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The Lunatic Express: Discovering the World . . . via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes |  | Author: Carl Hoffman
Publisher: Broadway
Category: Book
List Price: $24.99
Buy New: $14.43
as of 9/6/2010 22:15 PDT details
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New (32) Used (9) from $13.99
Rating:  22 reviews
Sales Rank: 40173
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.3
ISBN: 0767929802
Dewey Decimal Number: 910.4
EAN: 9780767929806
ASIN: 0767929802
Publication Date: March 16, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Indonesian Ferry Sinks. Peruvian Bus Plunges Off Cliff. African Train Attacked by Mobs. Whenever he picked up the newspaper, Carl Hoffman noticed those short news bulletins, which seemed about as far from the idea of tourism, travel as the pursuit of pleasure, as it was possible to get. So off he went, spending six months circumnavigating the globe on the world's worst conveyances: the statistically most dangerous airlines, the most crowded and dangerous ferries, the slowest buses, and the most rickety trains. The Lunatic Express takes us into the heart of the world, to some its most teeming cities and remotest places: from Havana to Bogotá on the perilous Cuban Airways. Lima to the Amazon on crowded night buses where the road is a washed-out track. Across Indonesia and Bangladesh by overcrowded ferries that kill 1,000 passengers a year. On commuter trains in Mumbai so crowded that dozens perish daily, across Afghanistan as the Taliban closes in, and, scariest of all, Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., by Greyhound.
The Lunatic Express is the story of traveling with seatmates and deckmates who have left home without American Express cards on conveyances that don't take Visa, and seldom take you anywhere you'd want to go. But it's also the story of traveling as it used to be -- a sometimes harrowing trial, of finding adventure in a modern, rapidly urbanizing world and the generosity of poor strangers, from ear cleaners to urban bus drivers to itinerant roughnecks, who make up most of the world's population. More than just an adventure story, The Lunatic Express is a funny, harrowing and insightful look at the world as it is, a planet full of hundreds of millions of people, mostly poor, on the move and seeking their fortunes.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 22
 A Book to Savor March 20, 2010
Ben F. Noviello
16 out of 20 found this review helpful
In less talented hands, "The Lunatic Express" could have ended up condescending, maudlin, exploitive, or worst of all, dull. Fortunately, Carl Hoffman is far too good of a writer to allow this to occur. Instead, Mr. Hoffman has given us a book that, much like the world it describes, is complex, colorful, exciting, and never less than engrossing.
The underlying concept of the book is to experience modes of transportation around the world that would give safety inspectors the vapours. After reading these descriptions I will never again complain about beltway traffic. Yet Mr. Hoffman is never insulting. He implicitly recognizes that there are reasons for the way things are, and manages to imbue his descriptions with a sense of dignity.
This respectful approach extends to the many interesting individuals he encounters, both on and off the road. He celebrates their idiosyncrasies, but never becomes patronizing. These people emerge as fully-rounded characters who live in a world fundamentally different from our own.
And this world bursts from the book with brilliant realism. Mr. Hoffman straddles the boundary between prose and poetry, even when what is being described is sometimes terrifying. Indeed, there are sections of this book that are so vivid and exciting that the reader feels the need afterwards for a stiff drink. (Or at least some soothing tea.)
Further, like all good travel writers, Mr. Hoffman is able to express the personal impact of his travels in a way that is honest and never narcissistic. We get the sense that these travels have changed him, much as reading this book changes the reader.
For me, personally, this book is special because it made me fully appreciate that for millions of people daily life consists of a crowed and frantic maelstrom. It made me realize that the entire planet could be considered something of a Lunatic Express. And with this knowledge comes a greater respect and admiration for the world as a whole, and for individuals, like Carl Hoffman, who bring it to us.
smart travel book -- entertaining and thoughtful March 30, 2010
Cecil Natapov (New York, New York)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
I worried that this was going to be kind of slim, like Sebastian-Junger-On-A-Risk-Tour, and kind of exploitative. But it's the opposite. It's like a really really long article from the Atlantic, or a series of articles, where you learn what life is like around the world, and how the many billions of people who do not live in the first world get around. There's plenty of fascinating risk-taking, yes (he hitchhikes through the gobi desert...in 38 degrees below zero weather; and takes a bus tour...in Afghanistan, while the war is going on!), but Hoffman is a highly empathic writer who makes you feel like you know what it is like to commute in India, or be a taxi driver in Kenya, or to ride an ancient wooden ferry in the Amazon. He has some great Harper's-type stats about risk levels, but he is most interesting when talking about what it means to be affluent (quiet and privacy, as well as safety, and liability laws, not to mention bathrooms in trains...), and showing what you only can learn about the world and what it means to be human by traveling on an Indonesian ferry, in steerage, for a week, with roughnecks on their way home from months in an oilfield.
You wouldn't want to do it, but you'd love to read about it... April 2, 2010
R Candlewood (New Jersey)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The real magic of this book is that Hoffman captures the thrilling sense of possibility and romance of travel AND the hard, dusty, bone-wearying hardships. Early on he quotes another writer about the simple essence of travel: A boat. An island. A journey. Nothing could be simpler, and more exciting. What's out there? What's the world really like? It's such a powerful and profound impulse, that of discovery. And yet at the same time, any journey is full of danger and peril.
