Gullible’s Travels by Cash Peters: Though I’d never heard of Peters, I thoroughly enjoyed this trip through his last months as a radio travel journalist. He’s a cranky Englishman who visits tacky tourist sites, such as the Barbed Wire Museum in Kansas and the General Mills cereal fantasyland within the Mall of America. At the very beginning Peters assures us he is not very interested in pesky facts, so there were several occasions when I wondered how much was embellishment and how much actually happened. But in the end, that doesn’t matter much. The descriptions are brash and witty, and Peters’s frequent asides very amusing, and occasionally even thought-provoking. I was not very convinced by the overarching “plot” of Peters’s decision to leave radio – sure, a change is good after so many years, but I never quite grasped what was so horrible about radio, and what would be so much better about television. However, his concern about the future isn’t as large a part of the book as one would expect. Really, this is a book about a guy visiting places most of us would skip even if we lived nearby. I would not recommend this book to those with a lot of regional pride (he makes several comments on the meanness of Bostonians and the obesity of Minnesotans, for instance), but otherwise this is a fun bit of snark about some of the stranger parts of America.
Also posted on BookCrossing.
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