Gather Hold The Enlightenment: More Travel, Less Bliss Picturized By Tim Cahill Version

back of this book indicates that it's travel/adventure, and that's correct because it includes essays about some of Cahill's travels to exotic and sometimes dangerous places.
But he is also hysterically funny, and I've never been disappointed in anything I've read by him, I think I want to read "A Wolverine is Eating My Leg" next, I think Cahill is more fun to read in individual bites, Ive always enjoyed his articles in Outside Magazine, Here, some of the chapters are hairraising, some are thoughtful almost poignant, They are very uneven however, Some did not interest me a bit, Tim Cahill's dry reports from wild wild adventures accidentally charging a troop of gorillas, weighing up the dangers of being in the sea off South Africa where Great White Sharks pick seals off, etc are all entertaining to read, so much so that even I, a die hard lover of what Cole Porter called The Great Indoors, feel the urge to get out and experience nature red in tooth and claw.
And then I pour a Talisker, and the urge drifts away

A splendid book, nonetheless Collection of magazine articles and essays.
"Professor Cahill's Travel" is a hoot,

Rule: Avoid psychotic travel companions,
Rule, corollary: The most carefully chosen travel companions become the most psychotic,
Rule, corollary: Psychosis is contagious,

Ruleis the one I've vowed to remember, I have always enjoyed reading sitelinkTim Cahill's adventure travel essays, and sitelinkHold the Enlightenment: More Travel, Less Bliss is no exception.
I sometimes wonder if,

in the end, it is boring always to be going on adventures, such as kayaking the Missouri Breaks or searching out the FARC guerrillas of Colombia.
If you have an adventure each week or two, doesn't that somehow militate against the special purpose that travel and adventure play in our lives Does it ever become humdrum

Some of my friends and acquaintances think I am too adventurous in going to South America five times in the last eleven years.
But those were once a year events that I needed to stay on an even keel in my life, And I have not contacted any guerrillas nor attempted to make demands of my aging body, In, I broke my right shoulder in Tierra del Fuego, But that was not on an adventure: I slipped in a blizzard and slammed against a high curb at the corner of Magallanes and Rivadavia in Ushuaia.
Now there is a traffic signal at that intersection,

In the world of travel literature, Cahill is excellent light entertainment, I don't think he is at the level of Bruce Chatwin or Paul Theroux, but he does make for good reading,
This book is amazing, Cahill is the master. Adventure travel with humor. My favorite travel writer of all time, Read anything he writes. In Hold the Enlightenment, Americas favorite and funniest adventure writer returns with his most entertaining collection of essays yet, as he travels the globe and faces down challenges that are animal, topographicaland human.


Hold the Enlightenment takes Tim Cahill to sites as farflung as Saharan salt mines, the Congolese jungle, and Hanford, Washington, home of the largest toxicwaste dump in the Western hemisphere.
With his trademark wit and insight, Cahill describes stalking the legendary Caspian tiger in the mountains bordering Iraq, slogging through a pitchblack Australian eucalyptus forest to find the nocturnal platypus, diving with great white sharks in South Africa, staving off enlightenment at a yoga retreat in Jamaica, and much, much more.
In these essays, vivid and masterly storytelling combine with outrageously sly humor and jolts of real emotion to show one of the most popular journalists of our time at the absolute peak of his game.
Another successful collection of essays and stories by Cahill, There is a wide variety featured in this assembly of tales so one or two is bound to hold the interest of most readers.
Each chapter is an autonomous tale so this is a book that can be easily digested in stages and at one's leisure, The majority feature trips in the somewhat distant past i, e. occurred more than twenty years ago as Cahill has been a travel writer for over four decades so he's accumulated a lot of mileage with which to construct essays, short stories, and chapters to entice readers.
Anyone who has enjoyed either his featured articles in "Outside Magazine" or one of his previous anthologies will no doubt find this entry equally entertaining.
Cahill's writing makes me yearn to travel even more and see places I've yet to explore but at the same time, maybe not so much at the extremes that may of his adventures seem to take him.
I have no interest in traveling to wartorn countries, meeting up with guerilla fractions, finding out what it is like to be arrested or stopped at gunpoint.
Nor do I want to find out how panicstricken I can be if I opted to rappel beyond my level of training and find myself dangling over a mountain cliff.
I am just fine living those experiences vicariously through Cahill, turning his pages leisurely while sitting at home comfortably on my sofa, Tim Cahill can write, and he doesnt travel to ordinary places, Id put him at the top of the travel writing genre and will read more of his books, This wonderful writer creates another definition of travel, adventurous, world's hot spots and off the beaten paths, The writer is fearless, daring, who had his share of tragedies, The book is divided by thirty mini chapters, all cover different parts of the world and the Northwest, Some of the chapters took my breadth away, "I don't travel like this" For the traveler, and the traveler at heart, This is the latest of adventure travel writer Tim Cahills nine travel collections including such illustrious titles as Pass the Butterworms, and Jaguars Ripped my Flesh.
Cahills style is conversational, entertaining, wellresearched and often LOL funny, This collection starts at a yoga retreat where he pokes fun at those who think they are closer to universal wisdom than the rest of us, but admits he does experience some benefits, like feeling better.
He takes us to Bali in Entranced Duck, Mali before the troubles, a wild road trip to Banos in Ecuador and shark diving in South Africa.
I especially enjoyed EvilFish a tongue and cheek conversation about deviant dolphin behavior, Tim has no lofty aspirations with his writing other than to share with readers things, people and places he cares about in a way they can enjoy.
Mission accomplished.

