SAND IN MY BRA AND OTHER MISADVENTURES: Funny Women Write from the Road

Travel writer Leo has collected 28 short and snappy travel stories bursting with exuberant candor and crackling humor sure to leave readers feeling that to not have an adventure to remember is a great loss indeed. Many of these bite-size reminiscences chronicle personal ordeals endured in places with unfamiliar amenities, languages and/or cultures. For example, Christie Eckardt's elastically challenged underwear falls down in a Muslim country; Kathleen Meyer (How to Shit in the Woods) writes about—what else?—"this subject... which seems to be overwhelmingly mine"; and Anne Lamott is jealous of younger backsides on the beach. The gems of the bunch are Nancy Bartlett's "Panic, in Any Other Language," describing an embarrassing incident in an opulent Italian swimsuit boutique; Christine Michaud's "Chador Etiquette," on her well-intentioned but disastrous attempt to wear a chador (a large black cloak and head covering) to a Kuwait shopping mall; and Christine Nielsen's title story, which manages, completely by her description of participating in it, to endear readers to the annual Burning Man project in the Nevada desert, a "crazy celebration of life's diversity and creativity." Some of the stories shoot themselves in the foot by being too lengthy, but as a whole, the anthology will definitely light a fire under the behinds of, as the dedication states, "all the women who sit at home or behind their desks bitching that they never get to go anywhere." (May)