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Doug Lansky is an unfunny, one-note writer. In almost every paragraph, he employs a single, childish device to trick you into thinking his adventures are amusing: EXAGGERATION. Lansky's exaggeration comes so thick and fast that you a) immediately stop trusting anything he says, and b) realize how desperate he is to mine laughs out of experiences that were clearly not particularly interesting or funny at the time.

He usually exaggerates with the help of a forced and trite comparison, preferably unflattering:

"As I boarded the Trans-Manchurian in Beijing for my six-day train ride to Moscow, I was greeted by a motherly Russian train attendant who had enough facial hair to knit a pair of leg warmers."

And it only goes downhill from there. Hardly a paragraph passes without some kind of exaggeration, negative caricature, and/or mean-spirited sarcasm. If you're looking for a book where a young American traveler insults the appearance, clothing, language, eating habits, and personal hygiene of most everyone he encounters, this one's for you.

Another of Lansky's key exaggeration tactics, utilized in almost all 60 essays, is the old "cheap shot at a celebrity" trick:

"I jumped on [the alligator's] back and placed both my hands firmly in the 'safety position' on his neck, which was about twice the width of Roseanne Barr's neck."

Only a gifted comic could take a story about alligator wrestling and masterfully turn it into a cheap shot at an overweight celebrity. Bravo.

"[The Old Course at St. Andrews, Scotland] has more lumps than Robert Redford's face, bunkers the size of the Gobi Desert, and other "small" bunkers deep enough to conceal the bodies of numerous golfers who refused to stop swinging away at their ball. The rough is thicker than Don King's hair, and there's usually enough wind to blow the makeup off Tammy Faye Bakker's face."

Some might call this funny. I call it desperate and grasping. And embarrassing. Good travel humor isn't something you impose on your subject with exaggeration and phony comparisons. Good travel humor comes from observing genuinely interesting and amusing things that are inherent in your subject, and rendering them in a way that not only communicates this humor, but also gives your reader a rich and authentic portrait of what you actually experienced. That's not what you find in this book. You find the above. Half the time Lansky goes for the cheap laugh, and the other half he goes for the nonexistent laugh.

Now let's see how Doug generates additional "humor" by flaunting his ignorance and laughing condescendingly at other people's poverty. This is where Lansky's writing goes from bad to downright ugly. Writing about a bus trip in Guatemala, Lansky has this to say:

"All of the windows [of the bus] were jammed shut, probably with thirty-year-old chewing gum left by junior-high baby-boomers in Nebraska before the bus was sold to the Guatemalans."

These sorts of 'wacky' observations display Lansky's essential malevolence. Isn't it funny that Guatemala is so poor they're using ramshackle, decades-old school buses America threw away, and they're such filthy people that they (apparently) haven't cleaned the bus once since they bought it? No, actually, it's not funny at all. And it's even less funny when you're not completely ignorant, and you know that in 1954, when those Nebraskan baby boomers were just being born, the CIA sponsored the overthrow of Guatemala's democratically-elected president and replaced him with dictator Castillo Armas, kicking off 40 years of brutal repression that put a lot more emphasis on liquidating hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans than maintaining a state-of-the-art bus fleet for Doug Lansky to ride around in. A good travel writer might have thrown in a paragraph or two about recent Guatemalan history (you know, context and all), but Lansky isn't here to educate us. No, his schtick is just having a cheap laugh at dirt-poor Guatemala.

"I liked the idea of being isolated in a third-world country, nothing to do but speak Spanish... and avoid death squads."

Yes, mass murder is hilarious when it isn't your people being killed. I can't wait to read about Doug's zany visit to Auschwitz. Whoops, his last name is Lansky. Bet it'll be a while before we see that one. Let's just stick to giggling at the slaughter of those dirty Latin Americans, shall we?

I'm sorry folks, but the oft-repeated charge that Doug Lansky is an "ugly American" sticks. I'll bet that most of those who say "lighten up, it's all in good fun" are American, and therefore unaware of how it feels to be on the receiving end of the smug American superiority complex. It's not funny to be laughed at. And that's what Lansky does.

