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Buy Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism by Thomas Kohnstamm available and for sale on Brightsurf
| View Larger Image | Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism
by Thomas Kohnstamm
| | List Price: | $13.95 | | Price: | $11.16 | | You Save: | $2.79 (20%) |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 11075 | | Studio: | Three Rivers Press | | | Binding: | Paperback | | Number Of Pages: | 288 | | Publication Date: | April 22, 2008 | | Publisher: | Three Rivers Press |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
For those who think that travel guidebooks are the gospel truth.
The waitress suggests that I come back after she closes down the restaurant, around midnight. We end up having sex in a chair and then on one of the tables in the back corner. I pen a note in my Moleskine that I will later recount in the guidebook review, saying that the restaurant “is a pleasant surprise . . . and the table service is friendly.” –Thomas Kohnstamm, professional travel writer and author of numerous Lonely Planet guidebooks
WANTED: Travel Writer for Brazil
QUALIFICATIONS REQUIRED
Decisiveness: the ability to desert your entire previous life–including well-salaried office job, attractive girlfriend, and basic sanity for less than minimum wage
Attention to detail: the skill to research northeastern Brazil, including transportation, restaurants, hotels, culture, customs, and language, while juggling sleep deprivation, nonstop nightlife, and excessive alcohol consumption
Creativity: the imagination to write about places you never actually visit
Resourcefulness: utilizing persuasion, seduction, and threats, when necessary, to secure a place to stay for the evening once your pitiable advance has been (mis)spent
Resilience: determination to overcome setbacks such as bankruptcy, disillusionment, and an ill-fated one-night stand with an Austrian flight attendant
As Kohnstamm comes to personal terms with each of these job requirements, he unveils the underside of the travel industry and its often-harrowing effect on writers, travelers, and the destinations themselves. Moreover, he invites us into his world of compromising and scandalous situations in one of the most exciting countries as he races against an impossible deadline. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 29 reviews)
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Great read 
An excellent read that reminds me of some of my own shenanigans (although not as crazy as the author's) while traveling in Latin America.
July 07, 2008 | |
Boy in Brazil
This travelogue by Thomas Kohnstamm is about his journey and misadventures through Brazil as a first time writer for Lonely Planet travel guidebooks. Thomas spends the first portion of this book getting out of his job, separating from his girlfriend, and spending the night out with his friend which ends disastrously. Thomas then shows up in Brazil, with his purportedly meager wage advance on which he must travel, eat, and lodge. He spends much of the book complaining about being low on funds and time he is but will rent apartments for a month, buy ecstasy and other drugs, and do a lot of partying with other travelers as well as the locales.
He tries to abide by the Lonely Planet creed of 'no freebies or gratuities" from hotels or restaurants for inclusion in their guidebooks. It takes Thomas most of his retelling to come to the conclusion you can only do the whirlwind travel and expenses by informing just such business owners who you are and where you work in which you get comped rooms, food, and meetings with the staff. Also you can't visit all these places and gather the input without using locals and other travelers to tell you about them and using their opinions rather than your own experience. I'm not knocking the author for doing this, I can understand why you need to do so.
The book itself is based on the struggles of an aspiring travel writer and what it takes to be one. Secondary is the attempt to expose the underbelly and tribulations these writers endure and often outright lie about because you can't get paid for negative press. Thomas best writing is in his descriptions of the people he meets as the text is full of flavor and inspiring visions such as finding out what is roommate Inara's actual modeling job consists of or how the unassuming Otto is not to be taken for granted. His random sexual encounters are limited in coverage but his drinking and drug use was a bit much. Maybe cutting down on those could have stretched his money further. It was more like he took the job for the trip and went as a backpacker instead of a guidebook writer only to find out that he needed to do some actual research. Overall, quick read with some amusing misadventures.
July 07, 2008 | |
A tale on being young in the 3rd millennium
...much more than simply throwing stones on his own former glass house, Lonely Planet -- Kohnstamm has committed a grabbing road memoir on travelling through Northwestern Brazil.
One thing is the underload of cash and time and overload of rules and inflexibility his employer set for the (ad)venture into these up and coming tourist destinations, another is the lack of discipline and resistence to the many temptations the same destinations throw in his face. Beautiful and usually not unwilling women, sometimes girls. Cheap alcohol and easy drugs, a less easy drug dealing business, and not at all easy Brazilian policemen. Here a free meal without a deal, there a free night. Kohnstamm's basically just a young man being exposed to choices and often giving in to them. And being honest, and courageous, enough to share them.
True, 'Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?' will certainly make a wannabe travel writer, as well as any potential guidebook buyer -- not only of Lonely Planet but in general! -- think twice. But its first and foremost justification is the journey. A journey which is entertaining but much more so, it is a journey causing the author as well as the reader to reflect on morality, society and even humanity. On a down to earth level, in an almost frighteningly real life universe.
Kohnstamm writes in a slightly philosophical but in no way pretentious language. Behind his inviting style lures a hint of a post-20s male's indignation and self-scepticism. But Kohnstamm also suggests which roads might lead in a more acceptable direction. An absorbing book by a skilled writer with much more to say than simply bashing the standard-setting travel book publisher to earn an easy buck.
July 03, 2008 | |
A Very fun read
I read about this book when all the buzz came out about the Lonely Planet writer you didn't actually visit the location. After the buzz ended up being about nothing, I was still interested in the book.
The writer does an excellent job keeping us in his head as he travels and lives a little on the edge. The story moves well and I found myself really looking forward to getting back to the book.
AS someone who really enjoys travel, I was inspired by the adventureness of the writer. I usually restrict myself to high end hotels and the standard tourists destinations. But it's the times that I have moved off the beaten path that I have found myself enjoying the trip most. Thomas is an expert at finding that route.
If you enjoy travel, it's likely that you'll enjoy this book.
June 30, 2008 | |
Thomas's Inferno 
Author Thomas Kohnstamm must be one of those charming, but thoroughly irresponsible, ne'er-do-wells with whom my past is littered - he certainly has a glib way with words. How else can I explain why I was up all night reading this book, fascination mingled with disgust, as he describes in painful detail his Rabelaisian descent into an underworld of booze, drugs and cheap women while gathering research for the Lonely Planet Guidebook on Brazil.
Whether you are a seasoned traveller or an aficionado of the travel writing genre in all its extremes, you'll want to add this gutter's eye view of travel to your experience, albeit, from the safety of your armchair. But -- be warned - it's not for those of faint heart and queasy stomach. And yet the extreme physical privations Thomas subjects himself to in his quest for information, although perhaps viewed as immoral by many of us, are surely no worse than those endured by the great travellers of the past (Stanley, Scott, Peter Fleming, Eric Newby, Dervla Murphy) and for no better reason.
This book may contain a certain level of hyperbole (one hopes so); after all, hyperbole is the author's business, and he readily describes with an adman's skill how he translates seedy reality into picturesque prose for the guidebook's naïve audience.
Do travel writers go to hell? I'd say Thomas has been there, but hell wouldn't have him.
I know I'll never look at a guidebook the same way again.
June 27, 2008 | |
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