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I bought this book a couple of days ago at the Sydney Airport just because I thought the back of the book jacket was already hilarious. I'm not a big friend of travel books like Bill Bryson etc. but this book is one of the funniest and most interesting books I have read. I will not even get into details here, every chapter is a delight and once you finish you will want more!! Hopefully J. Maarten will have a prosperous future as an author so we could enjoy more of his work!

To describe briefly the content, a couple from the U.S. move to Kiribati for 2 years, this being a country that consists of many tiny islands - merely atolls - spread over a vast area in the middle of the Pacific and largely being ignored by the western world. An almost impossible country, this is also a very hard area to live in, one must know, with hardly anything else than fish and coconuts to eat and yet people are as kind as one can imagine.

Now that I have finished the book, I am sure that not the author but the editor choose the title. I have never come across a book that has no relation to its title. After much contemplating I have come to the conclusion that it could be related to those polynesians that migrated to Kiribati or the other possibility being the dogs eating each other for the lack of food. Please Maarten, help me on this one.

But apart from that, this is a truly wonderful and amusing book, not for the "otherness" of the people of Kiribati, but for the authors struggle to find a way between blending into this society and living his own lifestyle. J. Maarten Troost's unpretentious way to describe their life is a great pleasure in this world of development aid (I can attest that it is very true to reality) and I can only marvel at the couples patience and curiosity and respect, which are so rare in this world. Thank you Maarten