Just so you know, I'm not a humorless or overly political person. I am in fact a professional comedian who loves travel literature. I wrote this review, my first, because Lansky's book was awful enough to shake my out of my complacency. Where writers like Tim Cahill entertain and enlighten, Lansky just insults. His flippant and callous ignorance does nothing but perpetuate the harmful mentality that the rest of the world is a playground for rich American kids to frolic in, make fun of, and feel superior to. And I hope this review, and more importantly, the bits of his book that I've quoted here, will convince you to give this one a miss.

If you're looking for a "serious" travel book, this isn't it. Lansky's "slacker abroad" schtick is unabashedly about making fun of himself, the places he visits, and the people he meets, and not a source of useful cultural insight or travel tips. Some readers might be offended that he appears to be out for a good time at the expense of really learning about the cultures he travels among, but if you read between the lines, you'll find that the author seems to reflect (momentarily, anyway) on how pampered tourists and partying hostel-hoppers have altered the cultures of so many places in the world that their economies now revolve around showing visitors what they expect to find rather than a continuation of the unadulterated society that once existed. The wry, jaded epilogue about Disney's Epcot Center, which comments on this unfortunate reality, might be the truest piece in the book. As a newly minted international traveler, I can tell you that it's not easy to escape America and its more blandifying influences.

But, this is not the place for a sermon. Bottom line -- funny book. Read it on the airplane.

Nothing is more boring than Aunt Gertrude's slide show of her trip to Italy and France. What makes travel accounts interesting are often the personal details included in the accounts. From Theroux to Bryson, this has always seemed true. Sometimes, a single incident can illuminate the setting and Lansky's stories do just that.

His comic view of travels makes this light reading perfect for travel or a few minutes between clients at work.

Up The Amazon Without A Paddle - 60 Offbeat Adventures Around The World

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Up The Amazon Without A Paddle - 60 Offbeat Adventures Around The World
Doug Lansky
Manufacturer: Meadowbrook Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000PK1CD4

Teaching and Learning in a Multilingual School: Choices, Risks, and Dilemmas is for teachers and teacher educators working in communities that educate children who do not speak English as a first language. At the center of the book are findings from a four-year critical ethnographic case study of a Canadian high school with a large number of emigrant students from Hong Kong and rich descriptions of the multitude of ways teachers and students thought about, responded to, and negotiated the issues and dilemmas that arose. The solutions and insights they derived from their experiences of working across linguistic, cultural, and racial differences will be extremely valuable to educators in other locales that have become home to large numbers of immigrant families. The book is designed to help readers think about how the issues and dilemmas in the case study manifest themselves in their own communities and how to apply the insights they gain to their own teaching and learning contexts:

* Each chapter includes four components: an excerpt from the ethnographic study; an analytic commentary on the ethnographic text drawn from a variety of theoretical perspectives and academic disciplines (including interactionist sociolinguistics, language minority education, English as a Second Language education, critical literacy, anti-racist education, and critical teacher education); a pedagogical discussion; and suggestions for further reflection and discussion.

* The book features the use of ethnographic play writing to engage readers with the issues that arise in multicultural/multilingual schools. The author's play Hong Kong, Canada is included in its entirety and is used to stimulate further discussion of the issues raised in each of the chapters.

* Although it is organized around two different kinds of schooling dilemmas--dilemmas of speech and silence, and dilemmas of discrimination--everyday dilemmas of curriculum and assessment are also discussed throughout the book.

* A methodological discussion of the choices the author made while designing, conducting, and writing up the critical ethnographic case study makes the book useful in qualitative research methodology courses.

* A set of strategies and activities is provided for helping students develop English oral presentation skills.

Adolescence worldwide is a life period of role restructuring and social learning. Free-time activities provide opportunities to experiment with roles and develop new adaptive strategies and other interpersonal skills that have an impact on development, socialization, and the transition to adulthood. Leisure provides a rich context in which adolescents can gain control over their attentional processes and learn from relationships with peers, but it also has potential costs, such as involvement in deviant and risk behaviors. This volume is a valuable contribution to the research and discussion of this critical topic.

This is the 99th volume in the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development.

Teaching Middle School Social Studies: Who is at Risk?: An article from: Social Education

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Teaching Middle School Social Studies: Who is at Risk?: An article from: Social Education
Sherry L. Field , Ron Wilhelm , Pat Nickell , John Culligan , and Jan Sparks
Manufacturer: National Council for the Social Studies
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital