I've been waiting to get my hands on the newest gut-busting travel tale by writer J. Maarten Troost so that I can review it here. His last (and first?) book Sex lives of Cannibals was absolutely superb. I reviewed it just after it came out and thought it one of the funniest travel books I'd read in a while, pretty much on par in its own way with the stuff Bill Bryson puts out (which is saying A LOT). There is immense appeal to Troost's stories because he writes about the other side of paradise. He spirits off with his wife to exotic tropical locales that conjure up images of Corona ads or adolescent fantasies of topless native women fanning you with palm fronds on the beach, and he dispels the romantic allure of these places by revealing, well, the human reality of them. These islands, it turns out, are not quite as idyllic as Bronislaw Malinowski would have you believe.

Anyway, I promise I'll get the book eventually, but in the meantime, I'd like to direct you to the superb review done over at Worldhum by Kristin Van Tassel, a writing teacher at Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas. I happened to by cruising around Worldhum and found the piece here and it reminded me how much I want to read the new Troost opus.

Filed under: Arts and Culture, Oceania, Books