TRAVEL MANIA

A diverse collection of true stories by a self-described “travel junkie.”

Gershowitz, a marketing strategist and researcher in New York City, presents a series of travel tales that one can read as stand-alone stories or as part of a larger narrative. The book reflects the author’s love of globe-trotting adventure and describes how she built her whole life around it by getting a job in which she effectively got paid to travel. Her recollections take readers to many places around the world, from Southeast Asia to the Galápagos Islands to the American West, as she trekked for business and pleasure. These stories are also, in some ways, about the passage of time, reflecting on how travel has changed, for better and worse, over the decades. One striking example is her account of hitchhiking from Los Angeles to San Francisco to catch a plane to Japan—and just making her flight in circumstances that would be impossible with today’s security requirements. The book’s final account is of her last journey before the Covid-19 pandemic hit and of her current, strictly local outings. Gershowitz’s collection is often an enjoyable read, and it’s bittersweet but not unpleasant to revisit times when unencumbered travel was still possible. However, many of the stories here cut off abruptly, leaving readers hanging; one notable example is an account of a rodeo in Cody, Wyoming, which ends vaguely with the reactions of a visiting French tourist family. Also, occasional comments feel culturally insensitive, as when the author complains about having to wear special garments to enter the grounds of a mosque in Abu Dhabi.

A nostalgic but sometimes-problematic travel narrative.