“No Touch Monkey!” and “Somebody’s Heart is Burning”

Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 02.16.04 | 9:18 PM ET

The Los Angeles Times published a review of five travel books on Sunday. Among the recent titles surveyed was Ayun Halliday’s “No Touch Monkey! And Other Lessons Learned Too Late,” which features Halliday’s personal essays about experiences as a backpacker traveler. Critic Marion Winik liked it. “What you will remember…is the author,” Winik writes. “For example, what you recall about Amsterdam is that it was there our narrator was attacked by infuriated prostitutes. Sumatra is not a place to dislocate your knee, and watch out for the marijuana in Saigon or you’ll end up like Halliday and her boyfriend, flat on your back in the guest house, praying to come down.” Winik also enjoyed Tanya Shaffer’s “Somebody’s Heart Is Burning: A Woman Wanderer in Africa.” Winik writes that Shaffer “creates crisply focused, emotionally rich portraits of the people she spent time with during her year as a volunteer and traveler in Ghana and elsewhere.” Among the other titles Winik reviewed—better late than never, we suppose—were Mark and Rae Jacobson’s “12,000 Miles in the Nick of Time: A Semi-Dysfunctional Family Circumnavigates the Globe” (it “manages to rankle rather than amuse”); Paul Theroux’s “Dark Star Safari” (“Theroux may be a crank…but his storytelling and eye for detail are unmatched”); and Geoff Dyer’s “Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It” (“mostly humorous essays”). The review is available online only to print edition subscribers.

Tags: