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The End of Elsewhere: Travels Among the Tourists
Books: Travel: Biarritz: Item 6
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The End of Elsewhere: Travels Among the Touristsby Taras Grescoe
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful: Shrewdly observant and mordantly funny, September 11, 2004 Reviewer:Richard McCallum - The End of Elsewhere is a wonderful book that engages the reader on several levels. Firstly, it is an entertaining travelogue, much in the style of Paul Theroux's non-fiction, shrewdly observant and mordantly funny. Grescoe follows the well-trodden paths of modern tourism, from a mock-pilgrimage in Spain, along an escorted bus tour and a Mediterranean cruise, to the remnants of the hippie drug trail in India and the sex tourists of Thailand. The author interleaves his traveler's tales with just the right amount of historical and cultural context: the history of tourism from classical Greece to Cook's Tours, the perils of misleading travel guidebooks and the destructive capacity of eco-tourism, among other subjects. The thoughtful reader will be lead inevitably to re-evaluate his own travel plans - and that, more than entertainment or information, makes this book a very worthwhile read.
From The New Yorker
"Travel writers tend to seek out the world's ever-diminishing pockets of authenticity," Grescoe writes, announcing his perverse decision to "make a point of going exactly where the tourist ruts have been plowed the deepest," by following itineraries that have become generic—the pilgrimage to Santiago (he walks away from Santiago, in order to meet more tourists), sex tourism in Thailand (as a non-participant), the Michelin-guided motor tour of provincial France. En route, he taxonomizes such tourist types as the "budget travel snob," and provides a gloriously trivia-strewn history of tourism. A bus tour of Europe leads to a discussion of the life of Thomas Cook, whose temperance outings grew into the world's first travel agency, while modern European rail-pass tours recall the Grand Tours of the eighteenth century, this ostensible goal of cultural enrichment providing a front for "unsupervised sex and boisterous partying."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
Product Review
?Essential reading.?
?Globe and Mail
?Sheila Copps would have done better to give every household west of Ottawa one of these with the $20 million she squandered on flags.?
?Edmonton Journal
?Read this entertaining book.?
?Enroute
?Sacré Blues forms a GenXer?s guide to Quebec, one that?s witty, well-researched and topical?If Grescoe?s book were put on school reading lists, we?d all be richer for it.?
?Toronto Star
?A terrific study of contemporary Quebec.?
?Vancouver Sun
?Entirely entertaining, insightfully chatty and often delicious?. a revealing, gloves-off journey.? ?Hour magazine
?A thorough, thoroughly entertaining Ski-Doo ride through [Quebec?s] economy, language, climate, and popular and spiritual culture?his is a book to be revisited.?
?Quill and Quire
?Grescoe know what it is to investigate a subject and nothing scares him: Sacré Blues unearths les differences in mores and morals, cuisine and language, immigration and ethnicity, economics and social policy?and much more with zest, precision and remarkable compactness. Grescoe is always interesting and accurate in his wide-angle descriptions of everything from the St-Trite rodeo to the corporate culture of Bombardier?Along the way, he catalogues everyone and everything of value that all of us ought to know about the culture of French Quebec at the beginning of the new century.?
?Globe and Mail
?Well-researched, well-written, funny in all the right places, opinionated and profound when it needs to be without pomposity, Grescoe?s book captures nicely a time-slice of what is truly a distinct society.?
?Halifax Daily News
?Reading his portrait of us, I thought to myself, Boy, I?m glad to live here! Why doesn?t everyone feel the way I do?For the reader little accustomed to what is going on here, a primer like Grescoe?s is exactly what?s needed.?
?Montréal Gazette
?Quebec is a nice place to visit, and you would want to live there?Explaining how foreign cultures go about being distinct is Taras Grescoe?s forte?imagine an extended edition of the Lonely Planet television series, with the hip host being a resident, and you have the flavour of this book?If being well-written and informative are sufficient virtues, it will do well.?
?National Post
?[Sacré Blues] is informed by his extensive travels throughout the province, by [Grescoe?s] keen and observant eye and by a genuine thoughtfulness. Respectful of Quebeckers, but also delighting in some of the cheesier aspects of pop culture, Grescoe sets out to avoid the usual political discourse and explore the fertile tensions which have given Quebec its cultural identity.?
?Ottawa Xpress
From the Hardcover edition.
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