Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Two new books offer tips and tales from the wild wide world.
Jul 14, 1999 | Last week, prompted by the new travelers' tales anthology "Danger! True Stories of Trouble and Survival," I reflected in this column on the eternal allure of danger to a certain kind of traveler.
Following up on this theme, I want to focus this week on two recently published books that in different ways embrace and extend the notion of danger's irreplaceable role in our travels.
The first is a compilation of short pieces by Doug Lansky, "Up the Amazon Without a Paddle: 60 Offbeat Adventures Around the World," published by Meadowbrook Press.
Lansky is a young adventurer who writes a column that is syndicated in a number of Sunday newspaper travel sections. Some of my best travel editor friends use his column and speak highly of him and his work. So when his book arrived on my desk, I was predisposed to like it.
Perhaps this was a problem, for I did enjoy the book, but not as much as I had expected -- or hoped -- to.
"Up the Amazon" roves the world, beginning with Africa and moving through Asia, Australia/New Zealand, Europe, South America and the Middle East before coming to an end in the United States. Each of these sections offers roughly seven to 10 newspaper column-length pieces, with the exception of Europe, which has 15.
Each piece depicts one of Lansky's worldly adventures. The Africa section, for example, offers canoeing down the Zambezi River, ostrich-riding in South Africa, fishing for bronze whale sharks in Namibia, kloofing in Cape Town, touring an impoverished South African township, hustling carpets in Marrakesh and sailing down the Nile in a felucca. In fact, the table of contents is one of the most entertaining sections of the book.
It's good fun to explore the world vicariously through Lansky. He goes bungee-jumping in New Zealand and sheepherding in Australia, hunts moose in Sweden and plays ice golf in Finland, attends tango school in Argentina, hangs out with the military in the Middle East and wrestles alligators in Florida -- so that you don't have to.
At his best, Lansky's pieces evince a devil-may-care spirit and self-deprecating humor that can be highly entertaining and occasionally enlightening. But I have to say that many of the pieces strike me as shallow and sophomoric. I finished this book feeling still hungry, wanting to know a little less about his zany misadventures and a little more about the cultures and places through which he was stumbling.
Dave Barry mines a similar vein in his travel columns and books, but I usually feel that there is more substance underlying his anecdotes and observations. I learn something about the country and the culture from his work -- and I laugh out loud more often.
But Barry is a venerable master, and this is Lansky's first book. I look forward to his next one.
The second book is one I was prepared to dislike: Robert Young Pelton's "Come Back Alive," published by Doubleday, which is pithily subtitled "The Ultimate Guide to Surviving Disasters, Kidnappings, Animal Attacks, and Other Nasty Perils of Modern Travel." The sheer machismo of this subtitle -- the I'm-tougher-than you'll-ever-be attitude implicit in it -- really put me off.
Pelton is the author of "The World's Most Dangerous Places," another title that struck me as ludicrously macho when the book was published. These words seemed to bluster and blunder blindly into that testosterone-crazed territory where Outside and Men's Journal, at their worst, occasionally stray, and where Soldier of Fortune and its ilk routinely bivouac.
Without ever reading it, I relegated the book -- and the author -- to my private literary dustbin.
Then I had the opportunity to throw back a few whiskeys with Pelton at a literary/travel event in Los Angeles, and he didn't have a Bowie knife on his belt and he wasn't wearing ass-kicker crocodile boots and he didn't even dominate the night with tales of his guerrilla-running, bomb-dodging, killer bee-kung fuing travails. He just seemed like a fairly normal guy with a penchant for dangerous travel.
So my internal macho-meter dropped just enough to allow me to open his new book -- and lo and behold, it was full of useful, level-headed, no-nonsense advice, told in an agreeable conversational tone, with nice notes of sardonic humor scattered here and there and very little in the way of self-aggrandizing accounts.
"Come Back Alive" covers the gamut of life dangers, beginning unexpectedly but appropriately enough with the home and the highway. Pelton starts out with the preconception-tweaking assertion that the home is the most dangerous place you'll ever be -- because you spend so much time there -- and goes on to give tips about avoiding death from poisons, falls and fires.
Then he moves on to driving. Did you know that just under half of all accidental deaths in this country -- and fully 80 percent of the deaths of Americans between the ages of 16 and 18 -- are caused by motor vehicle accidents? Pelton tells how to maximize your chances of avoiding accidents and then what to do if you are involved in an accident. Then he moves into more exotic vehicular challenges such as soft sand, bogs and floods.
After this Pelton presses into areas where he seems more comfortable: crime, disasters and self-defense. And then the magical mastery tour really kicks off, with stops at, among other subjects, kidnapping, weapons, pestilence, hypothermia and heat, jungles and deserts, maps and compasses and why smart humans get lost and dumb animals don't.
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