Mad Travelers

Reflections on the Reality of transient mental illnessThis text uses the case of Albert Dadas, the first diagnosed "mad traveller", to weigh the legitimacy of cultural versus physical symptoms in the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders. The author argues that psychological symptoms find niches where transient illnesses flourish.

At twenty-three, William Simon Baekeland was well on his way to becoming the world’s best traveled person. The “billionaire” heir to a great plastics fortune had already visited 163 countries, but his real passion was finding ways to visit the world’s most challenging destinations—war torn cities, disputed territories, and remote or officially off-limits islands at the margins of the map. He earned rock-star status in the world of extreme travel by finding ingenious ways to bring the world’s most widely traveled people to difficult-to-reach and forbidden places. But when his story began to unravel, an eccentric group of hyper-well-traveled country collectors were left wondering how they had allowed their obsession to blind them to the warning signs that William Baekeland wasn’t who they thought he was. Mad Travelers: A Tale of Wanderlust, Greed and the Quest to Reach the Ends of the Earth delves deep inside the subculture of country collecting, taking readers to danger zones like Mogadishu and geographical oddities like Norway’s nearly impossible-to-reach Bouvet Island. Along the way, this raucous tale of adventure and international intrigue illuminates the perils and pleasures of wanderlust while examining a fundamental question: why are some people compelled to travel, while others are content to stay home? Mad Travelers is a perceptive and at times hilarious account of how the pursuit of everywhere put the world’s greatest travelers at the mercy of a brilliant young con man. Soon to be an HBO documentary.

Mad Libs is the world’s greatest word game and a great gift or activity for anyone who likes to laugh! Write in the missing words on each page to create your own hilariously funny stories all about going on vacation. Get ready for the adventure of a NOUN! With 21 “fill-in-the-blank” stories about hotels, caves, and national parks, there’s something for everyone in Vacation Fun Mad Libs. Play alone, in a group, or with your favorite travel buddy. Mad Libs are a fun family activity recommended for ages 8 to NUMBER. Vacation Fun Mad Libs includes: - Silly stories: 21 "fill-in-the-blank" stories all about vacation fun! - Language arts practice: Mad Libs are a great way to build reading comprehension and grammar skills. - Fun With Friends: each story is a chance for friends to work together to create unique stories!

When Carolyn Walton, journalist and mother of four, pitched her first travel story to the Ottawa Citizen in 1984, recounting her adventures in Rio de Janeiro, little did she realize that she was about to embark on a remarkable career that would span the globe--taking her from the jungles of the Amazon to palaces in St. Petersburg, on a pilgrimage in France to ports on the Caribbean, Baltic, Mediterranean, Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas, the Adriatic, North and South Pacific oceans. Prepare to be enlightened and entertained as you tread the path less taken to swim with deadly stingrays in Tahiti, kayak among bulbous- headed belugas in Hudson Bay or deep-sea dive through schools of phosphorescent groupers off Andros Island in the Bahamas. Lapland finds her a guest of the colourful Sami people, dining high above the Arctic Circle on smoked reindeer meat or drinking boiled billy tea by the billabong in Australia’s Outback and truffle hunting in Italy or learning to cook per gli stuzzicini from a famed Italian chef in la cucina of a 1000-year-old castello in Tuscany. The old adage: “Half the fun is getting there” just doesn’t compute when Carolyn’s much anticipated flight to Paris is politically- interrupted or a transfer to the wrong boat in the South Pacific leaves her abandoned on a Fijian island! This collection of tales and misadventures takes the travel lover on an engaging and often humorous journey to the heart of some sixty bucket list destinations around the globe.

