A Pirate Looks at Fifty FROM THE PUBLISHER
For the millions of fans of Jimmy Buffett's music as well as his bestselling books, Tales From Margaritaville and Where Is Joe Merchant?, here is the ultimate Jimmy Buffett philosophy on life and how to live it. As hard as it is to believe, the irrepressible Jimmy Buffett has hit the half-century mark and, in A PIRATE LOOKS AT 50, he brings us along on the remarkable journey which he took through the Southern hemisphere to celebrate this landmark birthday.
Jimmy takes us from the legendary pirate coves of the Florida Keys to the ruins of ancient Cartegena. Along the way, we hear a tale or two of how he got his start in New Orleans, how he discovered his passion for flying planes, and how he almost died in a watery crash in Nantucket harbor. We follow Jimmy to jungle outposts in Costa Rica and on a meandering trip down the Amazon, through hair-raising negotiations with gun-toting customs officials and a 3-year-old aspiring co-pilot. And he is the inimitable Jimmy Buffett through it all.
For Parrotheads, for armchair adventurers, and for anyone who appreciates a good yarn and a hearty laugh, here is the ultimate backstage pass — you'll read the kind of stories Jimmy usually reserves for his closest friends and you'll see a wonderful, wacky life through eyes of the man who's lived it. A PIRATE LOOKS AT 50 is a breath of fresh air and a ingenious manual for getting to 50 . . . and beyond.
SYNOPSIS
In this intensely personal book, popular singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett leaves his barstool in Margaritaville and does some soul searching. The result is a hilarious account of the funny, adventurous odyssey of Buffet's life.
FROM THE CRITICS
Katherine Whittemore
"Fun is about as good a habit as there is," writes Jimmy Buffett, and boy, he ought to know. Our author is well acquainted with bliss, chemical and otherwise. He "never gets tired of watching a wave breaking on the shore," for instance, and throws out section headings like "Blame It on the Bong." Here is a man who re(e?)fers to his Joseph Campbell tapes as "mental tiger balm." A dad whose daughter Sarah's first word is "Bob," as in Marley. A man who has pots of money. Someone who revels in flying the skies and fishing the seas. "Water is my real religion," this lapsed Catholic declares. His boat, for God's sake, is named the Euphoria.
OK, so A Pirate Looks at Fifty should have been half as long; heck, it should've been a magazine article. ("I don't know when to stop telling the story," he admits up front.) Knopf clearly wanted a follow-up to Buffett's engaging mystery Where is Joe Merchant? But this maker of more than 30 albums and writer of two bestsellers couldn't pick up the story. "Unsavory legumes and watery fiction are both offensive to the palate," is how he puts it. Hence this alternative effort. It's a meandering memoir/travelogue (47,000 Caribbean miles in three weeks) that needs a good bilge pump. Only a Parrothead could really care to learn, at length, what Jimmy puts in his flight bag. And while one fish-that-got-away story is fine, maybe even three, a dozen begs you to skim the pages like a waterbug.
Still, Buffett is ever-likable, even humble. "I don't have the talent to compete with the Great Serious Writers," he writes, meaning his heroes such as Eudora Welty and Gabriel García Márquez. But so what? His prose extends from his lyrics; it's catchy, funny and offers up a decent image every once in a while. A stormy sea is "shaken like salad dressing." He's drawn to navigation because "it is both mysterious and explainable at the same time."
The best passages -- and there aren't nearly enough of them -- pivot on his youth. His evocation of the Mobile, Ala., Mardi Gras of his boyhood is fine, and so are the affectionate portraits of his Naval officer grandfather and shipyard designer father. My favorite parts of the book tack to Buffett's rough-hewed musical beginnings, especially a dive he played in his lackluster college days. The place was nicknamed "Vietnam, Miss.," since vets and soldiers from the nearby base lurked there. When Jimmy turns off the jukebox one night so he can perform, he's pelted with beer bottles. "I felt like a yellowtail snapper suddenly surrounded by a school of hungry sharks," Mr. Cheeseburger-in-Paradise recalls. Nice.
Sure the man rambles, but he knows how to have -- and winningly, even artfully, describe -- fun. -- Salon
Publishers Weekly
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.
Library Journal
Mellow singer-songwriter Buffett's previous best-selling books -- the essay-and-story collection Tales From Margaritaville and the novel Where Is Joe Merchant? -- 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. -- Eric Bryant
Thomas McNamee
Among the number of bookish conventions with which A Pirate Looks at Fifty seems to have dispensed are continuity, structure and editing. . . .There is no story as such. . . .everything seems to be of about the same importance. . . . -- The New York Times
Time
[Jimmy Buffet] has gregarious charm...and a bottomless well of stories to tell.Read all 7 "From The Critics" >
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