Imagine a travel guide that informs you, pointedly, that sometimes it's a good idea to stay at home.
Or, at least, it's a good idea to stay away from many of the places listed in this particular travel guide.The Fielding Worldwide guide to "The World's Most Dangerous Places" tells you where the bodies are buried, or worse, left lying out in the road.
Where conventional guides steer you to points of interest, "Dangerous Places" gives you the skinny on points of impact. Also land mines, bandits, pirates, terrorists, professional kidnappers and civil wars.
"Adventure is the cheap cologne of the '90s," says author Robert Young Pelton, who edits his thousand-page tome from the relative safety of suburban Redondo Beach.
Along with his adventurous co-writers - Cocksun Aral and Wink Dulles - Pelton has traveled to many of the spots described in the guide.
"Nowadays $1,200 will take you anywhere, that's what makes adventure travel the `in' thing," Pelton said.
In many ways, the guide book is a road map for a new generation of travelers who make the journey their destination.
The book is grim warning, gallows humor and a lot of practical advice for the professional traveler. It's also vicarious fun for the armchair adventurer, and at $19.95, a lot cheaper than a plane ticket.
The New York Times has reviewed the guide as "one of the oddest and most fascinating books to appear in a long time," and Time magazine branded its collection of tips and warnings "a real lifesaver."
Pelton, 42, recalls that when he was growing up in the 1960s, most travelers thought Europe was an exotic destination.
Now, the young, prosperous traveling crowd is headed for places like Cambodia, the West Bank, the Himalayas and a multitude of destinations in Africa.
"Nairobi is an excellent example . . . ," Pelton said. "In Nairobi, you can go out for a beer and find that you are suddenly in the most dangerous place in Africa outside of Somalia."
Each has its attractions and hazards, for which "Dangerous Places" includes hundreds of helpful hints.
"The most dangerous places tend to stay the same," Pelton says with a professional traveler's sang froid. "The trail of coups and corpses continue."
In others words, you've got to watch out for yourself in places like Colombia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Algeria, countries "where they specifically target Westerners once you leave the security of camps and hotels."
The book's first edition sold out so quickly that a second edition followed and is selling briskly. This from a company that specializes in more conventional guides to destinations such as Thailand and Borneo.
The company was started after World War II by Temple Fielding, a former OSS operative who began writing guides for GIs in postwar Europe.
"He told you where to get a good drink and who was going to clip you," Pelton said.
The tradition continues in Pelton's updated guides. But in "Dangerous Places," destinations where you could get killed share chapters with places where you could get clipped.
One chapter is titled, "Tourists: Fodder for Fiends." One entry notes, "the chance of being injured or slain by a terrorist is much less than an attack by a common criminal . . . crooks in Algeria, Egypt, Turkey, Cambodia, Myanmar, Colombia, the Philippines and Peru are deliberately targeting tourists and foreigners."
Best advice: Avoid hanging those cameras off your neck, and when you choose to wear that handsome new canvas backpack, "you might as well paint a bull's-eye on your back."
"Being safe in most of these countries involves growing a web of friends," Pelton advises. "I make the cab driver my friend. Most crimes are against tourists who have no web of friends."
The idea was to put together a book for journalists and business travelers who must go to destinations in harm's way.
"I was at an all-night party in Paris with some war photographers back from Liberia," Pelton recalls, "and they said, `when you really need a travel guide, there really aren't any for where you need them.' "
The most recent edition of the book gathers statistics on 22 war zones and more than 85 areas of the world listed as simply dangerous. It cites the U.N. listing of 82 armed conflicts fought within the past three years, almost all of them civil wars or insurgencies.
The Third World isn't the only target for criticism and caution. The United States comes in for its share of the guide's mordant humor.
"In L.A., inner-city toddlers catch stray bullets from drive-by shooters, while in New York, (terrorist) whackos use a rented van full of fertilizer makings to blow up the World Trade Center," the guide notes. "What would Ozzie and Harriet Nelson say?"