The Battle for Room Service: Journeys to All the Safe Places

Are you fed up with people kayaking across the Sahara or absailing down the North Pole. Do Redmond O'Hanlon, Bruce Chatwin and Dervla Murphy make you feel guiltily like a boring couch potato? Here is a travel writer with a difference. Lawson visits only safe places, where nothing ever happens (Dead Horse, Alaska, to give one example) but describes them in a way that, while it doesn't exactly make you want to visit, makes you glad he did. He is witty, observant, tongue-in-cheek and possessed of an acute sense of irony. If you like Bill Bryson, you will love this book.