Customer Reviews:
 Troost delivers again February 10, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
It's probable that you have read Maarten Toost's first book "The Sex Lives of Cannibals" if you're considering reading this book. If not, don't worry about it. They are stand alone books, but do read that one too... it's hilarious.
In this book Troost takes us on his second epic journey to the South Pacific this time to Fiji. Which is fairly developed compared to other South Pacific island which presents it's own set of problems. Troon takes the reader though a set of day to day, laugh out loud adventures living in urban Fiji (not what you see in resort brochures). He also describes some of the history and politics that only a local would learn.
Overall this is another extremely funny book by Toost that displays a good deal of wit an sarcasm in a very readable and relatable way. While it does strip out all the fantasies and present the realities of living on a south pacific island thousands of miles from "civilization", his writing is so inviting you may still be inclined to get away from western society and try to submerge yourself similarly.
 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
6 out of 6 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)
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