Customer Reviews

Last Trout in Venice: The Far-Flung Escapades of an Accidental Adventurer

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I recently finished reading this book, and I loved it. I started out reading on the airplane. The short articles make it easy to read for a while and then take a break. I also enjoyed reading one or two stories before bed and while in the bathroom.

I don't get a chance to travel as much as I would like, and I felt as though I was able to travel vicariously through Doug Lansky, the author. I imagined myself trying to steer a gondola in Venice or hiking in the mountains. It's just a fun book to read--it kept my imagination going and made me laugh out loud a few times, too.

If you find yourself having one of those ho-hum days, dreary days and are in need a quick pick-me-up, search out this book and buy it. Time flies when you are having fun! Lansky brings more than a chuckle or two; some of his escapades are downright sidespliting and hilarious. No one would ever dream the "running of the bulls" could be quite as Lansky tells it. My only regret is that he didn't take me with him, especially to the "gondola school." Just imagine travelling anywhere with this zany, outrageous man. He could certainly turn an ordinary adventure into a ride on the wild side. At least, by reading the book, you have the safety and comfort of home but the "pleasure of the trip" - great author, terrific off-beat book - don't miss it!

This is an entertaining and delightful read. Lansky has tried many things we have all wondered about -- and some we'd never dream of. From his 'tail' of running with the bulls in Spain to what sounds like the most grueling cross-country ski challenge ever, it is put together in a way that is mostly humorous, at times informative, and always surprising. I recommend it.

I read a few of Doug's columns a while back and remember liking them. So I picked up the book and brought it along on my trip from DC to SF. I started snickering half way into the first story, then the guy next to me on the plane wanted to know what was so funny. I read the passage. Next thing, we were both laughing. Several embarassing snorts later I had to put the book down -- didn't want to see any airplane food flying out my nose. Finished it in chunk-size portions later as Doug suggests in the Introduction. Liked some stories more than others, but for overall laugh count, I highly recommend.

I've been to quite a number of places in this great big world, but apparently Doug Lansky has already been there and thankfully already written about it! Hilariously so!

Armchair travelers rejoice! Doug Lansky is at it again, sharing his continued adventures across the globe!

This time around; Doug has trained with sumo wrestlers, learned kick-boxing, shouted "higher" or "lower" on the set of The Price is Right, worked in an underwater hotel and pretty much broken the sound barrier on a luge. But that's not even the half of it! You'll scale Kilimanjaro with him, learn to play cricket (maybe) and even participate in a cow auction! (Lucky you!)

All of the stories are brief yet immensely entertaining! His footnotes add just the right balance of satirical commentary. Take Doug's suggestion at the beginning and read the stories in a scattered order! You won't regret it!

Mr. Lansky's photo albums must truly be a sight to see! I recommend this one heartily! Should you ever fall into the canals of Venice from a gondola... quite simply... beware of the trout.

Disclaimer: I am part owner of Travelers' Tales, the publisher of this book, but I read it just for fun, like you would, and couldn't put it down. This is the funniest book I've read in a long time. Doug has sought out bizarre situations in his travels that most of us would be too embarrassed to try, and tells of his escapades in ways that made my sides split.

His "school" sequence -- gondola school in Venice (the source of the book's title), Sumo wrestling school in Japan, Kickboxing School in Thailand, to give only a few -- gives endless food for how much fun it can be to put yourself in awkward situations where you learn about the inside of something most tourists view only from the outside. His account of his visit to the Kit Kat Club in Berlin, and his attempt in advance to come up with a suitably outrageous costume is one of the funniest pieces I've ever read.

This is one of those books your friends will either hate you or love you for, because you'll be reading them all the best bits aloud.

If you like Bill Bryson, you'll likely love Lansky, since he's got a similar mix of travel and slightly off-color humor.

