On Display on top of the New Book shelf collection until 4/13, then in the Leisure Reading Collection in the main library's lobby
Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu
By J. Maarten Troost
Publisher's Description: After his misadventures among the natives of heat-blasted Kiribati, memorably chronicled in The Sex Lives of Cannibals, it would be understandable for Maarten Troost to be in no hurry to return to the South Pacific. But then in a strangely appropriate place for a modern epiphany, the aisle of a Super Stop & Shop, he discovers that he feels remarkably out of place among the trappings of twenty-first-century American life, and longs to return to simpler days when a shortage of beer numbered among his chief concerns.So off again he goes, this time to Vanuatu, with his girlfriend-turned-wife, Sylvia. Like Tarawa, Vanuatu proves to be a fallen paradise, breathtaking in its beauty but also maddeningly backward. With his trademark sardonic wit, Troost relates his run-ins with Mother Nature (volcanoes, typhoons, earthquakes, giant centipedes) and the kava-besotted, clothing-optional lifestyle of the islanders. Perhaps as a result of these customs, Sylvia gets pregnant, and soon their son is born in slightly-more-civilized Fiji. As they contend with new parenthood in a country known for cannibalism and government coups, their boy begins to take quite naturally to island living, in complete contrast to his dad.A rip-roaringly funny account of life in the farthest corners of the world, Getting Stoned with Savages again reveals the wry appreciation of the absurd and infectious joy of discovery that make Troost one of the most engaging and original travel writers around.
1 comment:
I can't wait to tell my sister about this book. She has visited friends on Vanuatu and has great stories (and pictures) about this place, which also inspired James Michener.
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