| |
1 |
A Beginner's Guide to Paradise: 9 Steps to Giving Up Everything So You Too Can : Move to a South Pacific Island, Wear a Loincloth, Read a Hundred Books, Diaper a Baby Monkey ...
Author:
Sheshunoff, Alex
Biographee:
Sheshunoff, Alex
|
| |
|
Class:
996.6
Age: Adult
Language: English
|
LC: DU568.Y3
|
|
ISBN-13: 9780451475862
LCCN: 2015008757
Imprint: New American Library
|
|
Pub Date: 09/01/2015
Availability: Out of Stock Indefinitely
List: $25.95
|
| |
Hardcover
|
|
|
Physical Description:
|
x, 447 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 22 cm
H 8.5",
W 5.81",
D 1.5",
1.325 lbs.
|
|
LC Series:
|
|
|
Brodart Sources:
|
|
|
Bibliographies:
|
|
|
Awards:
|
|
|
Starred Reviews:
|
|
|
TIPS Subjects:
|
Humor
Travel/Tourism
Biography, Individual
|
|
BISAC Subjects: |
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs
HUMOR / Business & Professional
TRAVEL / Special Interest / Adventure
|
|
LC Subjects:
|
Americans, Micronesia (Federated States), Yap, Biography
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
Burn out (Psychology)
Escape (Psychology)
HUMOR / General
Life change events
Moving, Household
Self-actualization (Psychology)
Sheshunoff, Alex, Homes and haunts, Micronesia (Federated States), Yap
Sheshunoff, Alex, Travel, Micronesia (Federated States), Yap
TRAVEL / Australia & Oceania
Yap (Micronesia), Description and travel
Young men, Micronesia (Federated States), Yap, Biography
|
|
SEARS Subjects: |
Sheshunoff, Alex, Travel
|
|
Reading Programs: |
|
|
|
| |
| Annotations |
| ONIX annotations | 11/02/2020 |
| So You Too Can:
- Move to a South Pacific Island
- Wear a Loincloth
- Read a Hundred Books
- Diaper a Baby Monkey
- Build a Bungalow
And Maybe, Just Maybe, Fall in Love! *
* Individual results may vary.
The true story of how a quarter-life crisis led to adventure, freedom, and love on a tiny island in the Pacific.
From the author of a lot of emails and several Facebook posts comes A Beginner s Guide to Paradise, a laugh-out-loud, true story that will answer your most pressing escape-from-it-all questions, including:
1. How much, per pound, should you expect to pay a priest to fly you to the outer islands of Yap?
2. Classic slumber party stumper: If you could have just one movie on a remote Pacific island, what would it definitely not be?
3. How do you blend fruity drinks without a blender?
4. Is a free, one-hour class from Home Depot on Flowerbox Construction sufficient training to build a house?
From Robinson Crusoe to Survivor, Gilligan s Island to The Beach, people have fantasized about living on a remote tropical island. But when facing a quarter-life crisis, plucky desk slave Alex Sheshunoff actually did it.
While out in Paradise, he learned a lot. About how to make big choices and big changes. About the less-than-idyllic parts of paradise. About tying a loincloth without exposing the tender bits. Now, Alex shares his incredible story and pretty-hard-won wisdom in a book that will surprise you, make you laugh, take you to such unforgettable islands as Yap and Pig, and perhaps inspire your own move to an island with only two letters in its name.
