Getting stoned with savages: a trip through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu

Using a format similar to that of his previous work, The Sex Lives of Cannibals, Troost creates another comical and touching travel memoir. Troost and his wife, Sylvia, move from busy Washington, D.C., to Vanuatu, a nation made up of 83 islands in the South Pacific. As Sylvia works for a regional nonprofit, Troost immerses himself in the islands' culture, an odd mix of the islanders' thousand-year-old "kastoms" along with imperialist British and French influences. This really means that Troost gets to live in a nice house while he gets drunk on kava; dodges "a long inferno of magma and a cascade of lava bombs" at the "world's most accessible volcano"; and checks out the "calcified" leftovers from one of Vanuatu's not-so-ancient traditions, cannibalism. At the end of the book, the couple move to Fiji so that Sylvia will have state-of-the-art medical care when she gives birth to their first baby. While modern-day Fiji provides little fodder for Troost's comic sensibilities, the birth of his son enables him to share some deeper thoughts and decide it is "time to stop looking for paradise." A funny travelogue with a sentimental heart, Troost's latest work genuinely captures the search for paradise as well as the need for home. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Those who enjoyed Troost's account of living on an atoll-a ring of closely spaced small coral islands-in Kiribati in the South Pacific in his previous travel memoir, The Sex Lives of Cannibals, will not be disappointed with this follow-up. After a two-year stint working as a consultant for the World Bank in Washington, DC, Troost began yearning for the adventure of the South Pacific. So when his wife, Sylvia, was offered a job in Fiji, the two jumped at the chance to return to the far reaches of the world. This time they set up camp in Vanuatu and Fiji, where the author discovered the delights of kava, attempted to find a cannibal, and experienced the joy of parenthood. For those readers sitting in offices, yearning to break free and live on a tropical isle, this book provides a wonderful, witty view into the experience-the good and the bad. Recommended for all libraries with travel collections.-Louise Feldmann, Colorado State Univ., Fort Collins (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Troost returns to the South Pacific, where he had spent a couple years on Kiribati (The Sex Lives of Cannibals, 2004), when the sensory overload of life in Washington, D.C., gave way to a gilded weariness. His life as a well-paid drone for the World Bank got to Troost. He yearned for his days on Kiribati, at their wonder and mystery, of water so blue it made him gasp. Forget the human feces on the beach, ringworm and dengue fever, the unrelieved diet of rice and rotten fish and the dreadful time the beer delivery went to the wrong island. Living on a South Pacific island could be grim, horrifying and revolting, Troost writes, but never less than interesting. So off he goes with his wife to Vanuatu, where the earth is alive and well and reminds you of it everyday, whether through volcanic eruptions or earthquakes. Troost works hard to find all that is fine and weird on the former British-French land mass. There will be coconut shells filled with kava--the local recreational intoxicant wrung from a masticated spitball of pepper bush root; discussion of the impulse behind cannibalism ("while I may not have completely understood what holy communion was all about, Catholicism did allow me to see the nuances in cannibalism"); and considerations of the spectacular governmental corruption of the island. Troost, who also briefly nests in Fiji, is a travel writer who delivers the gratifying, old-school goods: curious cultural practices; encounters with venomous, nay murderous, creatures; perspective on recent history, with all the chaos wrought by European interlopers. Troost is now washed up in landlocked Sacramento, but this "unapologetic escapist" should soon be on the move. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.