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  • Published: 15 January 2008
  • ISBN: 9780099516897
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

The Happiest Man in the World




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. 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.

  • Published: 15 January 2008
  • ISBN: 9780099516897
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

About the author

Alec Wilkinson

Alec Wilkinson has been a writer at The New Yorker since 1980. Before that he was a policeman in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and before that he was a rock and roll musician. He lives with his wife and son in New York City. He is the author of The Happiest Man in the World.

Praise for The Happiest Man in the World

Strange, wonderful, funny, weird, and totally engaging - and, like all of Wilkinson's work, simply beautiful

Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief

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

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

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

[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

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