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Product Description:
In his introduction to The Best American Travel Writing 2008, editor Anthony Bourdain writes that the pieces that "spoke the loudest and most powerfully to me were usually evocative of the darker side, those moments fearful, sublime, and absurd; the small epiphanies familiar to the full-time traveler, interspersed by a sense of dislocation—and the strange, unholy need to record the experience." With this in mind, Bourdain and series editor Jason Wilson have assembled a wide-ranging and wonderfully eclectic collection that delves headlong into those darker moments and subtle realizations, looking to absorb, provoke, and offer a moving record of what it means to travel in the twenty-first century.
Here you will find Seth Stevenson's extraordinary experience of "Looking for Mammon in the Muslim World" as he makes his way through sweltering and paradoxical Dubai. Exotic tastes and larger-than-life personalities abound as Bill Buford accompanies the chocolate maker Frederick Schilling to the rain forests of Brazil. And on the other side of the world, Calvin Trillin trolls Singapore for the ultimate street food, while Kristin Ohlson delves into the harrowing challenges faced by proprietors of restaurants in Kabul, Afghanistan.
The twenty-five pieces in this collection have their fair share of the absurd as well. David Sedaris explains the hilarious highs (sundaes) and woeful lows (sobbing with your seatmate) of flying Business Elite. Gary Shteyngart goes "To Russia for Love" during St. Petersburg's vodka-soaked wedding season. And Emily Maloney gets up close and personal with her fellow travelers — and their massage devices — in a South American hostel.
Culled from an amazing variety of publications, "the writing in this volume is so vibrantly good, you'll feel like you've armchair-traveled around the world" (Chicago Sun Times).
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Average Rating : 
Rating : - A Hairy-Chested Selection
Anthony Bourdain, the guest editor of The Best American Travel Writing 2008, is determined to shake us up, get our attention, make us uncomfortable. No package tours here, no excursions to familiar places, and believe me, no one is enjoying his travels in this collection. This might well have been subtitled, "Trips to Avoid."
I shouldn't be surprised I suppose. Bourdain's first book, Kitchen Confidential Updated Ed: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (P.S.) was horrifying, yet I couldn't put it down. But I found his shtick less compelling with his second book, A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines, and I didn't bother finishing The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones. Bourdain is becoming a caricature, a posturing bad boy who thinks he can still shock us by eating bugs.
Still, I never miss each year's Best American Travel Writing collection, and the format is pretty forgiving of the inexperienced guest editor. The series editor, Jason Wilson, selects about a hundred articles from magazines, newspapers, and the web. Then the guest editor's assignment is to choose twenty-five from those. It's difficult, but not impossible, to screw up.
I wouldn't categorize this year's anthology as a screw-up, but it isn't one of my favorites, and I would recommend it only to those who are seriously into adventure tales. Nothing wrong with adventure tales. I have loved Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (Travel Literature) with every re-reading. Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild had me hooked from beginning to end. But someone at the Best American Travel Writing forgot that women are adventurous too. A grand total of 25 pages out of this year's 284 pages are written by women.
Some of the pieces from the collection that stood out were Peter Hessler's article about the hazards of driving in China, Calvin Trillin's street food marathon in Singapore, Paul Theroux's swing through Turkmenistan, and Thomas Swick's book signing tours. Of course, it was fun to re-read David Sedaris's account of traveling in business class, but that piece seemed out of place, almost as if the series editor slipped it in with Bourdain's picks, so that readers who might be exhausted from yet another testosterone-fueled trek in a god-forsaken hell-hole would have a brief respite. Thanks, Jason.
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