Newspaper Article

ADVICE FOR THE VAGABOND IN ALL OF US, MINUS THE DETAILS

Morgan, Stephen H

2003

Overview

[Rolf Potts] evidently has spent years living what he preaches. And what he preaches is abstaining from the consumer culture by not acquiring lots of stuff, \"making work serve your interests\" (one of which presumably is to travel a lot), and keeping an open mind to whatever you find out there. He's even open to the reality that most of us can't wander forever and will choose to return to our settled lives, so he defines vagabonding as \"taking an extended time-out from your normal life - six weeks, four months, two years - to travel the world on your own terms.\" Yet his argument is rather thin - or maybe just, well, simple - and he ends up making the same points over and over, in his own words and those of others, to stretch it out to book length. Even so - and despite flurries of \"pop-out quotes\" that annoyingly interrupt the flow of the text and the addition of \"vagabonding voices\" and \"profiles\" at the end of each chapter - this is a rather slim paperback volume. Potts's argument could be made more powerfully and persuasively in a trimmed-down, less repetitious magazine article (which it evidently originally was). Either that or he might have forgone the endless philosophizing and gotten a lot more detailed about how you get from here to there, what there is to do, where to stay, etc.

• Publisher: Boston Globe Media Partners, LLC
• Subject: Books-titles / Nonfiction / Potts, Rolf / Travel / Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel