Glass reviews Foreign Fool by Alan Platt – a chronicle of travel misadventures

HERE is a collection of true travel stories and misadventure, Foreigh Fool by Alan Platt is written by a raconteur so crafted in seemingly casual hilarity, that this reader found himself wishing, halfway through, that these things had happened to me, just so I could tell the stories down the pub. Platt’s gift is  for telling tales that never end well, in countries where the language barrier is often broken, no – obliterated – with the international parlance of sex,  drinking, illness, random acts of violence, and miming chronic constipation via the gestures of Garbo’s Camille.

Alan Platt

From being mugged in Saigon, finding himself “lost, stoned and naked” in a Moroccan desert (but wearing fake Ralf Lauren shades – he’s a stickler for detail) to facing an emetic  feast of hairy spiders in the killing fields of Cambodia, The Fool plunges headlong into a series of grim but fabulously funny fine messes, wildly entertaining, irrepressibly irresponsible in the experiencing of the events, but word perfect in the recounting of them. Lives like a jerk, but writes like a dream.

by Graham Mitchell

Foreign Fool ($13.99) is available on Amazon