I Should Have Stayed Home: The Worst Trips of the Great Writers (Travel Literature Series) (Paperback)

by Roger Rapoport (Author), Marguerita Castanera (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Think your last vacation was bad just because you spent a couple of nights in the airport? You got off easy! In this delightful anthology, some of the world's best travel writers, novelists and journalists -- Eric Hansen, Pico Iyer, Barbara Kingsolver, and 48 others -- offer up the agonies of their worst trips. With an introduction by Mary Morris and a final rebuttal by Jan Morris.

From Publishers Weekly
While some of these essays transcend the limited range of their focus, the majority have the shallow immediacy of anecdotes told around a bar. There are endless accounts of nightmarish trips by boat, car and bus (too many people, lots of bad smells) and, more banal, airplane; horrifying stays in squalid hotels (insect invasions, faulty plumbing, rooms let by the hour); and hellish encounters with the locals (more bad smells, unsavory behavior). Sometimes these 49 tales-introduced by Mary Morris and with a rebuttal by Jan Morris-are amusing, but too often even the authors appear more dutiful than interested, and many stories end patly. The best, however, offer glimpses into the rewards promised by travel-enlightenment, a taste of the exotic, insight into human behavior. Eric Hansen's account of a sleepless winter night passed among the homeless in Grand Central Station and Paul Theroux's claustrophobic Christmas in Central Africa fall into this category; so do Larry O'Connor's moving description of a slum in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and Suzanne Lipsett's encounter with an American couple in Bangkok, circa 1968. All reflect Pico Iyer's belief that "the one great glory of traveling is that hardship is always redeemed by commotion recollected in tranquility." These authors, and half a dozen others, seem changed by their experiences; the rest rather blithely have shrugged theirs off.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: RDR Books; 1st THUS edition (October 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1571430148
• ISBN-13: 978-1571430144
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #817,537 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Side-splitting,great read out loud,can't-put-down book!, March 31, 1999

By A Customer

These stories are so incredible you just know they have got to be true. No one could ever make up the raining scorpians, rivers of vomit or very private events in very public places. This was one of the more hilarious and interesting books I have read in a loooong time. It's just like sitting down and sharing favorite international (and national) travel-stories-from-hell with some friends you just made at the airport while waiting for yet another adventure to begin.

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars I Should Have Avoided Reading This Book, March 27, 2000

By A Customer

The stories in this book fall into one of three catagories:1. Gross - vomit, cockroaches, excrement. A little of this goes a LONGway. And believe it or not, once you've read one fire ant story, you've pretty much read them all. 2. Dumb - Helen Gurley Brown's husband's shaving cream explodes in his suitcase. And then she has to stand in line in Madras, India to upgrade their flight from economy to first class. Oh the agony! 3. Irrelevant - stories that begin by saying something to the effect "Well, I never really had a bad experience but..." and they go on to describe a fairly mundane event. (Isabel Allende and Barbara Kingsolver in particular.)

I have more interesting travel stories than most of these people! The book was disappointingly dull. For a funny read, with some grim tales to tell, get a copy of "A Walk in the Woods" by Bill Bryson, who describes his and a friend's adventures on the Appalachian Trail.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, June 21, 2002

By	Allen Moore (Redmond, WA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The backcover text describes this book as a "...hilarious anthology...". However this is not a humorous book, let alone a hilarious one. The stories, written in the literary equivalent of a monotone, are simply dreary tales of other people's misfortunes, which after a few chapters become tedious. One particularly unmemorable story was entirely devoted to the author's encounters with human excrement in Nepal. The book's anthology format - a different "great writer" for each chapter - works against it. There is no consistent style, unless one considers bland writing a style. It _is_ possible to take travel misadventures and put a humorous spin on them (Carl Franz, "The People's Guide to Mexico", which is a great guide to boot) or even turn them into high comedy (Dave Barry "Dave Barry Does Japan"), but the authors of this book fell far short of the mark.