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LAURIE WOOLEVER, CO-AUTHOR, “WORLD TRAVEL: AN IRREVERENT GUIDE”: Yeah, it was a very difficult thing, especially at first. Tony’s death was obviously a great shock to myself and to everyone who knew him or knew of him. And for the first few months, it was very, very slow going. And I was asking myself, do I finish this book and how do I finish this book without Tony, who had intended to write a number of essays and, of course, just had intended to be there for every step of the process? Fortunately, he left behind a huge and brilliant body of work with his writing and with his television shows, and I was able to draw on that to finish this book.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And there was some original content, right? Because, literally, just weeks or months before he took his life, he downloaded to you, that there was some audio, some conversations you had.
WOOLEVER: That’s right. We had one very useful conversation that I’m so grateful that we had. We met in his apartment, and I went in with — armed with a list of every place that he had ever been for television. And we went through that list, which was quite extensive, as you can imagine, and decided which of those places would make good chapters for this book. And in that context, what were some of the restaurants, hotels, bars, sites, markets, kiosks that sold sausage, all of those things, what were some of those places that would necessarily be included in each chapter? So it became the defining blueprint for the book. I recorded the conversation. I had it transcribed. And I referred to it pretty much every day while I was writing the book, just so I made sure that I was keeping true to Tony’s vision.
AMANPOUR: His vision and his voice, which we know from television, of course, was profanity-laced, but so politically astute, so culturally astute, funny, free association. And we know also that one of the things — one of the trips you so enjoyed with him was in Vietnam, and he produced that for “PARTS UNKNOWN,” or produce it for something anyway. We have got a clip. I can’t remember whether it was before the CNN series began or what, but we have a clip of that trip and it appears in the book. Let’s just play.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BOURDAIN: This is Dong Ba market, and deep inside, somewhere in there is what I want.
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America’s vaccine rollout has seen more than half of adults get their first shots, but vaccine hesitancy remains an issue, especially among Republicans. So can anything change those minds?
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