The food-and-travel icon's longtime director and producer delivers a memoir of incomparable travelogues snatched from the clutch of chaos.Vitale was consumed by his work with Anthony Bourdain (1956-2018), an adrenalin-fueled ride through three broadcast series in which recklessness was as much a virtue as creativity. Traveling up to 250 days per year, risking life and limb, often in some of the most perilous places in the world, the director of No Reservations, The Layover, and Parts Unknown flirted with nervous breakdowns and imminent catastrophe as Bourdain constantly increased the stakes on whatever project was at hand. Vitale's memoir of those years-and of the vacuum in his life following Bourdain's suicide-is a fascinating insider's account of the making of groundbreaking TV. It is also the most complete picture yet of Bourdain's complex and conflicted character-along with Laurie Woolever's oral biography, Bourdain, publishing in the same month. "Tony was naturally telegenic," writes Vitale, "possessing an unmistakable star quality….But even more alluring was his antagonistic, devil-may-care, combative relationship with the very machine that created his fame." Vitale's writing is seductively alive, pulsating with events and vividly rendered observations of people and exotic locales, hairbreadth escapes, and all the high-wire escapades, cultural revelations, and ethical questions that accompanied being Bourdain's traveling companion. Everything that could go wrong generally did, yet that frequently resulted in a better product than the original script. Vitale admits that he struggled to articulate his own story, but if he was worried he was not up to the challenge, he can put those fears to rest. Drawn from show footage, notebooks, logs, travel itineraries, e-mails, and old receipts, his book is thrilling, sobering, harrowing, and as entertainingly frenetic as the events described, a tale told by a survivor still trying to make sense of it all.Clearly, watching Bourdain's shows was nothing like living them, as this high-flying memoir amply demonstrates.

The food-and-travel icon's longtime director and producer delivers a memoir of incomparable travelogues snatched from the clutch of chaos.Vitale was consumed by his work with Anthony Bourdain (1956-2018), an adrenalin-fueled ride through three broadcast series in which recklessness was as much a virtue as creativity. Traveling up to 250 days per year, risking life and limb, often in some of the most perilous places in the world, the director of No Reservations, The Layover, and Parts Unknown flirted with nervous breakdowns and imminent catastrophe as Bourdain constantly increased the stakes on whatever project was at hand. Vitale's memoir of those years-and of the vacuum in his life following Bourdain's suicide-is a fascinating insider's account of the making of groundbreaking TV. It is also the most complete picture yet of Bourdain's complex and conflicted character-along with Laurie Woolever's oral biography, Bourdain, publishing in the same month. "Tony was naturally telegenic," writes Vitale, "possessing an unmistakable star quality….But even more alluring was his antagonistic, devil-may-care, combative relationship with the very machine that created his fame." Vitale's writing is seductively alive, pulsating with events and vividly rendered observations of people and exotic locales, hairbreadth escapes, and all the high-wire escapades, cultural revelations, and ethical questions that accompanied being Bourdain's traveling companion. Everything that could go wrong generally did, yet that frequently resulted in a better product than the original script. Vitale admits that he struggled to articulate his own story, but if he was worried he was not up to the challenge, he can put those fears to rest. Drawn from show footage, notebooks, logs, travel itineraries, e-mails, and old receipts, his book is thrilling, sobering, harrowing, and as entertainingly frenetic as the events described, a tale told by a survivor still trying to make sense of it all.Clearly, watching Bourdain's shows was nothing like living them, as this high-flying memoir amply demonstrates.