Last Trout in Venice Doug Lansky Travelers' Tales 257 pp. Available from Powell's Books.

Last Trout In Venice, though never explicitly identified as such, is the second collection of Lansky's "Vagabond" travel columns (and the first to be published by Travelers' Tales). In the more than forty pieces included here, Lansky divides his time between exotic, remote locations, familiar vacation destinations (i.e. Club Med), obscure points of interest and the tourist traps of a dozen countries. It's important to remember that this is a collection of columns, not a straightforward narrative, so you can't expect any kind of consistency from chapter to chapter; the stories are grouped by type -- for instance, pieces dealing nominally with sports, or with regional festivals -- rather than in any sort of chronological order. In the space of four chapters, for example, Lansky moves from Norway to Lesotho to Botswana to New Zealand -- so even if you don't covet his job, you'll covet his frequent flier miles. If you're accustomed to more linear travel narratives, you may find Lansky's scattershot approach a little difficult to appreciate.

Lansky's modus operandi is pretty simple: he goes somewhere (Venice, The Rocky Mountains, Dublin, San Fermín), tries something (gondoliering, fly-fishing, working at the Guinness brewery, the running of the bulls), makes a bit of a hash of it and/or a bit of an ass of himself, and cracks jokes about it for several hundred words. When the formula works -- which, given Lansky's skill at self-deprecating schtick, is more often than not -- the results land somewhere between mildly amusing and pants-wettingly hysterical; for instance, his experiences in a German sex shop, a prelude to a visit to the infamous Kit Kat Club, inspires much highly audible laughter.

The problem, if there is one, is that these are humor pieces governed by an external word count. If you're the type to take a book into the bathroom with you, Last Trout in Venice will be right up your alley; as Lansky himself admits in his preface, these pieces are just the right length to be polished off during...well, a typical sit-down visit to the hygiene facilities. However, if you're at all engaged by any of the places Lansky visits, you'll be regularly disappointed, as most of the articles end long before Lansky has truly established a feel for his location. A few of his experiences are adequately covered in four to five pages, but most seem a little superficial, and a few end with jarring abruptness -- Lansky's tale of his table-waiting gig in Val d'Isere, for instance, wraps up just when it's getting interesting, and I'm certain that he could've come up with some better anecdotes from his time working at Club Med. In other words, don't expect depth, or you'll spend a lot of time throwing the book across the room and yelling "But what happened next, dammit?" The goal here is to get to the laughs; if you get a feel for the places Lansky visits, that's a matter more of luck than design. Better to stash the book in the rest room, where it's competing with lightweight crap like Entertainment Weekly, than to put it out on your coffee table, where (depending upon your lifestyle, friends and general social strata) expectations of substance are marginally higher.

Lansky's writing, when subjected to the sort of scrutiny that Little Brown Handbook-toting dorks like me like to apply to published, money-earning authors like Lansky, doesn't bear close scrutiny. To be fair, this stuff was written quickly and is intended as light entertainment, so misplaced modifiers, misused words and the sort of typos that slip past spellcheck (but not a human proofreader) don't really have an adverse affect on the overall experience. Still, it's hard to believe some of these things weren't caught before publication -- par for the course for the Travelers' Tales experience. In particular, Last Trout In Venice includes a reference to "Fran Drescher's accident" (Drescher, former star of the godawful TV sitcom The Nanny, has a truly obnoxious accent, but has never had an accident of note) that survived, uncorrected and unquestioned, and was included in the audiobook edition of Last Trout In Venice (Yes, I have the audiobook edition of Last Trout In Venice. It's excellent.) Sloppy proofreading? Or have the fortunate souls at NPR and Travelers' Tales never heard (of) Fran Drescher? Perhaps I should be embarrassed to have caught the flub.

To sum up: Last Trout in Venice is very, very funny. It's also rather shallow. I recommend it for its laughs, and for the sheer breadth of Lansky's experiences, but in terms of substance it's the travel narrative equivalent of Chinese food -- an hour after you finish it, you'll have forgotten all but the funniest bits.

-- George Zahora

Travelers' Tales got its start in 1993 when travel writers James O'Reilly and Larry Habegger teamed up with writer and publisher (and James's brother) Tim O'Reilly to produce a new kind of travel book, one that would paint a portrait of a country through the experiences of many travelers. Through true stories, these books would give readers a depth of understanding that can only come from people who have been there. Reading each book would be like sitting in a cafe filled with fellow travelers swapping tales about the place you're headed next - you come out changed, and eager for more. Over time, this basic premise has been expanded to include a variety of anthologies, travel advice books, and single-author narratives. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Travelers' Tales currently has more than 60 titles in print, and publishes approximately 8-12 titles per year.