Product Details
A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean: A Grump in Paradise Discovers that Anyplace it's Legal to Carry a Machete is Comedy Just Waiting to Happen (Travelers' Tales)

A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean: A Grump in Paradise Discovers that Anyplace it's Legal to Carry a Machete is Comedy Just Waiting to Happen (Travelers' Tales)
By Gary Buslik

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Product Description

"If you look at a map, you will see that the island chain known as the Caribbean, or, to confuse you, the West Indies, lies between Florida and South America and resembles a string of gems or possibly drool." And so begins author Gary Buslik's tale of tropical adventure. Each chapter of this often hilarious and sometimes poignant travelogue recounts another island-hopping, culture-clashing crisis that pits the homesick author against falling coconuts, hospitals that remove wrong organs, insects as big and dangerous as stealth bombers, ticket agents that put him on hold for hours, mysteriously calculated currency exchanges, over-proofed rum, livestock, singing Rastafarians, garbage-bin sex, peanut-crazed children, Idi Amin, flesh-eating monkeys, dentists, cricket, steel drum bands, and the French. Fortunately, even when making fun of his West Indian hosts, the curmudgeonly author's essential good nature and devotion to his wife twinkle through, and in the end his stubborn geocentricity gives way to a heartfelt appreciation of his island hosts.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #86450 in Books
  • Published on: 2008-05-01
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 256 pages

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This book is wicked...compulsively readable."
– Travellady.com

"Irreverent travel writing at its twisted best."
– Travel Goods Showcase Magazine

Customer Reviews

marvelous book-maven5
Although this book certainly is rip-roaringly funny, Buslik does himself a disservice by considering himself first and foremost a comic writer. There is a misleading modesty here, because Buslik is a highly skilled prose stylist: a master of controlled language, tone, and the ability to invoke deep emotions, felt and remembered long after the last page. The essays in this collections are occasionally played just for laughs but more often set readers up with humor and endlessly silly digressions, only, at the finish, to spring powerful emotional traps. The final piece, "Where Satan Works," is nonstop hilarity for eleven pages, only to end with the saddest and most spot-on observations about 9/11 I have ever read. This may be the best writing ever about that horrible day. His poignant "Flow," "Nasdaq 5000," "Weed Killer," and "Sometimes It's the Other Way Around" are literary feasts. Don't kid yourself: this author is not only a keen observer of human behavior but of human nature. The publisher might be selling this book mainly to tourists now, but my guess is that in a few years they'll be selling it to University English departments.

Two Thumbs Up. This is one Funny book5
There wasn't enough room for me to thrash about the breakfast table as I read this book. Truly one of the funniest books I have ever read.

If you can't afford a trip to the Caribbean, buy this book!5
A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean is truly laugh-out-loud funny. Gary Buslik's ancedotes are so far-fetched, and the characters he depicts (including himself) are so over-the top you can't help but guffaw out loud--which is fine when you're reading in the privacy of your own home, but might earn you some strange looks if you're reading in a public place. So, if anyone asks you what's so funny, just read them a line or two from this book. They'll have to agree with you that this is really funny stuff.