Hold The Enlightenment

Description

Extreme travel writing for fans of Bill Bryson, Peter Moore, P.J. O'Rourke, Tim Moore. In Hold the Enlightenment, one of America's favourite and funniest adventure writers returns with his most entertaining collection of essays yet as he travels the globe and faces down challenges that are animal, topographical - and human. Hold the Enlightenment takes Cahill to sites as far-flung as Saharan salt mines, the Congolese jungle, and Hanford, Washington, home of the largest toxic waste dump in the Western Hemisphere. With trademark wit and insight, Cahill describes stalking the legendary Caspian tiger in the mountains bordering Iraq, slogging through a pitch-black Australian Eucalyptus forest to find the nocturnal platypus, diving with great white sharks in South Africa, staving off enlightenment at a yoga retreat in Negril, Jamaica, and much, much more. In these essays, vivid and masterly storytelling combine with outrageously sly humour and jolts of real emotion to show one of the most popular journalists of our time at the peak of his game.

Tim Cahill is the author of seven books, including A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, Pecked to Death by Ducks, Pass the Butterworms and Hold the Enlightenment. He is an editor at large for Outside magazine, and his work appears in National Geographic Adventure, The New York Times Book Review, and other national publications. He lives in Montana.

'Cahill captures these dramas with such self-deprecating humour and insight that you're more than happy he enjoys putting himself in harm's way' * New York Times Book Review * 'Tim Cahill is the working-class Paul Theroux... He delights in finding stories too peculiar to be labelled merely off-beat' * The New York Times * 'Tim Cahill is one of those rare types whose fun quotient seems to increase in direct proportion to the diceyness of the situation' * San Francisco Examiner * 'This is a collection with something for everyone; each story, in its own way, manages to raise the consciouslness of the reader and reveals that the author, whether he wishes to admit it or not, is absolutely on the path to enlightenment' * Publishers Weekly * 'Tim Cahill writes a wonderfully funny and observant book' * USA Today *