Matt GrossRecensioner

As the author himself admits, a very disjointed style, but an interesting take, well if somewhat confusingly told.½

What made Matt Gross' columns as "The Frugal Traveler" for the New York Times so engaging was the fact that he is, first and foremost, a good writer. He tells a story -- not about the broad details of a place, but about how he experienced it. There are far too many "be sure to eat at this restaurant" guides out there today. What Matt is able to do is give his readers a reason to go out and explore.

This book continues what has worked in his past writing, blending travel stories about people and places with his own memoirs and experiences as a travel writer. This book is not a travel guide -- and other reviewers may complain about this fact, but I see it as a strength. What Matt does well in this book is tell a good story.

And, at the end of the day, what all of us want from our travels are those great stories.

This book wasn't what I expected. I thought it would be more of a travel log but it was almost more of a memoir about his career. Not enough information or stories about countries he visited. I didn't finish it.

Better when Gross is telling travel stories; less so when he starts philosophizing. Stick to travel writing, please. When he starts monologuing you realize he seems like kind of a jerk. But the actual travel stories are good and redeem the book.

Glowing reviews of this 2013 book by former “Frugal Traveler” and “Getting Lost” columnist for the New York Times, made me want to read it. As a young man, Gross picked up and moved to Ho Chi Minh City and from there explored more of Southeast Asia, worked for a local Vietnamese newspaper, and eventually got himself various travel writing gigs. In 2006, the Times gave him a budget for a three-month, around-the-world trip, which was to establish his “frugal traveler” identity. This, he says, was the job “everybody called ‘the best job in the world’—and an opportunity ripe for fucking up.” Which he did, at first.
The book is a mix of his travel experiences, which I enjoyed tremendously, and ruminations on the larger meaning of travel, which weren’t as interesting. The requirements for travel have changed for him over the years—from carrying a single bag to traveling with a wife and infant, from the ability to set his own schedule to being part of a family with all its competing needs. Truthfully, staying home has come to have its own satisfactions.
Across his whole travel-writing career, Gross visited “fifty or sixty countries,” ate their food (whole chapter on the resultant digestive laments), learned to cook much of it, and wrote hundreds of articles for the Times and others. He sums up everything he learned about traveling frugally in two pages in the middle of the book, which can be boiled down further to: use the Web to find deals and recommendations on airfare, lodging, and food. Airfare: use local and in-country airlines. Lodging: stay with others where you can, Airbnb, works when you can’t. Food: be adventurous. Social life: find local connections through Facebook friends-of-friends-of-friends.
The book’s full title is The Turk who Loved Apples and Other Tales of Losing My Way Around the World, which refers to his early days, as he was learning how to travel, yes, relatively frugally. Through an organization called World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms—a network of farmers who will provide volunteers free food and lodging in exchange for some farmwork—he stayed a few days on a rural apple farm in Turkey. Gross bonded with this farmer, an engineer who’d left his profession to do what he loved, and learned from that encounter that frugality “was not an end unto itself but one of the many traveler’s tools, a means of getting closer to exotic lands and foreign peoples.” And getting closer to people—from fellow expats in Ho Chi Minh City to refugees in Calais to members of his wife’s and even his own family—is what Gross is all about.

Read in February/2015. Matt Gross could not write himself out of a wet paper bag. I don't even know what warrants the extra star or two here. Very immature and pointless writing. He seems like a college kid out on his 1st trip w/o Mom or Dad....not interested in anything new in other countries (which in this book are very few) other than hangin' and partyin'. A waste of time.

Read my review here: http://from7eight.com/the-turk-who-loved-apples/

not like any travel book I have ever read. I have no idea what the point of this book was.

What happens when a New York Times travel writer, a man who actually depends on traveling for his living, becomes bored with the routine of traveling on someone else's dime? If you're Matt Gross, author of The Turk Who Loved Apples, you stop writing the paper's "Frugal Traveler" column and start writing its "Getting Lost" column instead. (Despite Gross's claim that his sense of direction is so good that it is almost impossible for him to get lost in a strange city, his new column was a success.)

The man is a natural born traveler. Upon finishing college, when he was just 22 years old, Gross did something that would change the course of his life: he moved to Viet Nam pretty much just to see what would happen. There he would eventually go to work for one of the country's English language newspapers, a job that brought him the credentials he needed to freelance a few travel and review columns on the side. That work led to the Times job and Gross has been writing about travel and food ever since.

The Turk Who Loved Apples is all about the evolution of one traveler, a man who traveled so much in just a few years that he quit enjoying it - especially the "frugal" part of the equation because, as he puts it, there are only just so many ways to save money while on the road, and recycling them and trying to make them seem fresh became more of a chore than it was worth.

The book begins with Gross's Viet Nam experiences and, with flashbacks now and then to Viet Nam, covers some of his other travel "adventures" as well. Travelers who prefer to stay off the much beaten tourist paths of the world will find Gross to be a kindred spirit. As the years went by, the author more and more often decided that the most important thing about traveling is making new friends. He began to focus more on experiencing new countries and cities the way the locals experience them, hoping to make - and keep - friends from each of the places he visited. As a self-styled "wanderer" myself when time allows, I was both intrigued and inspired by his experiences in this regard.

I recommend The Turk Who Loved Apples to travel memoir enthusiasts with one minor caveat. Gross presents a rather cavalier attitude toward women that can be a bit off-putting, particularly as regards his relationship to one Vietnamese prostitute. The relationship he describes, whether Gross intends it or not, makes the prostitute appear to be a very sympathetic, if not tragic, character while leaving the reader wondering a bit about Gross himself - a case of, in my opinion, too much information.

Bottom Line: Good book for real travelers and armchair travelers alike.

Rated at: 4.0