Reviews

Mellow singer-songwriter Buffett's previous best-selling books‘the essay-and-story collection Tales from Margaritaville (LJ 10/1/89) and the novel Where Is Joe Merchant? (Harcourt, 1992)‘were sometimes reviewed as "laidback" and "perilously close to sloppy." With this autobiographical journal, even his most devoted fans may feel he has stepped over that line. Eleven sections offer 66 chapters, many consisting of multiple vignettes. Some of these are entertaining‘Buffett never takes himself or others too seriously‘but the more one reads the more superficial the writer appears to be. Genuinely sentimental memories are treated with the same slapdash attitude as a fishing story. This approach is partly justified in the introduction, where Buffett explains that the impetus for this "journal" was that he had signed a book deal and could not make any of his other ideas work. These intertwined, meandering recollections would make a nice column in the local paper, but as the memoirs of a creative talent they are deeply disappointing. Buy as demand warrants. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/98.]‘Eric Bryant, "Library Journal"

Jimmy Buffett "has gregarious charm . . . and a bottomless well of stories to tell. . . . Reading A PIRATE LOOKS AT FIFTY is like sitting with Buffett at a beachside bar, listening to him spin tales . . . discourse on life and share nifty bits of geography and history."
--Time
"Fulfilling his peripatetic pirate lifestyle fantasies, rocker Jimmy Buffett took his family on a three-week trek around the Caribbean in celebration of his 50th. His colorful travelogue is interspersed with memoirs of his youth and music career--both of which revolve around his continuing search for the perfect fishing spot. But Buffett also imparts useful understandings gained from childhood through parenthood, and a valuable account of what it was like growing up in the '50s."
--USA Today
"The fun-loving Man from Margaritaville parses his hell-bent half-century."
--People
"Some of the funniest travel writing since Mark Twain went off following the equator . . . This man does know

The breezy pop craftsman of "Margaritaville" and "Cheeseburger in Paradise" famously spends most of his time sailing, trotting out 1970s chestnuts on the summer tour circuit‘and writing. Buffett's bestselling Tales from Margaritaville (1989) and Where Is Joe Merchant? (1992), among other books, created a world of sun-baked characters whose doings bore some resemblance to those of their author. This memoir draws back the curtain between fact and fiction, and genially takes stock in a manner likely to appeal to the Me generation. Though he rambles, repeats himself and may even raise hackles ("I have been too warped by Catholicism not to be cynical"), Buffett is earnest and unapologetic in his hedonism, seeing his mock pirate's life as the antithesis of the conformity foisted on him as a child in Alabama. In a series of loosely chronological vignettes, Buffett quickly takes us from his bar-band beginnings to a brush with death when he crashes one of his fleet of seaplanes. A lower-latitude voyage with his family (in a newer, bigger plane) to celebrate his 50th birthday makes up the bulk of the book, and takes them from Florida to the Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, Colombia and the Amazon. The diaristic logbook that Buffett keeps along the way provides endless opportunities to muse on the music business; his older, wilder ways; navigation and, on the horizon, approaching mortality. Buffett's prose won't itself win him more "parrotheads" (as his fans are called), but those with enough patience or reverence to wade through long descriptions of beloved gear, favorite books or "fucking tikki pukki drinks" will find beneath these amblings a disarmingly direct character. Simultaneous audio, CD and large-print edition; author tour. (July)