Travel Mania: Stories of Wanderlust

This book is a captivating international page-turner that carries the reader around the world with its spellbinding views of distant sites by a talented storyteller. Summons to visit far-off places infected this youthful student in her teens and commenced with her first trip to graduate art studies in Scotland. Still restless, she traveled to England, then hit France, and from then, on her thirst to experience faraway places became part of her mantra. Presented here is a delightful series of reflections about herself and her travels over the fifty-year period from 1970 to 2020. Recounted are the generational cultural and structural changes noted in visits to Japan and Germany. Definitely, a people person, though language shy, gutsy Karen Gershowitz manages to communicate with locals in Malaysia, Brazil, Indonesia, Cambodia, Cuba, Tanzania, and other remote locales through body language and hand gestures. Mostly attempting to avoid tourist trails, she sought out the essence of the visited sites.

Courageously mounting an elephant in Thailand, to sampling a durian in Malaysia, or walking across the Moroccan desert rather than mount a camel, to attempting to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania; these are all scenes that dazzle the reader and makes one liable to become infected with her travel addiction.