Cannibals, Surfboards, and, Like, Everything! In the deep, dark 1980s, Jim Crotty and Michael Lane quit their jobs, traded everything they owned for a 26-foot motorhome, and hit the road with their cats, their convictions, and a solar-powered Mac. Their mission: to travel the great American landscape and report on the incredible people, places, and parking lots they encountered along the way. One fateful day, their Monkmobile rattled into California… "Reading these guys is like watching a grainy, irreverent film about America— real, unreal, surreal." —The Boston Globe "[The Monks] don't simply document a chosen city or region. They dissect it, demystify it, revel in its oddities." —San Diego Union Tribune "Modern troubadors…writing about themselves and America." —The New York Times "Kerouacs of the ’90s." —The Seattle Times "An unshaven version of Travel & Leisure." —Utne Reader Dockweiler State Beach Museum of Jurassic Technology Slab City ■ Mojave Airport Pacific Lumber Company Saint Stupid's Day Parade Columbarium ■ Sixteen to One Mine Banana Man ■ Nudist Colonies The Astrophysicist of Love L.A. Police Academy ■ Madonna Inn Forestiere Underground Gardens Foster's Big Horn ■ Critical Mass Devil's Golf Course Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum Deep Creek Hot Springs Sagely, City of 10,000 Buddhas and more, More, More Visit us Online at www.frommers.com

In Laughing Mad , Bambi Haggins looks at how this transition occurred in a variety of media and shows how this integration has paved the way for black comedians and their audiences to affect each other. Historically, African American performers have been able to use comedy as a pedagogic tool, interjecting astute observations about race relations while the audience is laughing. And yet, Haggins makes the convincing argument that the potential of African American comedy remains fundamentally unfulfilled as the performance of blackness continues to be made culturally digestible for mass consumption.

Part travelogue, part memoir, The Yogurt Man Cometh is the story of Kevin Revolinski's year-long adventure as an English teacher in Turkey. Revolinski relates in candid style his encounters in a foreign culture, all told with an open mind and a sense of humor. An enjoyable read for anyone who has spent time in Turkey or who plans to do so.

Inspired by Dr. A. K. Benjamin's years working as a clinical neuropsychologist at a London hospital, this multilayered narrative interweaves Benjamin's own sometimes shocking personal experiences with those of his mentally disordered patients. What do doctors actually think about when you list your problems in the consulting room? Are they really listening to you? Is the connection all in your head? Every day for ten years--even while his hospital became the set for a reality television series--clinical neuropsychologist A. K. Benjamin confronted these questions, and this book is his attempt to tell the truth about what happens in these rooms in hospitals the world over. What begins as a series of exquisitely observed case studies examining personalities on the brink of collapse soon morphs into a unique work of nonfiction as Benjamin's own psyche begins to twist the story in surprising ways. Blazingly original, Let Me Not Be Mad undermines the authority we so willingly hand over to clinical psychologists as it bears witness to the self-obsession of Western society, and ultimately offers a glimpse of what it might mean to be sane and truly empathetic. Fractured, sad, playful, brilliant, and confrontational, this is a confession by a professional that delves into the heart of the patient-doctor relationship and ultimately finds love. This twisting psychological journey will be read and reread.

An illustrated history of the most influential and unique humor magazine in post-war America.

""Like Sylvia Plath's poems, these visionary poems are not only astute records of experience, they are themselves dazzling, verbal experiences. Worldly, wily, wise: Mad Honey Symposium is an extraordinary debut."-Terrance Hayes"[Mad Honey Symposium] has all the delicacy of [Mao's] earlier writing-but now there's also a gritty, world-wise sense of humor that gives her work heavyweight swagger."-Dave EggersMad Honey Symposium buzzes with lush sound and sharp imagery, creating a vivid natural world that's constantly in flux. From Venus flytraps to mad honey eaters, badgers to empowered outsiders, Sally Wen Mao's poems inhabit the precarious space between the vulnerable and the ferocious-how thin that line is, how breakable-with wonder and verve.From "Valentine for a Flytrap":.There's voltage in your flowers-mulch skeins, armory for cunning loves. Your mouth pins every sticky body, swallowing iridescence, digesting light. Venus, let me swim in your solarium. Venus, take me in your summer gown.Sally Wen Mao was born in Wuhan, China, and grew up in Boston and the Bay Area. She is a Kundiman fellow and 826 Valencia Young Author's Scholar. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Hayden's Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Passages North, Quarterly West, and West Branch, among others. She holds a BA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from Cornell University, where she's currently a lecturer"--