What if "playing it safe" is the riskiest choice of all?

When Dean Klinkenberg backed out of a semester abroad at twenty-one, fear won. Years later, he began to wonder what else fear had quietly stolen from his life.

So he started saying yes.

• Yes to overcrowded boats on the Mekong.
• Yes to armed checkpoints in Central America.
• Yes to New York City weeks after 9/11.
• Yes to chicken buses, awkward conversations, missed connections, and the vulnerability of trusting strangers in unfamiliar places.

In Better Safe Than Sorry?, Klinkenberg blends vivid travel stories with sharp reflections on media-fueled anxiety, personal insecurity, and the hidden cost of staying inside our comfort zones. With humor, candor, and hard-earned wisdom from forty-five countries and every U.S. state, he challenges the belief that safety should always come first.

This is not a reckless call to adventure. It's a thoughtful invitation to live more expansively ? to recognize that while travel carries risk, so does shrinking your world.

Because the real danger may not be what happens when you go.

It may be what never happens if you don't.