The Butterfly Hunter: Adventures of People Who Found Their True Calling Way Off the Beaten Path [Hardcover]

Chris Ballard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 18, 2006

Do we each have a dream job that we are, by nature or nurture, uniquely meant for? To answer this question, Chris Ballard set out to talk to people who found work they love way off the beaten path. The Butterfly Hunter is a rollicking narrative of what he discovered, and reveals insights the rest of us can use to find passion in our work.

The Butterfly Hunter begins its roundup of quirky characters in unusual professions with Spiderman Mulholland, a former Marine, who rappels to suicidal spots on sheer building faces to assess damage or make repairs. (And yes, that’s his legal name.) Through Spiderman, Ballard learns that one can find a calling by following one’s wildest idiosyncrasies. Along the way he learns the history of window-washing, why it is that some people enter risky professions, and the best way to jump off a 230-foot building.

His adventures continue as he meets America’s top lumberjill, an NFL kicking coach who has never kicked a ball in his life, a MacArthur genius who’s spent his life in remote jungles chasing butterflies, and the movie trailer voice-over artist known as the Voice of God.

These ten characters each reveal an aspect of the search for a life’s work, and reaffirm for Ballard that we, too, can discover a calling if only we look in the right place. As with true love, there aren’t seven steps to finding it, but The Butterfly Hunter teaches us what it looks like when it’s real.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With wit and style, Sports Illustrated staffer Ballard (Hoops Nation) profiles 10 people who found their life's work in highly unusual jobs. Although Ballard acknowledges that an engaging occupation doesn't guarantee happiness, he believes that having a calling brings meaning to life. And some of his subjects have achieved wealth and success through their work: Don LaFontaine, considered the master of voiceovers, has recorded trailers for over 3,500 films. Penny Halvorson, a 45-year-old grandmother, was the first woman to participate in lumberjack competitions; she has won four world championships. Doug Blevins has cerebral palsy and has never walked, yet he has become an outstanding football coach, working with the Miami Dolphins and New York Jets. Wisely, in Blevins's story, Ballard finds not sentimental inspiration but passion in pursuing a dream "because it is the one thing that can give... life meaning." The strength of this exploration lies in its offering not generalities or formulas for success but specific truths behind individual choices. And in a funny introduction, Ballard describes his own failure to become a vacuum cleaner salesman. (Apr. 18)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

You hear about it all the time: the dream job, the one occupation we are born to do. Sports Illustrated staff writer Ballard explored the fringes of the professional world and found 10 people who seem to be working in their dream jobs. There is Spiderman Mulholland, a former marine who climbs buildings for a living (yup, that's his real name, duly licensed from the folks at Marvel comics). Or Don LaFontaine, the 60-second salesman, who has spent the past four decades narrating trailers for movies. These men and women work in widely diverse fields, but they have one crucial thing in common: they love their jobs, love them with a passion that escapes the rest of us. Each believes firmly that what they are doing now is the thing they do best and that it's the thing they were destined to do. The book won't tell you how to go about finding your dream job--for that you need luck, inspiration, and a willingness to step out of the mainstream--but it may just inspire you to start looking. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Broadway (April 18, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767918681
• ISBN-13: 978-0767918688
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,727,318 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sports Illustrated Senior Writer Chris Ballard has had a lifelong affair with basketball. In 1998 he and three other former college basketball players piled into a used Chevy van and traveled 31,000 miles in seven months, playing at over a thousand courts in 166 cities in 48 states. The book resulting from that experience -- Hoops Nation -- was named one of Booklist's "Top Ten Sports Book of the Year." The Philadelphia Inquirer called it "a travelogue worthy of frequent rereading and a guidebook no hoopaholic should leave home without." Ballard is also the author of The Butterfly Hunter (2006) and his most recent book, The Art of a Beautiful Game, an examination of Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and others who have mastered areas of the game.

