What if the biggest risk in life isn’t taking chances–but letting fear stop you from taking them at all?

At twenty-one, Dean Klinkenberg was accepted into a study-abroad program in Grenoble, France—and backed out. The fear won. He spent one more winter in Wisconsin instead of a semester at the foot of the Alps, and he never forgot which one he'd chosen.

Better Safe Than Sorry? is the story of the years since then when he's spent choosing differently.

In these essays, Klinkenberg lies awake the night before a flight to Thailand, cataloging everything that could go wrong—then boards an overcrowded slow boat down the Mekong anyway. He rides a chicken bus through Central America, follows a new friend to a family wake in San Salvador, learns salsa in a neighborhood bar, gets lost alone in a Mississippi River marsh, and climbs a sacred mountain in China. He's scammed, soaked, humbled, and welcomed—over and over—by strangers who turn out to be the best part of every trip. And in the book's final act, older and slower now, with doubts creeping back into his head, he sets out on six hard weeks traveling through southern Africa to find out whether he still believes what he's spent a lifetime learning.

What he's learned is this: the world is not what the news says it is. We're fed a steady diet of fear—if it bleeds, it leads—until every stranger looks like a threat and staying home feels like wisdom. But a safety-first life has a price. It grows smaller and more isolated. Klinkenberg's travels didn't transform him in one lightning-strike epiphany; they shaped him slowly, he writes, like wind moving over a sand dune—into someone who still feels the fear, but no longer lets it drive.

Warm, funny, and disarmingly honest about his own worst decisions, Better Safe Than Sorry? is a memoir about trusting the world and being repaid for it—and an invitation to stop asking "Is it safe?" and start asking what you're missing.