Synopses & Reviews
Lawrence Millman has a certain contagious enthusiasm for traveling to the far-flung corners of the globe, places you and I would never dream of going. In this stylish, erudite, often humorous collection of travel essays, well-known travel writer Lawrence Millman visits the friendly islands of Tonga, where he partakes in the local custom of drinking Kava -- which tastes like a blend of liquified mud and muddy rainwater with a dollop of dental anesthesia thrown in for good measure, a drink that makes you float amiably above your world. In the Bay Islands, he encounters a vibrant insect population and "something green-eyed and winged whose mandibles made cookie-cutter indentations on my flesh". He travels to barren lands, where the main local attractions are the trees -- eighteen-inch willows, dwarfed by the extreme climate. An Inuk family offers him a meal: the stomach contents of a walrus, and raw seal eyes. Here he learns he is gallunaat, an Inuk word meaning White People: literally, those who pamper their eyebrows.
Synopsis
Essays on Millman's travel to farflung corners of the globe.
Synopsis
Lawrence Millman has a penchant for traveling to unusual places. In this stylish, erudite, often very funny book, the celebrated travel writer visits the South Pacific, the Canadian Arctic, the largest unknown island in North America, the most remote community in the eastern US and many other places as well. He drinks the Tongan homebrew of kava ("like a blend of liquefied mud and muddy rainwater with a dollop of dental anaesthesia thrown in for good measure"); he gets bitten by an army of "war ticks" in Honduras; he is invited by an Inuit family to eat raw seal eye (it "met my gaze with a distinctly unhappy gaze of its own"); and he has a very personal part of his anatomy mocked by Ecuador's Jivaro Indians.