Ballard joined SPORTS ILLUSTRATED in September 2000 and has since written 14 cover stories, as well as features on a wide array of subjects, from motocross star Ricky Carmichael to America's best sports bars to bass fisherman Mike Iaconelli. He has been nominated by SI for a National Magazine Award and his work has twice been cited in the Best American Sports Writing anthology (2005 and 2007) including The Game of the Year, a 2007 SI story which examined a Friday night high school game in Lepanto, Ark., with record-setting individual performances, exhausting swings of emotion and an unexpected dose of national fame. Since December 2007 Ballard has been part of a rotation of writers who have authored the Point After column and writes weekly online columns at SI.com.

Before joining SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, Ballard was an intern at the Courier-Post in Camden, NJ. He has written for The New York Times Magazine (where one of his stories was optioned for a film), The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Men's Health, and other publications. Ballard has appeared on The Charlie Rose Show, ABC News with Dick Schaap, and Outside the Lines. A native Californian, Ballard graduated from Pomona College, where he played basketball and was on the track and field team. He lives in Berkeley with his wife Alexandra and two daughters, Callie and Eliza.

Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/writers/chris_ballard/archive

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Get a life...read this book, May 7, 2006

By 

James Flusterdam "JJFLuster" (Newark NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Butterfly Hunter: Adventures of People Who Found Their True Calling Way Off the Beaten Path (Hardcover)

As if I wasn't already feeling beaten down by my run of the mill job (i.e. - paper pusher, BA) with a Fortune 500 company, then I had to go and pick up The Butterfly Hunter. This book, as the subtitle states, is about careers found off the beaten path. Among them are: a dude who paints fake eyeballs, a chick who makes her living throwing axes and wielding the "hot saw," and a wheelchair-bound guru of placekicking. Fascinating folks, and Ballard relates their stories with warmth and humor. I wish he'd spent a little more time detailing his own career path (from door-to-door vacuum salesman to staff writer for Sports Illustrated) but other than that this book delivered 100%. The Butterfly Hunter hasn't inspired me to quit my job just yet, but it does have me listening a little harder for that true calling.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing people = Amazing book, September 13, 2006

By 

Alexander Randall (Virgin Islands) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Butterfly Hunter: Adventures of People Who Found Their True Calling Way Off the Beaten Path (Hardcover)

Chris Ballard is actually a family friend and I was lucky enough to meet him personally before I read his book. He is a great guy and his humorous personality really comes out in his writing. I started to read this book when I flipped it open to the chapter where Chris meets the "movie preview guy." After only a few pages I was hooked and read the whole thing cover to cover. Chris's character descriptions are what I looked forward to every chapter. The way he described people in a way that I had never read before was eye-opening, I wanted to know how he would describe me, what intersting traits would he pick out and examine. I am just starting college so I am on the beginning of my search for what I want to do in my life, this book gave me great insight to how some people have found thier dream job in unconventional ways. Not to say that I will drop out to become a butterfly hunter, but that I will pay close attention to my personality and choose a path that best suits it. I highly recommend this book.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Makes you think -- and great fun too, August 10, 2006

By 

P. Lozar "plozar" (Santa Fe, NM USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Butterfly Hunter: Adventures of People Who Found Their True Calling Way Off the Beaten Path (Hardcover)

This is a perfectly delightful book: Ballard's descriptions of his subjects and their offbeat careers are amusing and lively. But he clearly respects the people he writes about, no matter how eccentric some of their choices may seem, so I never got the sense that he was laughing *at* them -- they come across as well-rounded human beings whose common characteristic is a passion for the work they do.

But the book isn't just a collection of interesting portraits. His main point (at least to me) is that what distinguishes a mere job from a "calling" is the worker's commitment to it. When asked, most of his subjects described their work not as "a job" but as "this is what I do." In some instances, a person took his/her passion and transformed it into a unique profession, while others are distinguished not so much by their line of work (e.g., industrial psychology, entomology) but by their individual "take" on it. Their stories will get you thinking about what YOU do, what relationship (if any) it has to your job, and whether there isn't a way you can make the two coincide.