Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism
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Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism
For those who think that travel guidebooks are the gospel truth. The waitress suggests that I come back after she closes down the restaurant, around midnight. We end up having sex in a chair and then on one of the tables in the back corner. I pen a note in my Moleskine that I will later recount in the guidebook review, saying that the restaurant "is a pleasant surprise . . . and the table service is friendly." -Thomas Kohnstamm, professional travel writer and author of numerous Lonely Planet guidebooks WANTED: Travel Writer for Brazil QUALIFICATIONS REQUIRED Decisiveness: the ability to desert your entire previous life-including well-salaried office job, attractive girlfriend, and basic sanity for less than minimum wage Attention to detail: the skill to research northeastern Brazil, including transportation, restaurants, hotels, culture, customs, and language, while juggling sleep deprivation, nonstop nightlife, and excessive alcohol consumption Creativity: the imagination to write about places you never actually visit Resourcefulness: utilizing persuasion, seduction, and threats, when necessary, to secure a place to stay for the evening once your pitiable advance has been (mis)spent Resilience: determination to overcome setbacks such as bankruptcy, disillusionment, and an ill-fated one-night stand with an Austrian flight attendant As Kohnstamm comes to personal terms with each of these job requirements, he unveils the underside of the travel industry and its often-harrowing effect on writers, travelers, and the destinations themselves. Moreover, he invites us into his world of compromising and scandalous situations in one of the most exciting countries as he races against an impossible deadline.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
Pretty average and somewhat boring:
Most of this book is repetitive whining about lack of funds and huge hangovers....Jeez, grow up. Thomas is getting paid to write for Lonely Planet and can not find enough ambition to do the job, so he gets drunk and obsesses about his dwindling funs....Get over yourself Thomas.
Dream job? Not so much.:
In his book Do Travel Writers go to Hell?, intrepid traveler Thomas Kohnstamm does a fascinating job of weighing his own addiction of travel with the highly unreasonable expectations that are associated with being a guidebook travel writer. Also, Kohnstamm admirably demolishes the popular conception that travel writing is some sort of dream job; his consistently neurotic analysis of the futile planning, budgeting and writing for Lonely Planet, or any guidebook publisher for that matter is not only sobering,... more info
Perhaps this author will:
This book was profiled on National Public Radio and positioned there as an expose on the travel industry: how travel writers would review locales without ever going there, would use expense account money for living the high-life, and potentially show other borderline tricks of the trade. Once read, the book is really more of a memoir of a young, raunchy, travel-addled seeker escaping from the cubicle world of post-college career to a job 'on the wild side'. Unfortunately, the author brings himself on the... more info
An awesome ride... Essential reading for anyone who uses travel guidebooks:
A young American, tired of life on Wall Street, takes a job as a travel writer for Lonely Planet. He arrives in Brazil and, amidst the temptations of beautiful women and the all-night partying of Copacabana beach, soon realises that he has been given a task of unimaginable proportions and an equally small stipend with which to fund it. Eight hundred miles of Brazilian coastline. Sixty towns. Countless villages. Our hero is sent to review and collect the names, locations, phone numbers and email... more info
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