Why a rough guide is better than none

Like the most desperate of priests, and the most marginal of activists, Nick Cohen wants us all to be like him. He’s an angry journalist who can’t imagine why everyone doesn’t think like an angry journalist.

In What lonely planet are they on? Cohen attempts a take-down of travel guide publisher Lonely Planet, implying that they’re all liberal lefties, happy to whitewash the crimes of dictators in order to sell more books. To do so he cites the work of Thomas Kohnstamm, a Lonely Planet author who admits making stuff up (though, here and elsewhere, Kohnstamm maintains that the job he was commissioned for was a desk-edit, rather than a research trip). The idea appears not to have occurred to Cohen that a man who is happy to invent material for a guidebook might also be happy to invent material for his own memoir. Some people want to believe Kohnstamm’s story about sex in a Brazilian café, while disbelieving his recommendations for good bars in Bogota.