7 in 7

Wrestling priests, Antarctic swimming, bleeding lungs, Christmas tsunamis… want to come traveling with me?

7 in 7: A Globe-Hopping Memoir of Disaster and Discovery is a memoir about my adventures as a soul-searching workaholic who set a goal to experience all seven continents in seven years as a true anthropologist, not just a travel-merit badge winner. 

Through those years I stumbled into and out of relationships, contracted pulmonary edema in Peru, and summited Shackleton’s peak on South Georgia Island. I learned why the Irish value a good craic while Scandinavians cherish lagom, witnessed the difficult truths of life in a Moroccan orphanage, and ultimately met my wife. Along the way I had plenty of time to contemplate the different ways people pursue happiness– or, sometimes the reasons they don’t. 

7 in 7 is for anyone who engages in inner and outer adventure. It sits comfortably in the tradition of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods and In a Sunburned Country. It expresses the honesty Chuck Thompson demands in Smile When You’re Lying. There are also overtones of Kristin Newman in What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding,  and J. Maarten Troost’s Los on Planet China.