Gullible's Travels: The Adventures of a Bad Taste Tourist

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 show more 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. show less

This book was a good change from the normal travel writer books. The author specifically targeted the lesser known (and lesser wanted) tourist attractions. Though at times I would have liked more fact, less fiction I still found enough to keep me interested.

Whilst I wouldn't want that for a job I would love to travel around to all the places he went and more. I can't wait to get out there and start having my own bad-taste adventures.

This tour of some uncommon locations/museums around the US is laugh-out-loud funny.