Lying Travel Writer Has a Book to Promote
Over the weekend, travel guide publisher Lonely Planet was rocked by revelations that one of their writers lied, plagiarized, and dealt drugs while working for the company. The writer, a 32 year-old named Thomas Kohnstamm, gave an interview to Australia's Daily Telegraph newspaper, in which he admitted to making up large sections of Lonely Planet guides to Latin America and the Caribbean. Kohnstamm claims that, in one case, he didn't even travel to the country he was assigned to write about. He says he wrote the Lonely Planet guidebook for Colombia while in San Francisco, where he got information about the country "from a chick I was dating" who worked at the Consulate.
Kohnstamm's transgressions were not limited to fakery and theft of intellectual property. He also told the Telegraph that he accepted illegal freebies and sold drugs to supplement the money he got from Lonely Planet. At first, I wasn't clear why a plagiarist like Thomas Kohnstamm would out himself to a newspaper. But like all douchebags, Kohnstamm has a Myspace, which also reveals that he has a book to sell. This confessional interview didn't begin the collapse of Thomas Kohnstamm's house of lies, it's just the start of his promotional tour. In this post-James Frey era, lying writers are actually selling their memoirs by promoting themselves as bullshit artists.
Kohnstamm's book, Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?, is subtitled "A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics & Professional Hedonism." I'd link to his Myspace or the other site he's set up to advertise his book, but the thought of helping this jerk sell even one single copy of his crap makes me want to retch. You can't help but wonder why Kohnstamm thinks there's enough interest in the lives of travel writers to merit this type of book. I'm sure none of you want to hear how I survive on my paychecks from Gawker by selling my body to truckers and swallowing honeyed condoms of cocaine each time I get on a plane. The strangest thing about all this is that Thomas Kohnstamm still thinks he has enough credibility left at this point to sell a book about his life. I can't imagine any reason why anyone should ever believe a word this guy writes again.
Lonely Planet says that an "urgent" review of Kohnstamm's contributions to their guidebooks miraculously hasn't revealed any inaccuracies.
Kohnstamm's web site claims that, in addition to working on "a dozen Lonely Planet books," he also contributed to other travel publications, including "Travel + Leisure, Time Out New York, The SF Chronicle, The LA Times, The Denver Post, The Miami Herald, [and] Forbes." No word yet on whether or not any of the other publications that he wrote for will be conducting similar reviews of Kohnstamm's work.
