Customer Reviews

World Enough: Travel Memoirs

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You can go abroad as a tourist, a journalist, a long-term visitor, or as a traveller. Over parts of four decades, Charles Stickney traveled mainly on the cheap, even hitching, while proudly staying in places that most Americans would shun. "World Enough" records the strange, the unusual, as well as the prosaic and mundane. When we go someplace, what do we notice, what thoughts do we record, and what do we remember? He quotes Barbara Tuchman: " As individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record." An English professor, Stickney notes that poets write so often about such noncontent-
ments like unrequited love. Then he writes, "Sad to say, it really is lucky for regular folks that poets don't get laid as much as they'd like." This observation is central to his travels, because the reader is reliably informed whenever Stickney did or didn't get laid. And lucky for us regular folks, Stickney didn't get laid as much as he would have liked.
How has a place changed since the last time the author visited? How much have the times changed and how much has the author, himself, changed? Stickney goes the extra mile, so to speak, telling us not just what he saw, but how he felt. It would be fair to describe "World Enough" as a semi-autobiographical travel book. The writing is good and the writer is quite empathetic. Buy it.

Entertaining book by a world traveler with a heart. This book can get your Adrenalin up. It is definately worth reading at least twice. He manages to find good in almost everyone and everything.

Every fellow adventurer or traveler who enjoys a good read should read this book. How I envy his experiences and knowledge. Not only is the book very readable - in places it is hysterically funny - it is very educational. Once you start reading it, you will not be able to put it down. A Gem of a book!