Customer Reviews

How to Make Friends and Oppress People: Classic Travel Advice for the Gentleman Adventurer

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

 

 

Using Darkwood's wit, quotes from 18th, 19th and early 20th Century travel books and some choice period illustrations this book is a fun collection of absurdities. I read it on a long bus ride from the Gaza border down to the tip of the Sinai and I must say it really hit the spot. Travel has never been so much fun!

Vic Darkwood has mined the hilarious regions of travel guides from the 1820's to the Victorian era. Those were the days of imperial ambition when Europeans could travel the globe and admire the "strange" cultures of Asia, Africa and remote parts of Europe and the Americas.

Darkwood has extracted the most bizarre anecdotes and travel "tips" for our edification. It is funny when it isn't scary. Just put another raw egg in your shoe to cushion your foot when hiking. Be cautious when building fires in boats, and so on.

Darkwood writes and collects like a man from another time. The book includes many wonderful period illustrations.

This is an engaging and utterly engrossing book. Highly recommend this gem when you are traveling, if not for the entertainment value but for some ludicrous exerpts from old travel guides. Hilarious and a fun read that you won't want to put down.

Even if you are not familiar with the work of Vic Darkwood via "The Chap", you instantly 'click' onto the feel of this book.
Darkwood cleverly writes in a steampunk Victorian style, effortlessly inserting real advice from 1800's travel guides amongst his own material. He offers a hectoring tone which bemoans modern life and makes some brilliant points with his tongue firmly in his cheek.
It is an addictive book and I am forcing myself to only read small amounts at a time.
I am only part the way through and am looking forward to his advice on my favourite subject - tea. I shall return to further review the book once I have completed it.

This must have sounded so much cleverer when Vic Darkwood (or whoever he really is) first pitched the idea to his publisher: a book that reprints and pokes fun at the no doubt racist, sexist, imperialist, and obviously bad travel advice gleaned from a stack of conveniently in the public domain, for the most part 19th Century travel guides. Unfortunately, Vic appears not to have done his research very well because the openminded reader will be astonished to find just how well the ancient travel advice reproduced herein holds up.

Except where technological obsolescence obviously applies, the only considerable body of useless advice comes under the heading of medicine, which was slowly emerging from the dark ages of quackery during this time period (one unintentionally hilarious bit lists the health benefits of smoking), and even there warnings about the necessity of care in eating, drinking, and being wary of filth in accommodations differ little from what you'd find in any halfway useful modern guide. What's more, rather than being chock full of the hidebound bigotries you were presumably expecting, these travel guide excerpts are quite remarkable for their almost modern worldly openmindedness. There is literally nothing that can fairly be labeled racism or imperialism. Stereotyping is present but since it consists primarily of stereotypes about other European nationalities, one cannot honestly condemn it as racism. The one demonstrable example of sexism (from a 1914 book about how to drive a motorcar rather than a travel guide) is delivered so diffidently and with such apparent fear and trembling over what members of the "weaker sex" might do to the author after reading it that it hardly counts anyway. Thus, it falls to Mr. Darkwood to supply almost all of the idiocy on display herein.

Fortunately, Vic Darkwood is up to the task.

When he is not "hilariously" acting out the very bigotry and imperialism he was unable to catch the authors he quotes in, he is quite deliberately misunderstanding them or matching them to inappropriate illustrations, such as in the cases of fireplaces in boats or proposing ways to pack lowlier servants two to a crate.

Har-de-har-har.

This is not to say that all of Vic Darkwood's attempts at humor miss the mark. When he aims his barbs at more deserving targets, such as idiot modern travelers or his own pompous persona, he fares a bit better, and though obviously subject to SOME amount of manipulation, his "50 Indispensible Foreign Phrases", which would be more accurately titled "50 Odd and Utterly Useless Foreign Phrases", gleaned from three different handbooks and conversation guides, is easily funnier than all the other excerpts combined.

A book pointing out how remarkably well this old travel advice holds up would have been more useful,...

and less unfunny.