An evening among headhunters

Lawrence Millman has a penchant for traveling to unusual places. In this stylish, erudite, often very funny book, the celebrated travel writer visits the South Pacific, the Canadian Arctic, the largest unknown island in North America, the most remote community in the eastern US and many other places as well.

He drinks the Tongan homebrew of kava ("like a blend of liquefied mud and muddy rainwater with a dollop of dental anaesthesia thrown in for good measure"); he gets bitten by an army of "war ticks" in Honduras; he is invited by an Inuit family to eat raw seal eye (it "met my gaze with a distinctly unhappy gaze of its own"); and he has a very personal part of his anatomy mocked by Ecuador's Jivaro Indians.