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A review by kellylynnthomas
My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere by Susan Orlean
3.0
Read for my Travel Writing class. Some of the pieces were really, really good, but others were kind of stupid and not really travel pieces (like the one about her life as a series of performance pieces--cutesy, not a travel piece). The best ones were, in my opinion, "Where's Willy?", "Royalty", and the one about her climbing Mount Fuji in Japan, which has a very long, very silly name.
The thing that gets me about this book is that you can tell that Susan Orlean has led a fairly privileged life. And that's okay, having money doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to write a good book (or in this case, a series of articles for various magazines). But the thing is, she never, not once, seems to recognize or acknowledge that she is better off than the people around her. In fact, she seems completely oblivious to her privilege, and that's kind of annoying.
Even so, there are some really great moments in some of these pieces, and it's easy enough to skip the pieces that drag on forever (the one about the grocery store) and just read the ones that really interest you.
The thing that gets me about this book is that you can tell that Susan Orlean has led a fairly privileged life. And that's okay, having money doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to write a good book (or in this case, a series of articles for various magazines). But the thing is, she never, not once, seems to recognize or acknowledge that she is better off than the people around her. In fact, she seems completely oblivious to her privilege, and that's kind of annoying.
Even so, there are some really great moments in some of these pieces, and it's easy enough to skip the pieces that drag on forever (the one about the grocery store) and just read the ones that really interest you.