Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?

A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures Questionable Ethics & Professional Hedonism

By: Thomas Kohnstamm

Narrated by: Paul Boehmer

For those who think that travel guidebooks are the gospel truth.

Wanted: Travel Writer for Brazil

Qualifications Required:

Decisiveness: the ability to desert your entire previous life - including a 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.

©2008 Thomas Kohnstamm (P)2013 Audible Inc.

Amazing book had hardcover had to buy audio

If you could sum up Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? in three words, what would they be?

Honest take on Travel

What did you like best about this story?

Dude is legit traveller sarcastic writing

What about Paul Boehmer’s performance did you like?

Mm sounds like a robot

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

If I had time yeah

Any additional comments?

Don't buy it if u r touchy feels about sex comments it's not pg rated

Bad Narration of a Hateable Protagonist

The author/protagonist is an odious arrogant bastard who comes across as smug and trying to shock you with how edgy he is, how easily he lays gorgeous women, and how he was able t get and accomplish most people's dream job while drunk and partying the whole time. This may sound like a thorough shellacking of the book but I kept listening to it and was eager to get back to it when Ii wasn't listening, because his salacious debacles in Brazil were at least interesting.

The narrator manages to talk like he's in a monotone EXCEPT when he comes across a line that should be deadpan and then he instead reads it like the applause sign has just come on, thus guaranteeing it won't be funny. Seriously I have vowed to avoid any books with this narrator in the future.

Ghastly tedious story

The author spends the first two hours of the book documenting a drug-fueled pub crawl in NYC. No wonder he lost his job.

Ghastly

after a brief interesting period of author's introspection, I could not plod through the self indulgent narcissism re drugs, alcohol and women to get to whatever there is in this sorry excuse for a book about travel writing. No stars if possible

Idiotic douchebaggery galore

What is the sound of one hand clapping? It's this author clapping himself on the back.

The author vacillates between the most well-traveled guy, who tries to wax poetic & altruistically about himself, to the biggest self-serving idiot who has trouble navigating the world, in the span of a paragraph. CONSTANTLY! Bragging about such things does NOT make you funny or interesting! The brush with which he paints himself and his views are frequently contradictory and hypocritical. Frankly, i question the veracity of his tales and his trip. This book is short, but it's also inflated with fluff, as another previous reviewer mentioned the extended pub crawl around NYC.

And the whining! Dear god, the whining and the excuses?! He whines with no one to blame but himself!?

I originally read this book about 13 years ago when i went on my on own RTW trip. I didn't have fond memories of it but was curious about revisiting it since I have spent a lot of time in Brasil since then and remembered that was the main location of this story. So, I thought I'd give it another try, since Amazon Music allows for a "free" audiobook per month. I suspected that this book would not be a "keeper" as i had already disposed of my original paper copy in Europe since that RTW trip and i had briefly thought about travel writing myself.

I honestly hope i threw it in the garbage, so no one else had the misfortune to read it. Having dated a Brasileira and lived there, I have traveled throughout the country extensively, including the Northeast. This book did not provide "saudades". He definitely had "some" true details about Brasil and the northeast, but instead of filling it with interesting cultural tidbits about the country and his travels (which i have tons of such anecdotes and details about the country and it's people and food), he focuses more on his self-indulgences, as if I should care. It wouldn't even be that bad if it wasn't so repetitive. This book would be about half as long, if he cut out his sexual exploits and whining.

It was a slog and a chore, and as i got further along i found myself constantly fast forwarding or skipping parts of chapters. In fact, i'm on the last couple chapters and as the story is now back in NYC again, I have no further interest in him or how this story ends.

I'm not sure if travel writers go to hell but this guy likely deserves to. I don't care about the false pretenses of Lonely Planet or travel writing or what a jackass this guy is, I'm more concerned of how much of my life was wasted listening to this and the wasted "free" credit. It was neither interesting, entertaining nor informative. The most enjoyable moment of this book was deleting it from my phone.

Pass this one up

This narrator is terrible. It sounds like one of those programs that reads the text on a computer. After 15 minutes I had to return the book because it was that bad. Too bad, it sounded like an interesting book.