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TV producer Janetti (Start Without Me) takes a delightful and sharp-witted tour through a lifetime's worth of travel exploits and misadventures. In essays that range from the family cruises he took as a kid (his father worked in sales for a ship line) to the present day, Janetti good-naturedly bemoans the discomforts of staying in friends' spare rooms ("The cost of being a perfect guest is your sanity"), juxtaposes the petty annoyances (including a foghorn's nonstop blaring) of a cruise taken with extended family with the moments of connection it afforded, and wistfully recalls meeting and falling in love with his husband Brad during a trip to Mykonos. Janetti's irresistible blend of deadpan humor ("Whether you were scammed by a ticket broker or your husband was knifed in Hell's Kitchen, a shrug and a 'This is New York' would fit the bill," he writes of how he'd deal with dissatisfied guests while working at a Manhattan hotel in his 20s) and earnest reflections on how travel has shaped his life mostly makes up for the book's more flatly diaristic descriptions of meals and disappointing cruise ship performances. Readers are bound to catch the travel bug. (July)

A bestselling author and TV writer muses on his experiences with travel and food. In his latest book, Janetti, a producer for Family Guy and the author of Do You Mind If I Cancel? and Start Without Me, offers a compendium of traveler's tales and tips along with wry musings on how professional success changed the way he traveled. His earliest trips took place on Cunard Line cruise ships because his father was a salesman who was able to get free tickets for the family to travel in "steerage." On one such trip, the author met a college student whose family was traveling (and also eating) first class. The experience changed him, he writes. From that point on, he "wanted in" to what he imagined were the glorious excesses of "Caligula's Rome." Janetti would only see that world after gaining affluence in adulthood. In the opening essay, he describes his trip to a wellness retreat to Italy, despite aversions to eating "gluten-free meals with…strangers dressed in ill-fitting spandex." In a self-mocking aside, Janetti observes that in middle-class Queens, wellness "was what you were when you weren't sick. It was the baseline." Now it has become aspirational, "like the peak of Everest." In another essay, Janetti recounts an excursion to a Noma restaurant pop-up in Mexico that featured a 20-course exotic-foods extravaganza, while another references exclusive treehouse dining in Rio de Janeiro. The author concludes with travel do's and don'ts, most of which focus on being generous to those who do the work of making travel pleasant for travelers (and especially those with means)--e.g., servers, housekeepers, and concierge staff members. Janetti's fans will no doubt appreciate his dry, self-deprecating wit, but some readers may take issue with the unintentional classism that underlies some of the author's observations. Mostly entertaining but at times mildly discordant. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.