This book is like a sandwich. The first piece of dry bread is Troost smirkingly telling us that he is just too good, clever and unique to have to actually work and pay bills, like the rest of us, after college. In the final chapter he tells us just how superior he feels to the idiots who over-pay and over-respect him for his newly acquired job that he knows nothing at all about. He wants to return to the life of a house-husband on a tropical island, supported by his wife while he floats in the blue waters of the lagoon and procrastinates about writing a book.Surprisingly, the filling of this sandwich is very tasty. He relates the history of Kiribati and the day-to-day life of a foreigner willingly marooned on a tiny tropical island in an amusing and somewhat spicy, biting fashion. Its very entertaining and - with the concise history - informative.Troost, though, fails to penetrate the surface of the island life. He forever moans the 'golden age' he presumes the island must have been in before he and his ilk brought the outside world, the developed world, to the South Pacific. He presumes that the islanders are much degraded now in the poverty of their subsistence existence compared to the life they must have lived in this imagined 'golden age', often described elsewhere as 'the noble savage'. I don't like to bring race into it, but why, why, why do white men (and it is always whites) go to an island to skim the cream off the milk, earn salaries three times that of locals, insist on importing as many of the appurtenances of modern life as their luggage - or container - can hold and are then surprised when the local people would also like to have easy-to-prepare food, disposable nappies, pretty clothes and all those other items that we take for granted?How do I know this so good? Because I live on a tiny tropical island myself. I have the pictures from my grandparents of the 'golden age' and I myself arrived before much modern development. The island has about 10% British and American folks on it. They mostly mix with each other (and local politicans and bigwigs who have travelled and understand how to behave at a cocktail party and whose children attend the American school - fees per month more than the average local income). The non-working partner generally joins some charity (mostly for the social life), the Reef Keepers, National Parks, Coastal Development et al that raise money at balls, art shows and $100 a head dinners, and seek to pressure outside agencies and local government into restricting further progress. All of them are devoted to keeping the island just as it was when they arrived or even taking it back and bugger what the locals want. After all, how would such an uneducated, primitive people really be able to decide what is best for themselves? Troot's only descriptions of the bustling town on Tarawa are brief and of a degraded, open-sewer, corrupt kind of existence. Does he really think the people live like that, is there no vibrance and ambition there? There are no descriptions at all of their working lives, of the education of their ambitions, or even of courtship and marriage. He is very selective indeed about the cultural aspects of island-life he describes. Troost is as patronising as the ex-pats are on my island with their old-colonial attitudes now so out of place and out of time.I would probably not want to read Maarten Troost's other book on Fiji, written while he was again a house-husband and before he relocated to the truly golden life of California. However, when his columns for Atlantic Monthly and the Washington Post are inevitably collected into a slim volume without the verbiage of a full-length book, I would definitely buy it. Small, appetizing bites can be even tastier than a full-scale meal. ( )

The Sex Lives of Cannibals was, I found, even more than it promised to be - it was a funny travelogue, sure, but it also contained more serious topics about colonialism, foreign aid and environmental protection. I'm glad I picked it up! ( )

This audiobook was funny and made driving a breeze although people in the next lane wanted to know why I was always smiling! ( )

I had high hopes for this book but was ultimately quite disappointed. Troost's writing is OK, the storytelling is rather bland, and I thought he missed the mark in general.

For a full review, visit The Book Lady's Blog . ( )

An entertaining and humorous story about a man and his girlfriend who pack up their lives and move to a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific. They moved from Washington DC to a little place called Tarawa. On the atoll, the electricity was sporadic at best but the fish and colorful characters were plentiful. It was an interesting travel book and I was wondering if I could do that. Could I survive on a little island in the middle of nowhere. It would take getting used to but the impact that a person can make in that environment, where living is truly self sustaining, would be immense. Then again the impact that the island and environment would have on me would be incredible as well. This was a great first book from a promising author. ( )