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

Nelson, Craig

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0446676039 ISBN 13: 9780446676038

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2000

Synopsis

Craig Nelson has experienced places most people only dream about. He has walked the Great Wall of China; taught New Guinea cannibals how to dance; communed with a sign-language-speaking orangutan in Borneo; gotten into an altercation with the People's Liberation Army in Tiananmen Square; and taken psychoactive pharmaceuticals with a male witch in the depths of the Amazon jungle. In this vastly entertaining, often hilarious, and sometimes poignant book, he shares his global jaunts and haunts with armchair travelers everywhere.

About this title

Review

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 Buckley

Review

'charm and wonder and a genuine excitement for new things seen' OBSERVER

The best travel book since Gulliver's but with better yahoos and fewer boring old houyhnhnms. (PJ O'Rourke)

What a phenomenal trip Craig Nelson takes us on! I don't know which made me laugh harder, the outrageous people and places Craig describes, or his hilarious travel antics. Let's Get Lost is a gem! (Lily Tomlin)

About this edition

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0446676039
• ISBN 13: 9780446676038
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384