Raphael Kadushin

this was much less about travel and place than i expected, but that's ok. that means it was more about personal relationships and exploration, which i like to read about. most of the stories didn't grab me, though, either by their writing or their content. i did, though, very much like boyer rickel's memory and edmund white's story. and i thought that brian bouldrey's contribution was truly excellent and easily the highlight of the book. i'd read him again without hesitation. this wasn't a bad book, and it has a few nice selections, but overall i wasn't impressed.

from the introduction: "The biggest fiction, in the end, is travel writing's own claim to being an objective genre. What does anyone really know about a foreign place that isn't partly his or her own creation? We're always choosing what we see, what we don't see, and whom we meet; we're always inventing our destinations."… (mer)