For the first book for the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge, I picked up this book. I had thought that I bought it from the Quality Paperback Club around the turn of the century, but a blog post from 2007 indicates I bought it at a garage sale or a book sale in the waning months of that year. Presumably a used book store or a yard sale, as one of the pages has a stain on it and the bottom of the pages has a marker’s mark on it. Maybe I just thought about buying it from the Quality Paperback Club. Maybe not–I don’t remember how late into the century I might have dabbled in that particular mechanism for expanding one’s library rapidly.
So, the setup is this: Right before his wedding in 2000, the author’s fiancé calls it off. But he’s already paid for the honeymoon, a trip to Costa Rica, as well as the venue and reception. So he goes ahead with a party for the guests who were coming, apparently mostly his friends, and then he convinces his brother to come on the honeymoon with him–which gives him the idea, since he’s just been demoted or sideways assigned at work, to quit his job and spend a year traveling the world with his brother.
I mean, that’s the setup. He goes into flashback a bit about his relationship and his job and does a bit of self-reflection. He seems to come from money, and his job out of school was in the political realm, so about ten years into his career, he’s a highly paid and very connected Californian (Republican) lobbyist for the Irvine Corporation which is the major developer behind Irvine, California. He met his fiancé in Washington when he was working for a member of Congress and she was a graphic designer. From the flashbacks, it seems like he was always in the driver’s seat of the relationship, making plans for the both of them–moving them to Seattle and then California and then pushing. When she began having panic attacks, he proposed, and she separated from him for a while, but when they got back together, the wedding was on again until it was not. He reflects, eventually, that he really had a template for life and she was a part of it, but he doesn’t express remorse, really.
So: They go to Europe; his brother, a part-time but successful realtor with a number of rental properties, buys a Saab because they will let you pick it up at the factory and insure it for six months if you want to take it on a tour of Europe with it. So they do, staying with friends in Prague and Moscow and then driving through Turkey to Syria, gaining entry with a photo of the author with George W. Bush (he also has one with Gore just in case–the election had not yet taken place). Then! They take a tour of southeast Asia with stops in Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and other places. Followed by a tour of the southwest United States, briefly (not really depicted). Then a tour of South America, including Brazil, Venezuela, Peru (and Machu Picchu), and Trinidad. Then, wow, they’re famous, apparently, for the dispatches that the author has been sending to his ninety-seven-eight-nine-year-old step-(great?)-grandmother, who has been sharing them with the other residents of her nursing home–and they’ve appeared in the local papers and whatnot. So he gets a chance to go on a junket without his brother all paid for, and then he and his brother go to Africa, where they can go on safari and slag on white South Africans before wrapping up the book. The book interleaves interactions with the step-grandmother, and at the end, she dies and leaves he and his brother a bundle. He goes on to become a travel writer, and the back cover of this book says his brother and he are traveling for a new book.
I intended to, and I’m going to, count this book in the Vacation category because it’s somewhere between that and memoir–it’s not a travel book, for although it does talk about the places he goes, the places are a little in the background to him being in those places, reflecting on his life and the world in those places, and trying to reconnect with his younger brother in those places. I cannot say that I can really identify with the fellow–he’s traveling the world from a place of fiscal security and, to be honest, confidence that I presume is borne of being positioned for and enjoying success at a high level. I mean, I would not try to talk my way across a border in the Middle East. Maybe I’ve ended up like a dog that’s been beat too much–not sure what percentage of my life just covering up, but it’s probably measurable. But I digress.
At any rate, an interesting book, at any rate. A bit rushed in the ending–the Africa trip is given pretty short shrift–but I’m not likely to seek out the sequels.
And, oh, how the world has changed in 25 years.
