Let's Get Lost Book

I'd like to travel with Craig Nelson--but that would be a shame, since he is at his best when knocking about alone, enduring bad beds, bugs and bureaucrats, feeding his travel fix. In Let's Get Lost, that means meeting "people living on the other side of nowhere" who want nothing to do with the 20th or even the 11th or fifth centuries. "I like to go look at them" is his motto. While the book begins with the least engaging essay, on China, read on to his escapades in Egypt, South America, India and Indonesia. He even finds humour in places he doesn't go: "I wouldn't get to see the Asmat, those extraordinary sculpture cannibals of the New Guinea swamps, who ate Michael Rockefeller." Sidestepping the worship-or-trash the natives genres, Nelson actually seems to like the people and places most of us will never see. He easily weaves in threads of past trips to reveal clever, if unusual, connections: the preponderance of cow worship in Third World cultures, for example. His writing is sharpest when he's on his own and least successful when recounting his travel with groups: The essay via a state-sponsored bus tour of China is pub banter, clever but tiring. He is otherwise generous with humour and spare with the superlatives, so when he got to the Baliem Valley in New Guinea and said the place was "knock-you- out beautiful", I believed him. In the world of travel narrative, that's no small feat. --Kathleen BuckleyRead More