LONELY PLANET FOUNDER’S ACID RESPONSE TO BAD TRIP AUTHOR REVELATIONS
May 15th 2008 11:57
Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler didn’t hold back from attacking renegade guide book author Thomas Kohnstamm in an interview in the Bangkok Post yesterday.
The Lonely Planet guidebook empire is reeling from claims by Kohnstamm that he plagiarised and made up large sections of his books and dealt drugs to make up for poor pay.
He also claims in a new book that he accepted free travel, in contravention of the company's policy.
Kohnstamm, whose book is titled Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?, said he had worked on more than a dozen books for Lonely Planet, including its titles on Brazil, Colombia, the Caribbean, Venezuela, Chile and South America.
"They didn't pay me enough to go Colombia. I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating, an intern in the Colombian Consulate. They don't pay enough for what they expect the authors to do.''
But Tony Wheeler savaged Kohnstamm in the Bangkok Post, saying, “I’m not surprised he didn’t do a good job because he was spending all his time partying and taking drugs. However, we double checked what he write and found no problems.”
As for Kohnstamm’s allegations that wrote about Colombia without even going to the country, Wheeler said, “He made this silly comment that we didn’t pay him enough to go to Colombia. The fact is that he was never paid to go to Colombia in the first place because someone else was researching the book.
“He has a degree in Latin studies, and so we asked him to write the history chapter. But that didn’t mean we wanted him to write in Colombia itself; he could have written it anywhere.
“He retracted his comments later and said that he’d been taken out of context. I don’t know what got into him.
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