now from purchasing this excellent collection.

I laughed out loud when I saw another reviewer call this a "hairy-chested" collection of travel writing and I couldn't agree more. A large portion of the stories in this book are hair-raising and purposely sensationalistic. Bourdain picked them to rise readers' ire and get a reaction.

Fortunately, not all the writings in this book possess a theme of bravado and shock. I really enjoyed the other short gems: a trans-Atlantic flight that dredged up childhood memories by David Sedaris, an educational and fascinating insight into falconry in the most expensive road trip ever by Annie Nocenti and an adventure on the newest and controversial railroad to Tibet by Pankaj Mishra.

For the most part, I enjoyed this collection despite a number of misses. This is a pretty decent compilation that would quench anyone's wanderlust until your next trip, that is.

Any collection of essays or articles is bound to have some so-so pieces included, and this collection is no exception. Yet "Best American Travel Writing" for 2008 features some truly extraordinary first-person pieces that beautifully blend the requisite ingredients of landscape, inhabitants, history and knowledge of subject matter.

That certainly is the case with the opening piece, "Extreme Chocolate", whose title helps draw me into this book. Author Bill Buford lets us smell the jungle floor, sympathize with the artisans, and understand more than we ever thought we needed to know about premier chocolates. His storytelling is riveting and his research exhaustive. In similar fashion, James Campbell's "Chasing Ghosts" gives us a genuine sense of the dangers that lurk across Papua New Guinea and the lengths to which the author went to complete his harrowing journey.

If humor is what you're craving, look no further than Simon Doonan's "Brighton Beach Memoir", a wry look at Britain's aging dowager-by-the-sea. And Calvin Trillin's "Three Chopsticks" offers a gentle poke in the (pork) ribs as he follows the locals who eddy and surge from food stall to food stall in Singapore.

If politics is your cup of tea, flip to Matthew Teague's take on His Hautiness in Tonga, immediately followed by Paul Theroux's examination of the Stalinesque idol worship in Turkmenistan.

Food for thought? Tag along with John Lancaster in Mumbai, who chronicles poverty tourism, one of the newer twists in globetrotting, and decide whether this seemingly perverse practice is more good than bad.

And for pure insight, complete our 2008 tour with Catherine Watson on Easter Island, who provides us not only with one more glimpse of this ever-fascinating spot, but who also bares her soul and along with it, that of every other writer featured here, as she explains the aggressive/passive psyche of travel writers and their compulsion to get involved, then back away; get involved, then back away...

All in all, memorable, and worth your time.

This volume, as part of a "best of" series, is limited by the writings available during the nomination window for this edition (presumably, 2007). So the designation of "the best" is relative to what is available during this time period. Nevertheless, there are some interesting and entertaining, as well as sobering, articles included here. Of particular interest are:

- "Extreme Chocolate", on the history of dark chocolate
- "Hope and Squalor at Chungking Mansion", about a unique building and its residents in Hong Kong
- "Wheels of Fortune", about driving and renting cars in China
- "Next Stop, Squalor", about "poverty tourism"
- "Journey into Night", by David Sedaris... need I say more?
- "The Golden Man", by Paul Theroux... ditto

There is a focus to these stories, describing the lavish and the stricken, the gluttony and the obscure. These writers, at least for these essays, tend to contribute little to the communities that assist them in making a living.

"Dark Passage," about modern day pirates, which I first read in National Geographic with its superb photographs, lost relatively little sans pictures.

Poverty tourism has always been around, but it's current popularity, whether as a side trip during an African safari or a trip to India, is disturbing.

I've been interested in the "donate your old clothes to poor people in Africa" - charity? scam? - for quite a while now. From "The River is a Road": "Our neighbor Lucy sold the secondhand clothing worn by almost everyone on the barge and along the river: the ubiquitous American T-shirts donated to charities and dumped on the African market" (p. 136). I'm still trying to get a handle on this issue. And the article by Jeffrey Taylor ("The Woman in the Kuffiya") tries to make the reader sense his lusting for a woman wrapped in robes and an Arab scarf: "I was soon wondering at just how little I had seen of her charms, yet how exciting I had found them. The fiercest lust smolders under wraps, but expires in the open. The oft-maligned Islamic custom of purdah does much to preserve passion in its most urgent and ineffable form" (p. 232). This excuse for the deprivation of a woman's choice makes this tale a sad choice for this volume. Emily Maloney described herself in "Mr. Tingler": "I told the Israeli that I sort of liked violence..." which she then tried to explain. And I learned of a new phrase in Theroux's piece: Mark Twain describing the Book of Mormon as "chloroform in print." Ouch!

This may not be the best of travel writing, but if you appreciate the genre, parts will certainly be entertaining.

I pre-ordered the book and was excited when the book finally arrived. I settled in reading in bed and then I got to page 46 and had a rude shock. The next page was numbered "45" with a different title. The next 5 chapters were not travel stories but science articles! This went until page 108, where it then went to page 111, and back to the travel stories. ARGH! I contacted Amazon and they swiftly sent me another copy, which I got today. It has the SAME problem! Stay away from the book until they FIX the problem! I love this series and the writing was great, but wait.

It was worth the money spent on it. The condition matched the one listed. I would definetly buy from the seller again.