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You shouldn’t believe anything that Daniel Kalder, author of Lost Cosmonaut says. Under a list of rules for the anti-tourist at the start of the book he states “The anti-tourist loves truth, but he is also partial to lies. Especially his own.” At times he veers off into the outright fictional, but it’s never entirely clear which bits of his stories are actually true. This is important, because otherwise, Lost Cosmonaut would be, by a very wide margin, the most depressing travel book I’ve ever read.

Kalder goes in search of emptiness, alienation and nothingness in the Russian Federation’s semi-automonous republics. He visits Tartarstan, Kalmykia, Mari El and Udmurtia – places I’ve never heard of and, based on his descriptions, would never want go. It’s hard to believe that Kalder, as he presents himself in the book, is anything other than a characature. He’s arrogant, crude, nihilistic and lazy – someone who’d be a nightmare to actually travel with. But it’s obvious that he knows far more about the Russian republics than he’s letting on and beneath the layer of existentialist crap he piles on, he seems to have a genuine affection for his subject.

It’s a bit like P.J. O’Rourke’s 1989 travel book, Holidays in Hell. Kalder would reject the comparison – in his rules for anti-tourists, he says that the only reason to penetrate danger zones is “vanity and a desire to brag”. Kalder doesn’t search out the dangerous – he finds interest in the banal and mediocre. What he’s really after are people clinging to the tattered edge of their identities, being consumed by Russia. Ethnicities on the verge of extinction, where people live lives of poverty and desperation. Kalder manages to criticise himself as an anti-tourist looking in on people’s misery, while skewering the cultural tourism of his contemporaries. Kalder’s no better than any of them and he doesn’t really pretend to be. It’s all a bit too post-modern, but identity is one of the few things that post-modernism actually does well.

I have no idea how accurate the book is in its depiction of these people, their culture or their countries. Kalder’s often quite funny in a mordant, dark and juvenile kind of way, but the whole effect of the book is rather depressing. I prefer my travel books a little less existentialist and a lot more straight-forward, but Lost Cosmonaut is actually pretty good. Just don’t go into it expecting it to be cheerful.

I like books like this, which take on the philosophical and political through the recounting of practical and personal experience. The Devil’s Picnic has just the right measure of each to provide the balance that I prefer.

Grescoe’s book charts a year-long exploration of forbidden or proscribed substances and foods, from Nowegian moonshine, through unpasteurised French cheese, to the coca tea of Bolivia. With each chapter dedicated to the exploration of a certain substance, Grescoe searches, samples and interviews his way across the world. There’s a hint of journalistic license here – what are obviously planned meetings sometimes seem to be presented as happenstance. It’s not quite as adventurous as Grescoe meakes out; but this doesn’t really matter – the substances and the cultures that surround them are in the foreground and Grescoes musings on the subject are more interesting than what he actually does.

And what he does is to examine the way that societies come to prohibit and regulate the consumption of illicit substances. Grescoe’s political stance here should come as no surprise – you don’t write a book about flying around the world, seeking out semi-legal substances if you think they should be prohibited. The same could be said of the potential reader of such a book – I doubt there’s all that many ardent prohibitionists who want to read a book-length argument against their ideals. It’s mostly preaching to the choir, though Grescoe does take time to highlight the double standard many liberals seem to have regarding tobacco.

Unsurprisingly, I’m part of the congregation on this one. I actually studied this kind of stuff when I was at university (my dissertation was about the connections between the War on Drugs and the War on Terror). At the heart of almost every sane argument on the subject is one idea: The harms associated with prohibition vastly outweigh the harms associated with the substance itself. I don’t want to turn this into a rant on the subject (it’s an easy subject to rant about, so maybe some other time), but it’s astonishingly frustrating that, with a few European exceptions, governments seem to be utterly incapable of even having a sensible debate on the subject, despite the frightening costs, both financial and to human life, of the prevailing policies.

There are an astounding number of books that are essentially the same rant as the one I’ve just narrowly avoided. This isn’t really one of them, but it does build a similar case, chapter by chapter. Gresoe sums up with this:

There is, after all, a middle ground between abstinence and excess: it’s called moderation, and once you’re out of the thicket of post-adolescent overdramatization, it becomes a lot more attainable. Getting there requires a certain amount of maturity and self-knowledge; unfortunately, in a context where prohibition is the reigning world-wide paradigm, where paternalistic laws keep us in protracted adolescense by professing to protect us from ourselves, most people are prevented from every thinking in shades of gray. Since the Harrison Act of 1914 kicked off worldwide drug prohibition, intoxication has become a black-and-white issue. You are either on the righteous side of the line, or in a world of shame, picknicking with the devil.