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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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