More Details About Strange Travel Suggestions: Tales of Global Adventure
Quotes & Highlights
- "Intriguing, beguiling...laugh-out-loud funny." —San Francisco Chronicle
- "Hilarious, spontaneous, gregarious! Don't miss it!" —KPFA’s "Music of the World"
- “Funny, keen-eyed, utterly engaging… Wherever it leads, it adds up to quite a trip.” —San Francisco Bay Guardian
More Information
Oakland-based writer Jeff Greenwald—best known for his critically acclaimed travel books, including Shopping for Buddhas and The Size of the World—delivers tales of global adventure, all based on the spin of a wheel. Each show is an improvised monologue inspired by the vagaries of wanderlust. Audience members step onto the stage and spin a huge, colorful Wheel of Fortune. Round and ‘round it spins, and where it stops, the journey begins....
Jeff Greenwald has traveled extensively through five continents, working as a writer, artist and photographer. In addition, he has prepared exhibits, lectures and educational programs for the San Francisco Exploratorium, University of California, and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. His stories and essays appear in a variety of publications, including The New York Times Magazine and National Geographic. He is Executive Director of Ethical Traveler, a global community dedicated to exploring the ambassadorial potential of world travel. His award-winning books include Shopping for Buddhas and The Size of the World—a chronicle of his 29,172-mile, around-the-world overland voyage—which was a national bestseller and won the 1995 Lowell Thomas Silver Award. Greenwald’s travel writing is widely anthologized, appearing in The Kindness of Strangers, In Search of Adventure, Salon Wanderlust, and many volumes of the award-winning “Travelers Tales” series and Scratching the Surface: Impressions of Planet Earth from Hollywood to Shiraz.
His critically acclaimed show Strange Travel Suggestions, an improvised monologue based on his adventures, continues to draw sold-out houses.
In the course of his travels, Greenwald has had the opportunity to participate in a number of unusual projects. In 1979, during his first trip to Asia, he designed urban playgrounds for UNICEF and the Nepal Children’s Organization. Several months later, arriving in Thailand during the Khmer civil war, he served as a volunteer water engineer at Khao-I-Dang—the largest of the Cambodian refugee camps. In 1983, he was awarded a Journalism Fellowship by the Rotary International Foundation, and departed for a second trip to Asia. During this 16-month residence he lived in Kathmandu, Nepal, and made excursions to the Himalaya, India, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Japan, Java and Bali.
His first book, Mr. Raja’s Neighborhood: Letters from Nepal, is still in print. Shopping for Buddhas, first published by Harper & Row in 1990, was reissued in 1996 by Lonely Planet Publications; the new edition won the Lowell Thomas Gold Award for Best Travel Book of 1996.
Greenwald divides his time between California and Asia, publishing stories and essays in a variety of publications, including The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, and Salon.com.
