Travelers both timid and daring will find plenty of useful advice in this perceptive and provocative volume.
The former “Frugal Traveler” columnist for the New York Times encourages anxious tourists toward more adventurous travel in this helpful, humorous, and opinionated guide.
Using anecdotes from his plentiful experience to illustrate his points, but without indulging in personal history for its own sake, Kugel makes the case that low-budget, minimally planned travel can be more rewarding than a journey insulated from risk and serendipity. As he writes, “people who inhabit the still-plentiful tourist-free swaths of the planet tend to be not only just nicer, but also more curious.” The author isn't afraid to complain about what he sees as problems in the tourist industry, such as the tendency of travel writers to be funded by the places about which they are writing, resulting in unnaturally positive reviews, and the use of points programs to choose a place to stay. He advocates for gradually upping one's tolerance for adventure. “Talk to three strangers a day,” he writes. “Smile and ask a question.” Or try the “microadventure” of “ordering a menu item you've never heard of. If you hate it, you still have a story to tell.” Though Kugel offers a few pieces of advice from female travelers, he writes primarily of his experience as a straight white American male. While recognizing the value of travel apps, he recommends that travelers use them sparingly. Instead of using TripAdvisor to find a predictably pleasant restaurant, for example, he recommends wandering around looking into windows or asking a stranger for advice. Appendices get down to the nitty-gritty of preparing for a trip, including detailed recommendations for assessing and reducing risk at every stage of travel, from “preliminary thinking” (“realize you're not perfectly safe back home, either”) to “prior to departure” (“consider evacuation insurance”) to “during the trip” (“Dare to ask taxi drivers to drive more slowly”).
Travelers both timid and daring will find plenty of useful advice in this perceptive and provocative volume.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-87140-850-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
