I don’t like to review a book if I haven’t read the entire thing. In this case, I’m going to make an exception. Just figure that information into your critique. Thomas Kohnstamm’s “Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?” has a great title, but after reading over half of it, I had to conclude “maybe they should.”Kohnstamm writes about his first ever “real” travel writing assignment after blowing off his Wall Street job, abandoning his New York apartment and leaving his girlfriend. He travels to Brazil where he proceeds to drink, snort and sleep his way around the country, attempting to make haphazard notes to format into the next Lonely Planet guide to Brazil.

As an expose, it certainly does its job. I now have extreme skepticism of any travel guide, knowing that they frequently send people out with no supervision or experience and the writers may not visit ANY of the places that they write about or may just shamelessly fabricate information (after all, how can you know that there have NEVER been buses running to Paraguay 5 times per day, maybe it was true when the book was written, you’ll think, but has only recently changed).

Kohnstamm freely admits to selling drugs and making up information, which is about when my appetite for this book turned completely sour (before that, I was mostly apathetic). If you want to become a travel writer, then this is probably a good book to read (hopefully, you’ll read it as a “what not to do”).

Everyone else, whether you enjoy travel or not, should probably just avoid it altogether.