THE LUNATIC EXPRESS overflows with the wonders of discovery - you'll love reading about swaying hammocks on a boat on the Amazon, about islands so small and isolated that friends walk down dirt roads hand in hand with each other, about the incredibly crazy, intense trains of Mumbai, and so on. But you'll also love reading about the people who take those trips as a matter of daily, weekly, or monthly survival, going from job to job on dangerous conveyances, just trying to make ends meet. Hoffman writes that his friends thought he was crazy to subject himself to third-class travel on ferries that could sink or long bus trips on muddy cliffside roads in South America, and they're right. But pushing himself into that uncomfortable place is what's so rewarding for Hoffman - and the reader - because he meets people and has experiences and grows in his understanding of the world in a way that only the best, most challenging possible journeys provide.
And he writes about it all beautifully. I don't think I'm brave enough to do anything that Hoffman did (or that the people he writes about do routinely), but I was very happy to read about it all and marvel at how much is happening every day around the world that we never, ever think about. Great book.
Great book August 25, 2010
Tyler Bridges (Lima, Peru)
Hoffman grabs you from the get-go with the fabulous title. He then delivers a terrific book.
One of Hoffman's challenges was to keep the material fresh as he took the reader from one difficult form of transportation to another. He pulled it off with vivid writing, an eye for detail and compassion for those he meets along the way. He pulls you into his adventure, and you smell, feel and sense the rigors of how he traveled. I marveled at his willingness to endure back-breaking trips on buses (I for one won't do that anymore) and his willingness to put himself in danger, as he did in Afghanistan.
I loved his line where he said, at a certain point, that he just decided to hell with it, he was going to drink the water the locals drank, bathe when they bathed, eat what they ate, etc. I think anyone who has done travel out of the ordinary would identify with the choices and questions that he faces, even if they don't decide to submerge themselves as deeply into the worlds he chose to inhabit.
What ultimately sustains the book are Hoffman's ponderings about life and travel -- eternal questions for the examined life.
This is a great book for anyone who has ever stepped off the beaten path. It's also a great book for college kids, as a way to encourage them to explore before they get settled in life.
The Lunatic Express by Carl Hoffman, an encouraging read for local travelites August 30, 2010
Cynthia (St. Louis, MO United States)
If local travel means putting oneself in the shoes of a local, then travel writer Carl Hoffman
has earned status as expert local travelite with a compelling story to tell. His latest book is The
Lunatic Express: Discovering the World via its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and
Planes. He relays his round-the-world journey on human conveyances that represent how the
global majority transports itself. His trip includes everything from airlines in Cuba to railways in
Africa to ferries in Indonesia and back again through the States via Greyhound buses.
Hoffman was first attracted to local transport in all its harrowing forms through the media
coverage of various disasters. Each chapter begins with a journalistic excerpt about a fateful
incident on some form of public transit. Using these anecdotes as well as statistics about
injuries and deaths, Hoffman plans a route on the world's worst transportation. This goal is not
sensationalism or stuntman bravado. Rather, he aims to contrast the luxury of tourism travel
versus the necessity of how the global poor get from point to point. "I gradually began to
realize," he writes, "that the big numbers of today's tourism industry obscured a parallel reality,
excluded a whole river of people on the move. Excluded, in fact, most of the world's travelers."
Each segment of the trip is its own story, but common threads weave it together. Dualisms
and paradoxes emerge. Hoffman begins by comparing affluent travel and public mass
transit. Transportation reflects the security, comfort, and regulation of affluent societies versus
the danger, overcrowding, and lack of controls in the less developed world. As he traverses
South America on its notorious bus system, he writes "I was starting to trust the efficiency of this
whole ad-hoc, unregulated system."
The dualism of personal space versus touch and contact also reoccurs. In the economics of
third world transport, "speed and maximum capacity are of the essence." He rides matatus, the
minibuses in Kenya that pull people aboard until they reach the absolute limit. He rides trains in
Mumbai where the crushing pressure of the crowds becomes fatal. In an interview about the
book, Hoffman reflects that the trip was a reevaluation of what affluence means. "I've always
sort of thought of it as objects, as things. Traveling as I did for five months, I decided that it really
had nothing to do with things. It was all about space. In places like Indonesia, you're with 3000
people and no personal space whatsoever." Spaces that are private and quiet and clean occurs
to him as a "luxury that is profound."
A final dualism Hoffman explores is connection versus otherness. At times the language
barriers and cultural divides between himself and his fellow passengers overwhelm him. He
spends pages in isolation, receding into himself. Yet the best moments of the book are the ones
where he breaks through the otherness and connects with locals. On a packed ferry in
Indonesia, he achieves this sort of communion. "The more I shed my American reserves,
phobias, disgusts, the more they embraced me. In the weeks ahead I would accelerate what had
started gradually over the miles. I would do whatever my fellow travelers and hosts did. If they
drank the tap-water of Mumbai and Kolkata and Bangladesh, so would I. If they bought tea from
street-corner vendors, so would I. If they ate with their fingers, even if I was given utensils, I ate
with my fingers. Doing so prompted an outpouring of generosity and curiosity that never ceased
to amaze me. It opened the door, made people take me in. That I shared their food, their
discomfort, their danger, fascinated them and validated them in a powerful way."
This passage, and the book as a whole, illustrate the ideas of the local travel
movement. Hoffman continually chooses authenticity and connection with locals over the
beckoning camaraderie of other foreigners. He plunges directly into the dense humanity along
his route and discovers what life is like for the majority of the world's people on the move. Turn
here for encouragement as a local travelite and a reality check for anyone complaining on an air-
conditioned flight.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 22
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