Getting Stoned With Savages...

Grounded by a bad back, I read Getting Stoned With Savages. This is the second book by J. Maarten Troost, whose first book, The Sex Lives of Cannibals, I found fascinating. It's about how Troost - born in Holland, raised in Canada, worked and married in the US - spent two years living in the nation of Kiribati, a series of islands in the mid-Pacific. These islands are very far from anywhere else and life is difficult: no medicine, no sanitation, inadequate food, minimal contact with the rest of the world - yet, with all the difficulties, the people of Kiribati have a strong and simple way of life.

After two years working for the World Bank in Washington DC, Troost and his wife decided they'd had enough of civlization and stress, and went to live in Vanuatu. It's a little more part of the world than Kiribati. They moved to Port Vila, where rent was higher than in Washington, and they lived on a hill that was occasionally washed out with floods, or visited by foot-long venomous centipedes. But he loves the place because he gets to drink plenty of the local recreational narcotic, kava.

Seemed to me that this book had neither the depth nor the pathos of Sex Lives of Cannibals, despite Troost's rather sensationalist desire to talk to a real cannibal. ( Bits I liked... )