The Happiest Man in the World

Description

Critically acclaimed New Yorker contributor Alec Wilkinson's sixth major work of non-fiction and his most charming subject yet- eccentric hero Poppa Neutrino. Poppa Neutrino is a philosopher of movement, a vernacular Buddhist, a San Francisco bohemian, a polymath, a pauper, a football strategist for the Red Mesa Redskins of the Navajo Nation, and a mariner who built a raft from materials he found on the streets of New York and sailed across the North Atlantic. And he is possibly the happiest man in the world. This is a rare and compelling book in which nearly every page contains an implausible, outrageous and exhilarating adventure.

Alec Wilkinson has been a writer at The New Yorker since 1980. Before that he was a policeman in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and before that he was a rock and roll musician. He lives with his wife and son in New York City.

Strange, wonderful, funny, weird, and totally engaging - and, like all of Wilkinson's work, simply beautiful -- Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief It's not often that a person as inspiring and deeply outrageous as Poppa Neutrino is described by an author as immensely gifted as Wilkinson. Here is a life in the largest, most courageous sense of the word, a life that most of us - if we're honest - will feel a pang of regret at not having lived -- Sebastian Junger, author of A Perfect Storm A marvellous raft of a book in which we float along listening to an amiable Christian hobo and champion bullshitter expound on the inexplicable... A masterpiece -- Garrison Keillor [A] masterpiece of joy...[a] vivid, precise and jubilant testament, which will fill his readers with a great and unexpected happiness -- Edward Hirsch A hauntingly beautiful biography... an elegy to the strange wonder of the stories he [Neutrino] had to tell * Guardian *