Let's Get Lost: Adventures in the Great Wide Open

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In this overenthusiastic and sometimes overwritten collection of travel adventures, Nelson (Finding True Love in a Man-Eat-Man World: The Intelligent Guide to Gay Dating, Sex, Romance, and Eternal Love) proves his main rule of the road: that he "can safely go anywhere in the world, and make real contact with people who are completely alien to me in their culture, in their language and in their civilization." Nelson survives a Chinese "friendship tour," which touches down in Tiananmen Square and Shanghai, takes the hallucinogenic drug ayahuasca in the Amazon with a shaman and explores the spiritual side of Egypt's Aswan Dam. Along the way, he contemplates the theory of the "momentous stumble" in India when he finds Khajuraho, a gorgeous Brahmin temple about which no one seems to know. Nelson prides himself on how well he can adapt to nature: he learns to live with hyenas, flamingos, tsetse flies and other sub-Saharan African beasts. At his best, Nelson's keen eye for detail captures those moments that offer escape from the dreaded "global homogenization" that he sees almost everywhere else. (Aug.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

It becomes apparent a few paragraphs into this account of his world travels that Nelson aches to be considered the equal of travel/humor writers like Bill Bryson, Tim Cahill, and Redmond O'Hanlon. Demonstrating an alarming lack of sensitivity and resorting frequently to puerile humor, Nelson wanders the globe (often with tour groups) making a big deal of his minor escapades at the must-sees (the Great Wall, the Taj Mahal). Anecdotes of dubious veracity are passed off as fact, and lists take the place of interested observation. On several occasions, Nelson refers to being in the "travel bubble"--a convenient form of isolation many tourists expect and enjoy. Although one does have to credit Nelson with doing his homework--he provides a ten-page Source List from which he gleaned much of the historical detail included in the book--the result leaves the reader feeling as if he produced the book as a tax write-off to finance his travels. Nelson's flippant attitude is far from funny, and few will find him an enjoyable travel companion.--Janet Ross, Sparks Branch Lib., NV Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Dim-witted dispatches from the adventure-travel front, graceless and painfully desperate for laughs, from tenderfoot Nelson, an editor, writer, and agent. First off, Nelson never got lost, though readers might wish he had. He is always in the company of a guide, who is routinely set up as a straw dog for Nelson's sarcastic humor. Nor does he serve, as is his intention, as a kind of common man returning to his readers their forgotten wanderlust and a life of excitement, for Nelson is too busy making fun of his destinations to make them the stuff of dreams. When he isn't being snide about his fellow tourists or taking tired jabs at missionaries and the global homogenization of culture, he•s choking a wheeze out of already mauled subjects. In China, he is "keen to shop for some fab Commie souvenirs," while in India he offers this historical insight: "The Mughals were also one of the most evil and disgusting bunch you could ever hope to meet." Tenzing Norgay, the man who climbed Everest with Hillary, is referred to as a "culture-mingle mongrel," while on the same page the author introduces "Welsh journalist James Morris, who had his willy snipped and became famed travel writer Jan Morris." In Amazonia, he is reduced to "it's eco-embarrassing to admit this but, from then on, at night in the torrential rains, I peed out the window." He commits the ultimate in travel tedium in Tonga, droning on over the state of his belly: One minute it's "if you vomit till you can't anymore, you almost always feel fine again," then comes his "case of constipation like you wouldn't believe." What a shame that places so politically, culturally, and physiographically remote as the Bwindiimpenetrable forest and Mandewar have for one of their emissaries so crude a mouthpiece as Nelson. (maps, not seen)