Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?

On the long list of genres we hope enjoy a short life, macho-travel-writer-tell-all is at the top. We’ve seen this before, particularly with last year’s Smile When You’re Lying: Guy lands gig as a travel writer, complains about all of the on-the-road disaffection, gets up to some high jinks, lives it up, humps around.

Kohnstamm is not a particularly sympathetic character from the beginning. A Stanford grad working on Wall Street, he decides to ditch his bougie life for a bougie life. He’s the kind of guy who claims to write his life goals down on Post-it notes stuck to the edges of his computer monitor, and those goals read: “Win or lose a bar fight in a dusty border town” or “Sleep with at least one woman (preferably more) from each continent.” He’s also the kind of guy who writes sentences like these: “She has relatively small breasts, but with a firm shape. I have always believed that the shape, not size, determines the best breasts.”

The book practically overflows with clunky, frat-boy koans like the aforementioned, a sort of Zen and the Art of Being a Knucklehead. The guy gets into all kinds of escapades and sexcapades, persistently (obsessively?) painting himself as the most interesting part of every story. Kohnstamm—who has authored several Lonely Planet guides—hopes readers will learn some life lessons, such as “Maybe if people see what arbitrary bullshit goes into the making of a guidebook, they will realize that it is just a loose tool to give basic information and is not the singular or necessarily the correct way to approach a destination.” Fair enough, but one hardly needs 270 pages of Kohnstamm to draw that conclusion. One doesn’t even need two pages. Oh hell, we don’t need this book at all.