Bourdain, notes editor Witherspoon, \u201chad wanted to be a writer all his life.\u201d His fame as the host of several television travel series, she adds, was accidental: The gigs were someone else\u2019s idea, but as long as he got to write, it was fine. Some of the pieces assembled here are near-transcripts from those shows, and longtime fans will hear Bourdain\u2019s voice in every word, as when he eats a street taco in the Mexican city of Puebla: \u201cYou quickly shove one of the tacos into your mouth, wash it down with a big pull from a can of cold Tecate\u2014which you\u2019ve previously rubbed with lime and jammed into a plate of salt, encrusting the top\u2014and you can feel your eyes roll up into your head.\u201d Elsewhere, alcohol being a constant, Bourdain celebrates a Sardinian wine made by \u201can old man sitting in the corner reading a soccer magazine, a cigarette dangling from his lips,\u201d and declaring that he wouldn\u2019t trade a trunkful of big-ticket vintages for the rustic red; offers lessons on how to drink vodka in Russia (\u201cknock back your entire shot in one gulp\u201d); and populates his fictions with woozy, boozy characters (\u201cNaturally, work like this required alcohol\u201d). There are other drugs aplenty as well, befitting Bourdain\u2019s longtime worship of Hunter S. Thompson and the culture of restaurant work in the golden 1970s and \u201980s: \u201cWe thought ourselves dangerous, trend-settingly debauched, and, of course, in no time at all, had made a serious botch of it all.\u201d But whatever his topic, absent a few forgettable pieces of juvenilia, Bourdain delivers whip-smart, mot juste, and funny pronouncements on the world. And never mind that he condones putting ketchup on a hamburger.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bourdain, notes editor Witherspoon, \u201chad wanted to be a writer all his life.\u201d His fame as the host of several television travel series, she adds, was accidental: The gigs were someone else\u2019s idea, but as long as he got to write, it was fine. Some of the pieces assembled here are near-transcripts from those shows, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4636,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4635"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4635\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}