World Travel by Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever (2 ★)

World Travel: An Irreverent Guide by Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever

To start with, this book is not by Anthony Bourdain. His assistant, Laurie Woolever pulled this book together from a conversation they had before his death, his work on various TV shows, and some basic research about the places listed. I was excited to see this at my library because I loved listening to Anthony Bourdain’s other audiobooks, and despite a strong start, it ended up falling completely flat.

World Travel is narrated by Anthony Bourdain’s brother, which I think was a nice touch; their voices share some qualities and it made for a pleasant listen. As far as the actual content of the book goes, it got boring and repetitive very quickly and it took me over 6 months to finish even on 1.25x speed.

There just isn’t a need for a book like this any more. All of the information that isn’t about food is easily found on Google. I think it would be mildly more interesting if you’re about to go to one of the places in the book, but then why would you want a whole book with random travel advice about staying in the Ritz Carlton or the Four Seasons (again, Google is your friend) in random places just for one little entry?

The places (and I keep saying places because there are both individual cities and entire countries as separate entries) are arranged in alphabetical order which is really strange and disjointed to listen to. I would’ve much preferred they were arranged by region, continent, language, or anything else. The ending was also completely sudden after the last location, with no outro or conclusion of any kind.

It was fine for background listening but I would not “read” this as a printed book or recommend it to anyone. Even diehard Bourdain fans would already have heard most of this content before as it is pulled from his other work. The best parts were the occasional essays or insights from people in the location being described, but they were few and far between the bland transportation descriptions and tipping percentages preferred by taxi drivers in various parts of the world.

Rating: ★★
2/5 stars