"Last Trout in Venice" is a slight improvement over Lansky's one-star first book "Up the Amazon Without a Paddle" (see my review there titled "awful and embarrassing"), but I don't think this has much to do with Lansky's development as a writer. Instead, I suspect it's because the editors at Travelers Tales were less forgiving than his dad (who published Lansky's first book) and trimmed out more of the bad stuff. In other words, the book is better because there is less bad material, not because there is more good material. The result is an essay collection that is usually boring, often irritating, and only occasionally amusing. Most of the time the writing barely crawls above 'amateur' status, and neither does the proofreading--I counted 18 glaring errors in the text.

Most of Lansky's adventures were not particularly funny at the time, but he's hell-bent on wringing laughs out of them with an over-reliance on a very small toolbox of comedy "cheats"--obvious exaggeration, phony comparisons to celebrities and trite, forced metaphors. His limitations as a writer become even more apparent when he starts recycling his jokes, which weren't original in the first place. At best, Lansky comes off as Dave Barry's nastier and less talented little brother, and at worst, he comes off as simply lame and untrustworthy.

The thing is, Lansky obviously realizes that his writing sucks, or he wouldn't have included an awkward and embarrassing forward in which he insists that his "ugly American" attitude is really just a persona--in reality, he claims, he is a very sensitive, informed and progressive traveler. He even includes a (possibly fake) character reference from his wife, who also assures us that he's a great guy in spite of his sarcastic and ignorant writing style. This ranks among one of the most desperate and pathetic displays of literary damage control I've seen. If you're not an ignorant jerk, Doug, we should be able to figure that out for ourselves.

Lansky is truly blessed to be able to travel so extensively and experience so much, which is part of the reason why this book, like his first, is so disappointing. There are countless glaring flaws that show him to be an incompetent travel writer (humorous or not), such as the essay where he recounts going to the Vienna state opera house and makes fun of the show, but doesn't even bother to tell us what opera he saw.

A talented writer could do so much more. I'm glad I signed this one out of the library, so my book-buying budget will instead go towards authors that are worth supporting, and books that deserve re-reading.

Doug Lansky picks up where he left off with Up the Amazon Without a Paddle, giving us another book full of hilarious tales of his various & sundry misadventures around the globe. As any traveler knows, it's one thing to dream of the peripatetic life, quite another to put up with the discomforts, loneliness, and fatigue that travelling on the cheap actually entails. Lansky's secret weapon in the war of attrition that travelling can become is, of course, his terrific sense of humor. His intelligence and long experience on the road have attuned him to the often hilarious ironies & contradictions produced by the commodification of leisure. His reports can be read as a warm-hearted, self-deprecating reminder of the bad faith that sometimes underlies our quest for adventure in a world whose possibilities are already ordered according to the logic of the market. Lansky has the mind of a skeptic and the gift of laughter--a great combination!!!

I enjoy entertaining travel stories, especially when they are written with a sense of humor. Which means that there was little chance that I wasn't going to enjoy this book. A collection of relatively short stories about the author's widely varied travel adventures around the world. From learning to row a gondola in Venice and schlepping luggage at an underwater hotel in Flordia, to hiking Kilimanjaro and learning how to Sumo wrestle in Japan, the author demonstrates an incredible willingness to try his hand at a vast array of different activities (even though he only appears to delve ever so shallowly into any of them). His stories about these experiences are both fun to read and frequently illuminating. Lansky manages to shed a little light into various cultures and behind the scenes of activities that few other people bother to look at very closely. While Lansky's sense of humor and writing style are similar to Dave Barry's, he still manages to convey a sense of empathy with the people he meets. All this comes together as a collection of very readable, fun and informative essays. While I doubt that many of them will inspire adventures of my own, I do feel like I've learn a little more about the world through Lansky's travels.

Full disclosure here, I did not finish this book. In the parts that I did read there were too many typos to take it seriously. In a story about Dublin he mentions how "Guinness's presence is as prominent as Fran Drescher's accident." Um, I think you mean "accent" Doug. The author is also the type of writer who is not as funny as he thinks he is.