Kelly and Quang's Global Roam

I like to read the Rake. It's a free magazine circulated in the Twin Cities area. I'm always impressed that it's free. It's printed on glossy paper, not newsprint, and has nice design elements.

The July issue has a book review in it titled Holiday in Cambodia. It was written by Brad Zellar and is more about his musing on the state of modern-day travel writing than it is a book review. He wrote the piece after reading, he explained, six issues of The Best American Travel Writing over a couple months' time. He was struck by the fact that many of the essays were "...perilous and disheartening dispatches that go well beyond the merely exotic to the truly terrifying."

Zellar wonders about this. Newstand travel magazines are selling issues chock full of the "ten newest Caribbean hot spots" to work-weary Americans, yet a whole other genre of travel writing exists. These travel writers are trekking off to Uganda and witnessing genocide. Why witness genocide when you could be tanning on the beach?

Here are some of Zellar's conclusions:

"The newest generation of travel writers (and some are already old hands) is up to something else entirely."

"...a writer has to be willing to suffer, not only to risk life and limb, but also to venture to far-flung places most of us will never feel inclined to visit, and are unlikely otherwise to think about."

"It is a compulsion that can no longer be explained as the simple desire to go where few Western people have been, or to challenge the limits of human endurance; rather it signals a willingness - and in many cases, an apparent need - to go where few Americans in their right minds would voluntarily go, and to stare hard at things the majority of us expend a great deal of psychic energy trying to ignore: forsaken cities, war zones, ruined and obliterated landscapes, sites of natural, ecological or economic disasters and/or inconceivable poverty and squalor. If the things these writers have to show and tell us are a jolting departure from the vacation fare we’re subjected to by friends and co-workers, maybe it’s precisely that jolt that makes those things worth looking at, and into. Maybe they’re worth a visit, however discomfiting, from the comfort of our easy chairs."