The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

Troost—somewhat addicted to travel—jumped at the chance to move to Kiribati (pronounced kir-ee-bas) when his girlfriend got a job there. Troost is funny—and he can put a hilarious spin on just about the worst things imaginable (except he’s very serious about the tribute to the victims of one of the worst WWII battles there). Thankfully he has this outlook on life because Kiribati sounds about like the worst place on the planet to live. One of the most surprising things to know is that this island surrounded by beautiful blue ocean tends to be subjected to years-long droughts. Be aware the dogs are brutal, and are treated in kind unless they are eaten. So big trigger warning there. This is an excellent book, though, about what show more it’s really like living in so-called paradise. show less

Troost—somewhat addicted to travel—jumped at the chance to move to Kiribati (pronounced kir-ee-bas) when his girlfriend got a job there. Troost is funny—and he can put a hilarious spin on just about the worst things imaginable (except he’s very serious about the tribute to the victims of one of the worst WWII battles there). Thankfully he has this outlook on life because Kiribati sounds about like the worst place on the planet to live. One of the most surprising things to know is that this island surrounded by beautiful blue ocean tends to be subjected to years-long droughts. Be aware the dogs are brutal, and are treated in kind unless they are eaten. So big trigger warning there. This is an excellent book, though, about what show more it’s really like living in so-called paradise. show less

Troost shares his experiences of the two years he spent on Tarawa, a tiny island lost in the middle of the Pacific, where his girlfriend was employed by an NGO aid organization, and he was employed not writing a novel. Tarawa, and the nation of Kiribati to which it belongs, is a place with a lot of problems: overcrowding, poverty, pollution, bad government, disease. But Troost writes with a real fondness for the place and the people, and with a lot of often self-deprecating humor, making this a delight to read, even if I'm glad not to be the one having lived it. (Because, seriously, nobody should have to dig flies out of their wounds. Nobody.)

Okay, right up front, this is NOT a NSFW book. Its a very funny travel book, the subtitle of which is "Adrift in the Equatorial". Maarten was finishing up his graduate degree in Eastern European International Relations. His girlfriend was getting her's in Western Europe. And logically with their background and education they decide to move to the middle of the Pacific to the island of Tarawa (part of the nation of Kiribati). She, to run an NGO aid origanization and he, to write a book. This book.

A island paradise this ain't. Heat, disease, entirely too much "La Macarena" and a cast of characters that while funny and interesting, did not make me want to visit the South Pacific. A great read!

To picture Kiribati, imagine that the show more continental US were to conveniently disappear laving only Baltimore and a vast swath of very blue ocean in its place. Now chop up Baltimore into 33 pieces, place a neighborhood where Maine used to be, another where California once was... Take away electricity, running water, television...Add Palm Trees, sprinkle with hepatitis A, B, and C, add in dengue fever and parasites.
Take away doctors, isolate and bake and a constant temperature of 100 degrees. The result is the Republic if Kiribati.

About surfing - "Look for a wave shaped like an A." An A. Hmm. I saw Zs and Ws and Vs. I saw the Hindi alphabet and the Thai alphabet.
I saw Arabic script. I saw no As. Finally I gave up, and chose the next wave that would have me, which turned out to be a poor move.
The demon wave picked me up, and after that I have only a very vague recollection of spinning limbs, a weaponized surfboard, chaotic white water, all kind of churning together over a reef. I decided this was not for me.

It is often said that Americans have no sense of history. Ask a college student who Jimmy Carter was and they will likely reply that he was a general in the Civil War, which occurred in 1492, when Americans dumped tea in the Gulf of Tonkin, sparking the First World War, which ended with the invasion of Grenada and the development of the cotton press. Actually, I would be impressed with that answer. The more likely response is "Who the F*#% cares?

9/10

S: 7/25/18 - 8/5/18 (12 Days) show less

I am a firm believer that true stories are wilder than any fiction the highly paid minds in Hollywood can come up with and Troost proves this, in an entertaining way, as he takes the reader through his metamorphosis of a stunned 20-something American from Washington DC trying to fit in and understand the local population of a small atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean into an islander. I had to look up the location of Kiribati on the map and, thanks to Google, I now know that this tiny chain of islands is due south of Hawaii and couldn't be more smack dab in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, almost as if someone had picked them islands up and placed them there. I like travelogues to be informative, witty and detailed enough to really show more give the reader an insight into day-to-day life. Troost does this in spades. I will admit that I struggled with the first couple of chapters when I thought I was in for, you know, one of those cheap "I don't know what to do with my life beyond aimlessly drifting from job to job and country to country" kind of drivel writing, but once Maarten and Sylvia had reached Tarawa and Maarten started to investigate where they had chosen to move to, it opened up into a more insightful read with segues into nuclear and chemical testing conducted in the South Pacific, that childhood dysentery is what first world aid should focus on (and not AIDS counseling) and the sad irony that garbage was never a problem - although sanitation was - until first world items like plastic bags, tinned corned beef, beer in cans and disposable diapers found their way to the region. Where exactly does one create a landfill - a first world solution to the problem - on an atoll?

A read/audiobook well worth experiencing for Troost's delightful wit and uncanny ability to capture the "what the ......" nuances of trying to assimilate into island life, with the hope of not always being the complete laughingstock of the natives. show less

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. In the final, dry 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 show more 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 further 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. show less

This book is slotted as a travel book, but for the most part, it's really just the story of the authors time on the tropical island of Kibari. The book starts of slow, with the author explaining who he was before he went to Kibari. He doesn't present himself in the most flattering light and I was kind of worried that the book would be boring cause he sounded like a self important jerk, but fortunately he isn't as bad as he makes himself out to be. While the book is extremely interesting, it is a little bit scary to find out what life is like on Kibari. Disease, malnutrition, and crappy buearocracy run rapant and it is a wonder to see how these happy people survive. The Kibari people seem interesting I don't really get what the title has show more to do with the work, there really isn't much mention of sex or cannibals, but it was still a fun and interesting read. show less