Answers: 1) $1.14 2) Gas Attack Training Made Simple 3) Crimp a fork in half and insert middle into power drill 4) No. |
|
| Journal Reviews |
| BookPage | 09/01/2015 |
| Call it the male answer to Eat, Pray, Love. Alex Sheshunoff was running a not-particularly-successful Internet startup in the late 1990s when he decided to walk away from it all: his Manhattan apartment, his girlfriend, his world. A health scare had landed him in the emergency room, where he vowed to turn his life upside down if he survived. "I'd been screwing up my life, I thought, pissing away years on this failing company, this failing relationship, this... materialistic city and its dead-end ideas of success, this hope that enough hours at work could make me rich, my parents proud, and democracy stronger," Sheshunoff writes. His plan, as much as he had one, was to find paradise and move there. To give this journey a little more heft, he would read 100 great books while traveling. He started where any 20-something probably would: He googled "nice Pacific island" and eventually found a message on a travel site pointing him to an island called Yap. Sheshunoff traveled to Yap, which was interesting in that the island's residents used enormous round stones as currency and the women all went topless. But it was not quite paradise. He meandered on to other hot, tiny islands with names like Pig and Tinian, making some quirky friends along the way. It was on the island of Koror, in the Republic of Palau, that he met Sarah. They hiked, they kayaked, they swam with jellyfish, and bit by bit, they fell in love. A Beginner's Guide to Paradise is extraordinarily entertaining, one part guidebook to two parts love story. This heartfelt account reveals what can happen when you leave everything behind--and find more than you ever hoped for. Amy Scribner. 464p. BOOKPAGE, c2015. |
|
| Kirkus Reviews | 07/01/2015 |
| A crestfallen 20-something techie leaves everything behind for a new life on a tropical island. Sheshunoff's hybrid of travelogue and anecdotal memoir embodies the dream of giving it all up to escape to paradise. This fantasy of "sitting on a small island and reading all day" was borne from a smoldering combination of a flat-lining romantic relationship and New York City burnout, exacerbated by a frustrating five-year stint at his own struggling, soul-sucking Internet startup business. Abandoning everything related to his former life in technology, Sheshunoff fled to the island of Yap (pop. 6,300, with a "growing leprosy problem"), part of the tropical Caroline Islands of the Western Pacific Ocean, and began living among the region's indigenous citizens. "I wanted this to be one of those instances when you discover how another culture does something better," writes the author about the shockingly weighty Yapese stone money, topless native women, and the lenient island dress code. Sheshunoff's ensuing Micronesian education, presented with great wit and composed through easily digested chapters, is unconventional, goofy, and rife with misadventure. As his idyllic days in the sun progressed, reality seeped in, and the author began to further contemplate his situation. He began to cultivate a romance with Sarah, an American attorney who tempered his tendencies to pontificate while swimming in historic Jellyfish Lake surrounded by a vast universe of jellyfish, "six million friendly cantaloupes in pink tutus...slowly pulsing their way across [the] small, tea-colored lake." The couple's eventual decision to build a bungalow together on a different outer island cemented their island fling into a relationship, which included a baby monkey named Gomez. Though the chatty narrative meanders along at a beachcomber's pace, armchair travelers won't mind, as the author's absurdist sense of humor validates the verbosity. A sincerely funny debut memoir extolling the benefits of spontaneous escape and personal reflection. 464pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2015. |
|
| Publishers Weekly | 07/20/2015 |
| In this self-absorbed, whiny guide, Sheshunoff sets up a successful Internet company, quickly tires of it, and heads to the South Pacific armed with books. Along the way, Sheshunoff shares little lessons he learns on islands such as Yap, Pig, Palau, and Angaur. Early in the book, Sheshunoff learns his greatest lesson--"capital P Paradise doesn't exist... there was no deluding myself that a place could fully protect us from ourselves... the human capacity to complicate life... would never be diminished"--but he refuses to listen to his own advice and to complicate his life at every turn, eking out "lessons" from his reading and his faltering attempts at being sociable. Such self-evident lessons include "making some big choices," "finding the right island," "settling in," and "meeting someone." Not long after Sheshunoff meets Sarah, the woman who will eventually become his wife, she deftly and cagily describes his quest in words that also summarize his book: "the contemplation of one's navel in search of a mystic experience." By the end of this overlong memoir, his life has changed little, except that he's traded the streets of Manhattan for the roads of Anchorage, Alaska. (Sept.). 464p. Web-Exclusive Review. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, c2015. |
|
9780451475862,dl.it[0].title
|
|