Tim Cahill is an entertaining writer, His prose are a mixture of adventure, history, everyday life and impossible situations, He always applies his unrelenting humor and usually a just a few well placed emotive comments or substories, He can, at times, be inspiring, but you won't notice that through the laughter, I have read all of his books and have them in my library, I've read Tim Cahill foryears, or more, I had this listed as read, and realized I hadn't actually finished it, so I finally snagged it off the shelf and started over.


It takes a mental gearshift to get back in the swing of Cahill's writing, There's a particular distinctive style to it that, unless you don't slow the heck down, you miss out, I like it it's a good mix of snark, humor, danger and description, I felt like I'd like pictures, . . just because, descriptive as his writing is, I still wanted to see and see where my imagination got it wrong, I can look those up later, I looked up the volcano he talks about in one of the articles, . . that was pretty incredible.

I like most of his books, but this one is a hit for me in particular because it has my favorite Tim Cahill article of all time, and the one that got me hooked on his writing, "Panic.
" It's about his experience with anxiety/panic disorder, and after reading it in Outside magazine, years ago, it blew me away that this guy this person who has done everything under the sun, was adventure writing before adventure writing became a "thing," was cave diving and sky diving and hiking through jungles before "extreme sports" became popular, who has fallen off cliffs, suffered dysentery in Mexican jungles, and tromped around deserts.
. . could get laid out by panic disorder,

Having an anxiety/panic disorder, myself, this was a total game changer, Could it be I wasn't a big wimp Could it be that just trying to "tough it out" wasn't enough Could I let go of the shame and guilt attached to this thing that was "all in my head" Most importantly, could I get over it someday

It took years, after reading his article, to get a handle on my own panic attacks, but having read that article, I was relieved to know I wasn't alone in what I was feeling.
If someone like the guy who has done it all could get caught by it, then I felt a little better,


Of the other articles in the book most of his books are collections of his articles: I LOVED the one on the volcano that was chilling.
Loved the salt mines, gorillas, bug screams, travel tips and shark cage articles,

There was a really good line in there I bookmarked to quote later, . . I finished the book, thought "what's this bookmark doing in here" and yanked it out of the book, . . and remembered right afterwards why it was there, Ah well. I'll add it if I find it again, Probably something about life and perspective, usually is! One can see that Tim Cahill is a good writer, some of his stories are imaginative and even kind of funny.
However much of his writing, for me, is ponderous, Tim Cahill went on the many adventures in these stories, A quicktongued devil pointing out the absurd rode along, Guess which one wrote the stories, You'll meet Fabrice, the con man, a Liberian who runs his scam on Cahill while they do what all travelers do, wait, in this case for paperwork to clear.
You enter South African great white feeding grounds in a chicken wire cage, You climb el Capitan knowing a lifethreatening maneuver with the rope is necessary at the top, And in one, you just hike with the dog to "not actually" prayhe is a lapsed Catholicin the woods for a little girl going through spine surgery.
Get the picture No hitting you over the head, but tugging unmistakably at you in each one, And, like a sip of Pappy Van Winkle's, the pleasure is immediate, brief, and one you'll want again, When you read a book by the author, you have a good idea of what you are going to get, and that is short travel pieces that have humor and often a fair amount of beta male perspective and hipster politics.
  To be sure, there are elements of this that I find less enjoyable, but the humor and general sad sack nature of the author is enough to cover a multitude of sinsit is easier to appreciate the author the less you take him seriously and the more you take him as a figure of fun.
  Like the author's other books, this contains mostly articles that the author has written for magazines that I don't happen to read, and that most people probably haven't bothered to read either.
  Having them in a convenient and easytoread volume like this one is certainly worthwhile, as it provides material that is funny and that occasionally offers larger insights though not as often as the author would wish on the world that the author finds himself traveling in with a low degree of competence at being sufficiently manly to handle his adventures properly.
  Since this schtick is intentional, though, one doesn't feel too bad for the author,

The author begins this book somewhat aggressively in seeking to attack a reviewer who said that the author was not attractive to women, which shows a certain combativeness on his part.
  Aside from that, the essays are what one would expectthe title essay is a humorous one on yoga, there are essays about the search for a tiger thought extinct that may in fact still exist, and the author finds himself in strange locales and interesting places.
  He travels to Mali in search of salt mines, hunts for the adorable platypus, visits the house of Boots in Argentina, better known as the home of Butch Cassidy, ponders the overcrowding of a boat on the Congo River, shows off an ability to act like an entranced duck to some people in Bali, and discusses some of the weird and unclean foods he has tried.
  There are essays about swimming with Great White Sharks off the coast of South Africa, discusses the crimes of dolphins that make them humanlike, visits cowpersons in Tanzania, and talks about his brother's dealing in pots, along with some travel experiences and numerous other stories that will occasionally amuse or annoy the reader.


It is refreshing, in a way, that the author does not hide away from talking about the less pleasant aspects of his character.
  Most telling is his admission of being a bully when it came to instructing others on travel writing, in which he brings a writer to tears, making her leave the seminar in humiliation after he picks on the lead sentence in something she had written, without appreciating that not everyone writes to a mass audience.
  The fact that the author does write to a mass audience does make this easier to relate to, as this sort of writing would be pretty insufferable if the author added to his other issues that of being a snob as well.
  If one is going to be a putz, at least one should be a putz who has the good sense of trying to relate to others and to be someone that one can laugh with and not take too seriously rather than someone who combines incompetence and arrogance together.
  That said, let us judge not lest we shall be judged,   This is a book that is meant to be enjoyed, and also meant to demonstrate a certain degree of wit and humor and as it generally succeeds one should not be too hard on it.
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