The Happiest Man in the World
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:3rd Jan '08
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
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.
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.
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 *
Beautiful and true, this is a great book that brings you into the life of Poppa Neutrino, a character just as determined as the fishermen in Hemingway's 'The Old Man and the Sea', just as self-inventing and free as the explorer in Bellow's Henderson the Rain King -- Rich Cohen
Poppa Neutrino built a raft from stuff he found on the streets of New York and sailed it across the Atlantic: he is a joy to meet through the happy medium of Wilkinson's wonderful words as Poppa plans his next epic voyage * Saga magazine *
ISBN: 9780099516897
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 20mm
Weight: 224g
320 pages