Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon

In Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon Mr. Palahniuk comes at the Rose City from two directions: Offbeat points of interest and very offbeat personal memoir.In the former, the curiosities he offers as worthy of investigation are very refreshing and dig deeper than the usual pap regarding trendy restaurants and standard tourist attractions. For example, the section on haunted places included sites that were new to me and did not overlap at all with the usual list that shows up in the Oregonian every Halloween. Additionally, his exploration of the Oregon Zoo is very entertaining and focuses on the eccentricities of the animals as told from the very off-the-cuff perspective of the keepers, insights you will never get from a Tracy (never met a zoo story I didn't like!!!) Barry KGW News 8 broadcast.The personal memoir takes the form of vignettes spread throughout the book detailing the kind of stories you might tell your drinking buddies after the second pitcher at Produce Row and are uniformly compelling and often hilarious. I was lucky enough to hear Mr. Palahniuk offer up the "Acid Trip at Laser Floyd" story at a library reading earlier this year and this coupled with the "Midnight Rock Video Shoot at the Cornos Meat Counter" are worth the price of the book alone.Fugitives and Refugees is a very unique and breezy read that I highly recommend to anyone living in, near or at least familiar with Portland, Oregon.

This is Chuck Palahniuk's travel guide to Portland, Oregon. He gives a pronunciation/terms list so that visitors won't sound so much like outsiders when talking to local residents. Knowing the other work of Palahniuk, you can go into this book expecting this to be an unconventional travel guide. Palahniuk has a unique outlook on life and what is worth seeing and he presents that in this book.There is no narrative in this travel book, but it is broken up into sections. In each section, Palahniuk lists (and describes) various things to see and do in Portland. One section may be on eateries, another on haunted locations, yet another on gardens. In each section, we are given off-the-beaten-path ideas of what to do and where to go in Portland. Even if you have no interest in traveling to Portland, this makes for an interesting book to read. You get a sense of the city and the city's fringe elements. It gives a different flavor than what you might expect from a Fodor's travel guide. I would recommend this book to fans of Palahniuk or anyone looking to read an interesting and different travel guide.

When I got the book I was expecting anecdotes from Chuck about his experiances in Portland. While these were present, and hilarious, the book is mostly about various spots in Portland. In the beginning it drags a bit when discussing restaurants and the like, but towards the end it picks up tremendously. A good short read, you can finish it in half a day, and worth the time and money.