Written in the vein of the old travelogue, this is a book about one man's personal travels around the world to places the reader has never been. But, these books have been done many times before, and done better.

This just kind of felt like a vanity project, and could have used an editor. After the hundredth adjective- and adverb-laden descriptive sentence, I no longer knew which things were important to the story, and no longer cared. I started skimming over the descriptions.

If you enjoy detailed descriptions of places you've never been, and don't mind the occasional cliche or misused word, then you might enjoy this book. But if you're looking for compelling narrative non-fiction, then you probably won't. ( )

Interesting look at travel in the out of the way places, and experiences with the local population good and bad. From the depths of Borneo to the fringes of the Antarctic, he touches on the cultures and changes at the edges of modern civilization. A good book to read before you head out on your travel adventures. ( )

The premise of this book was admirable - visit the few places left on earth that are less changed by development, before it is too late to see and learn about the cultures. Mancuso may have been a little too ambitious in the number of places he chose to cover, leaving the reader not enlightened about the cultures, but merely getting a brief description of them. That could be a strength for those who are new to travel literature and want to taste a few different places before deciding where to delve in more deeply. However, this is a field crowded with wonderful authors and writing that offers much more engaging and educational reading. ( )

I wanted to like this book. The title certainly held great promise. But the writing was quite rough and felt unedited. For example, in one sentence the author used the phrase “parked our canoe,” which should have been “moored our canoe.” The sporadic joys that he experienced in these remote locations were more often than not overshadowed by incidents of theft, corrupt police, problems with logistics, relationship troubles and insects. Had this book been called “Misadventures in the Last Places on Earth” I may have been more prepared for the contents. But as it is, it is less about the pristine places on our earth, and more about the author’s struggle with travel, both physically and emotionally. I understand that there are difficulties when traveling alone to remote locations, but when those difficulties are a constant and overpowering presence in a book, then it needs to be presented and marketed in a different way.

As a fairly avid real-world and armchair traveler, I was particularly pleased to receive a copy of Gary Mancuso's book, "The Last Places on Earth" through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. After finally making it through the book, I now look at it with a bit of disappointment -- still intrigued by the destinations themselves, but let down both by the author's execution of his journeys and by their presentation in print.

A good many travel books are laden with purplish prose about the romance of the adventure and the fascination of the destination, often to the point of overkill. Mancuso's volume is essentially the opposite of that -- it's written in a style that's so straightforward and matter-of-fact as to almost be painful. I admire a desire not to over-romanticize, but at the same time I wonder if the author really felt much joy or intrigue in his adventures at all. The prose makes it feel like the author was just going through the motions, which is a shame for him, and for those of us who were hoping to get a little more of a feeling of life from the book. (It makes the process of reading fairly laborious, too.) The only "feeling" I really got from the book was a sense of the author's somewhat self-absorbed personal angst, which wasn't too endearing.

The marketing for the book suggests it's a narrative of high-testosterone, danger-filled travel, and there's definitely some of that in the text ... but the flat descriptions mean that you don't really feel it. (And admittedly, that's a premise that bothers me when it comes to travel books in general, because it sets up encounters based on alienation rather than engagement.)

All in all, this probably ins't a book I'd recommend unless someone was particularly interested in some of the specific destinations that were visited. Given the richness of the first-person travel narrative genre as a whole, it's not difficult to find more engaging stories. ( )