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| Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu | 
 enlarge | Author: J. Maarten Troost
Publisher: Broadway
Category: Book
List Price: $12.95
Buy New: $3.97
You Save: $8.98 (69%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (40 reviews)
Sales Rank: 6687
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.7
ISBN: 0767921992
Dewey Decimal Number: 919.59504
EAN: 9780767921992
ASIN: 0767921992
Publication Date: June 13, 2006
Release Date: June 13, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Excellent, funny read. January 11, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Troost gives the reader a down-to-earth view of his travels and life in this easy read. There's comedy, drama, and lots and lots of kava drinking. I highly recommend this book for a fun read.
Fantastic Humor December 8, 2006
Loved Troost's book. This was the first of his books that I've read and he grabbed me from his first lines, "I have been called many things in my life...." He's one of the most entertaining and humorous travel writers whom I've read in this past year and I look forward to hearing of his adventures now that he and his family live on the West Coast.
Not quite as good as the first, but still very good October 26, 2006
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
In his best-selling travel memoir The Sex Lives of Cannibals, J. Maarten Troost chronicled the two years he spent living in Kiribati in the equatorial Pacific with his girlfriend Sylvia. After the period covered by the book Troost spent another two years in Washington D.C. working as, of all things, a "hoity-toity consultant to the World Bank," a change in lifestyle akin to, say, giving up a job on Gilligan's Island to work for Donald Trump. Fortunately the suit and tie and dependable paycheck of buttoned-down life didn't capture Troost, and he and Sylvia left civilization behind again, lured by warmer climes and the laid-back tropical mentality: "Stuff happens, but tomorrow the sun will rise again."
This time the couple moved to Vanuatu--formerly the New Hebrides--a country about the size of Connecticut that's composed of some 80 islands and lies directly on the Pacific Ring of Fire, which is to say that it's geologically interesting: Vanuatu has nine active volcanoes and experiences frequent, even daily, earthquakes. But more alarming than the tremors and the lava and the frequent cyclones, more alarming even than the shark-infested waters that put a damper on life in paradise, are the foot-long, poisonous, carnivorous, child-killing centipedes that live in Vanuatu. That's right, killer centipedes. And if you should get up the nerve to take an axe to one of them and, say, chop it into five pieces, it doesn't mean you've done away with it: it means you've now got five killer centipedes running around loose. Paradise has its price.
In addition to recounting his harrowing adventures with the island wildlife, Troost writes about Vanuatu's history and culture and living conditions. He spends a good deal of time describing the experience of drinking kava, a muddy liquid--"to the uninitiated...the most wretchedly foul-tasting beverage ever concocted by Man"--that became Troost's drug of choice on the island. And, happily, Troost put considerable effort into researching the country's long--and relatively recent--history of cannibalism:
"The last officially recorded incident of cannibalism in Vanuatu was in 1969 on the island of Malekula. I was born in 1969, and while I am willing to concede that 1969 is rapidly receding into the dim mists of time, it wasn't that long ago. Humor me. It seemed to me that if people were still officially gnawing at human limbs in 1969, it was more than possible that, since then, there had been some off-the-books cannibalism going on in Vanuatu."
About two-thirds of the way into the book, Sylvia having become pregnant, the couple decided to move to Fiji, where delivery promised to be less nightmarish. Fiji, it turned out, was full of prostitutes, both male and female, and Troost recounts his adventures on that front with his usual good humor.
The Sex Lives of Cannibals, Troost's first book, was a laugh-out-loud funny, you-must-go-buy-it-now kind of read. (Really, go buy it now.) Getting Stoned with Savages is not quite as good a book. It drags a bit when Troost is talking about Vanuatu's government, for example. But it suffers in comparison only because the author set the bar so very, very high with his first book. Getting Stoned with Savages is a funny book, and Troost's a likeable, self-deprecating, witty guide through the cultures and countries of Vanuatu and Fiji. Since I'll never be going to either country, I'm glad Troost is around to write about them for us. And I hope he winds up writing a great many more books.
Debra Hamel -- author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece (Yale University Press, 2003)
 Not Very Worldly October 12, 2006
8 out of 14 found this review helpful
This guy is an idiot and does not know anything about Fiji, or its inhabitants. He is the typical "ugly American" and it would be best if he stayed away from beautiful islands such as Vanuatu. The people of Fiji are not as he portrays them, and his juvenile excursion to the islands is a poor attempt to be Hunter S-like.
BTW - Kava does not make one hallucinate.
Vinaka-Vaka-Levu,
Signed: A real Island Boy (a true 'Gimrit' off the ship, Leonidas)
 Agree completely that this is a sophomore slump October 1, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I agree with the earlier reviewer from Washington D.C. who wrote, "Mildly interesting, not as good as the first." Troost's second book is "The Sex Lives of Cannibals" Lite.
The author finds fewer interesting stories in Vanuatu than he did in Kiribati. And Fiji proves least interesting of all -- this surprised me, as I had high hopes after how other authors, including Joana McIntyre Varawa ("Changes in Latitude") and Sheree Lipton ("Fiji I Love You Full Speed"), provided intriguing accounts of this island nation.
I was distressed that after a few stories about giant centipedes, drinking kava and cannibalism on Vanuatu, and a brief sojourn on Fiji, "Getting Stoned with Savages" was over. GSwS is a tiny 236 pages, and if the author's writing style were not so bright and humorous, we wouldn't be distressed at the brevity of this work. Yes, your fans are shouting, "More!"
A lot of events and decisions, such as that to return to the United States, could have borne deeper examination, especially since Troost's sophomore effort, like his first book, also contains cheap shots at Americans. So why then does he feel compelled to move "home"?
A coda makes clear the author added a second child to his family and moved within the United States during writing of book, and these disruptions show in the final product.
A brilliant vignette on p. 22 set on the Washington, D.C., Metro moves GSwS from two to three stars. Troost captures the asexuality and chill of public transportation in the nation's capital, and the impossibility of living in such a bureaucratic place after sojourns in the South Pacific. Bravo from someone else who has lived the same experience.
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