SquawkRadio

I happen to be the sort of person who loves armchair travelling.  I’ve read pretty much all those books about Provence, and then the tidal wave of books about Tuscany that followed.  I’m still a sucker for books with Paris in the title (anyone else read A Year in the Merde?).  But let’s face it:  most of them aren’t that good.

As someone who actually lives in Tuscany for two months of the year (since Florence is in Tuscany), I can tell you flat out that most of the stories in those cute books about English or Americans living in Tuscany are crap.  Either that, or the adorable shop people described in the books were spitting on the floor after the infidels left their store.  Take it from me (who’s married to one):  Florentines, and by extension, Tuscans, are not open to deep friendship with foreigners.

Oops...off topic.  My point is that I particularly love travel books that don’t indulge in gross sentimentalization of the “natives,” whoever those natives happen to be.  Sex Lives of the Cannibals is an acerbic, ruthlessly truthful (you can tell) memoir about a couple who went to spend two years in a remote South Pacific Island in the Republic of Kiribati.  Island paradise, right? 

Ha!  If you have any desire to travel to far-away places without actually getting there, buy this book.  It’s one of the funniest, most bizarre and—need I say it again?—TRUTHFUL books of this genre I’ve ever read.