Praise

“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

“The best travel book since Gulliver’s, but with better Yahoos and fewer boring old Houyhnhnms.” –P.J. O’Rourke

“You’ll laugh till you lose it with Craig Nelson, as this wisecracking runaway escorts readers to his version of the outer limits in Let’s Get Lost: Adventures in the Great Wide Open. Nelson, who grew up in a Texas suburb where he learned early on the power of unpredictability, is determined to visit the few remaining places on Earth that still differ a little from home, places where great mystery and romance are still a part of the landscape. He’s particularly fond of regions where he seems as exotic to the people and creatures that he encounters as they seem to him. Whether sloth-watching in the forests of the Amazon, hunting with Tanzania’s bushmen, communing with orangutans in Borneo and gorillas in Uganda, and dancing with the Dani in New Guinea, Nelson is a wonderful guide. He finds what’s surprising and takes readers along for an exploration that might otherwise leave them squeamish.This is traveling, and travel writing, at its best – an honest look at cultural differences that might make you wrinkle your nose, hike up your skirt and shudder, but without the “I’m right, you’re wrong” kind of judgment that usually goes with the grimace. Not above playing the fool – an endearing feature in any traveler – Nelson leads readers to the ends of the Earth and into the kind of culture clashes where someone generally ends up embarrassed. Fortunately, he seems to understand that it’s so much more civilized to ensure that the someone isn’t your host. In his efforts to put all parties at ease in some thoroughly challenging situations, he is continually entertaining, keeping everyone concerned unbalanced and amused with his sensational chatter and clowning. In the midst of his antics – the Fruit-Eating Bat Dance, the cannibal kissing, the serenades for the Lalati women – he delivers on the profound realization that the only way to really get away from it all is to find an escape from yourself.”– Linda Watanabe McFerrin, San Francisco Chronicle

“Craig Nelson’s Let’s Get Lost is intelligent, funny and DANGEROUSLY informative. I love it.” –Lynne Russell, CNN

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, Amazon.co.uk

“Get ready to laugh your way around the world with Let’s Get Lost. We’re lucky Craig Nelson made it through customs with his razor-sharp wit.” –Jane Wagner, author,The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe

“Why suffer the blinding headaches, dizziness and extreme nausea that comes with climbing 16,000 feet straight up the Andes in under six hours — especially when Craig Nelson has already gone to Machu Picchu for us? But ‘we must go for ourselves,’ he argues. Not just to this ancient Incan pilgrimage site, but also to the Tomb of Hatshepsut in Egypt, the Great Wall of China, India’s Ganges River, the Kenyan plain of Maasai Mara, and a host of other dangerous and offbeat places. Nelson knows he’s a white guy staring at the natives, and his gentle self-mockery makes him a most likeable tour guide. Add his knowledge of world history, anthropology and sociology, and a keen eye for the trappings of late monopoly capitalism — McDonald’s is everywhere; native Kenyans peddle Visa cards on American television — and the result is a wild summer ride that requires no safety belts.” –Emily Drabinski, Out

“Let’s Get Lost is a tour de force of travel and wonderful writing; a great book.” –Jane and Michael Stern, authors, The Encyclopedia of Pop Culture

“Nelson proves his main rule of the road: that he ‘can safely go anywhere in the world, and make real contact with people who are completely alien to me in their culture, in their language and in their civilization.’ At his best, his keen eye for detail captures those moments that offer escape from the dreaded ‘global homogenization’ that he sees almost everywhere else.” – Publisher’s Weekly