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Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism | 
 enlarge | Author: Thomas Kohnstamm
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
Buy New: $7.84
You Save: $6.11 (44%)
New (30) Used (9) from $7.50
Avg. Customer Rating:  31 reviews
Sales Rank: 17569
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 0307394654
Dewey Decimal Number: 910.4092
EAN: 9780307394651
ASIN: 0307394654
Publication Date: April 22, 2008
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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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 26 more reviews...
 Anyone who ever wanted to be a travel writer July 25, 2008
Funny, poignant, over-the-top, a must read for anyone who ever aspired to becoming a travel writer. I never liked guide books, have never bought one, and only occasionally glance at them at book stores. Somehow they always turned me off. This book confirms that I've been doing the right thing!!! Rather research destinations on the internet from the countries themselves, comments by other travelers, including Lonely Planet's ThornTree, and write about it yourself, and if only in travelogues to friends.
The looooong descriptions of his or his friends' sexual exploits, endless drinking and drugging detract and add at the same time. Too long sometimes, I would have liked to read what he actually wrote about the places he never visited.
The book gave me many ideas, and I will rework my own travel manuscript and finally publish. So, wannabe travel writers, read this and start writing. You can do it too!!!
 A Perfect Description of a Lost Year July 20, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book feels like a record; the record that the artist says nearly killed them. The one that almost did them in, despite the critical acclaim or career advancement that it provided. Reading the beginning of Kohnstamm's escape from New York is like the second a paper cut hits - there's no pain, but you know it is i coming and you know it is going to gush. One expensive bottle of alcohol and a fistfight into it, you're on your way through Kohnstamm's journey through travel hell. It's exactly as you'd want it to be; a bit scandalous, a bit egregious, a bit tell-all. Nothing here really shocked me but it did give me a greater appreciation of what it is All About. I'd daydreamed about what a Lonely Planet author would have to go through on a daily basis - it turns out that my daydreams were on point. If you like travel, writing and sordid tales.....I'd recommend this book. I read it from cover-to-cover in one flight across America.
Great read July 7, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
Boy in Brazil July 7, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
A tale on being young in the 3rd millennium July 3, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
...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.
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