Tales from Nowhere Book

This is not the best selection of travel essays I've ever read. There are some well-known travel writers included -- Pico Iyer, Simon Winchester, et al -- but collection feels overly dictated by an editor's directive. Each piece is of a certain length (often, I felt, too short), a certain tone (not too upbeat, not too downbeat), has a certain clever (not necessarily good) ending.

I have issues with the premise of the collection. The idea of Western writers traveling to actual places and labeling them "nowhere" strikes me as arrogant. By the middle of this book, it seems any place that makes traveling difficult or is not up to Western, developed standards is a "nowhere." Entire countries are written off in this way, and I wished for more enlightened travelers to be guiding me instead of those included here.