Honorable Bandit: A Walk across Corsica [Hardcover]

Brian Bouldrey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 12, 2007

Brian Bouldrey traveled to the island of Corsica, with its wine-dark Mediterranean waters, powdered-sugar beach sand, sumptuous cuisine, and fine wine. And then he walked away from all of them.
     Bouldrey strapped on a backpack and walked across Napoleon's native land with the same spirit many choose to dance or drink: to celebrate, to mourn, to think, to avoid thinking, to recall, to ignore, to escape, and to arrive.
     This wonderfully textured account of a two-week ramble along a famous Corsican hiking trail with his German friend Petra (she was good at the downhills while he was better at the uphills) offers readers a journal that is a launching point for reflection: thoughts on cultural differences, friendship, physical challenge, personal challenge, and getting very, very lost. Part travelogue, part memoir, and part lampoon, this book offers readers an impressionistic view of a little talked about yet stunningly beautiful landscape.

 

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians and the Public Library Association

 

Runner-up, Best Travel Book, National Association of Travel Journalists

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A remarkable achievement. Deeply felt, humorous, and extremely wise, Honorable Bandit takes the reader on a journey across Corsica, but even more takes us on a charged—Dantean, at times—journey that explores the nuanced corners of life: our most intimate infernos, purgatories, and paradisios, all on one island.”—Tim Miller, author of 1001 Beds

“Reading Honorable Bandit, you enter not just another country but also the secret door into Brian Bouldrey's head, and that is the real fun, living inside this wonderful, wonderful writer with his sly humor and infectious tenderness for the world. I didn't want the book to ever end.”—Sharman Apt Russell, author of Hunger: An Unnatural History and An Obsession with Butterflies
 

“One of the many pleasures of this book is its deceptive humility. Bouldrey reminds us that being human is something we must—and can only—do one thoughtful, measured, grateful step at a time.”
—Rebecca Brown, author of Excerpts from a Family Medical  Dictionary and The End of Youth

About the Author

Brian Bouldrey has written six books and edited six anthologies, including three volumes of Best American Gay Fiction. His edited collection Wrestling with the Angel: Faith and Religion in the Lives of Gay Men won a Lambda Literary Award and his memoir Monster: Adventures in American Machismo, was a Lambda finalist. He is author of  the novel The Boom Economy: Or, Scenes from Clerical Life, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press. He teaches creative writing at Northwestern University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 296 pages
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press; 1 edition (September 12, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0299223205
• ISBN-13: 978-0299223205
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,772,089 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #95 in Books > Travel > United States > States > Wisconsin

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I Love to Go Awandering, October 29, 2007

By 

John Bliss (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Honorable Bandit: A Walk across Corsica (Hardcover)

If you've read any of Bouldrey's other work, this book will come less of a surprise than a delight. If you're new to Bouldrey, I envy you the discovery.

"Honorable Bandit" is part travelogue, part memoir, part meditation on walking, and part shaggy dog story. Bouldrey spent several weeks walking across Corsica, the Mediterranean island best known as the birthplace of Napoleon (the ruler, not the pastry), and he does offer tips on dealing with pigs, flash floods, and tiny horses. But "Honorable Bandit" is not a guidebook. Corsica merely provides the context for tales of vendettas, lonzu, throat singing, disagreeable roosters, and a host of other subjects that won't get you across the island any quicker or more safely. Speed is not the point, after all -- the journey is about the journey, and the journey is through life and history, not an island that seems to be saying, "We're #1!"

Reading the book is like watching a slideshow given by a loquacious, but very engaging, host, who stops the show for long stretches as one story leads to another, starting with the slide, but then sliding into tales of family and friends and escaped convicts and past journeys and memorable meals, yet always returning to the next slide, and just in the nick of time. In the hands of a lesser writer, such a book would be tedious at best and infuriating at worst. But Bouldrey loves language, and loves the reader, and has such wonderful things to tell you that you forgive him his excesses, even when they are excessive.

The problem with most memoirs is that the memoirist generally thinks of him- or herself as the most important -- and certainly most interesting -- character in the story. Bouldrey is rarely guilty of that crime. He uses his experiences as a way to tell us about what he's discovered along the way, and in doing so, allows us to make our own discoveries. He is a most generous host, and his book is a most satisfying repast.

1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Irritating, June 10, 2010

By 

J. Mchenry (Ohio) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Honorable Bandit: A Walk across Corsica (Kindle Edition)

This book is not about Corsica at all, rather Brian Bouldry. It is a collection of pointless drivel written while hiking in Corsica with his snobby German companion. (or Austrian? Who cares.) At one point he goes on about people traveling with their "retarded man-child". Did he see a retarded man-child? No...so why is he including this in a book about hiking in Corsica? Beats me...I guess he thought it was just so witty. And the passages about the "dead little British boy" were disgusting. Not funny AT ALL. If you had bothered to find out the circumstances of how this child had disappeared and died on the island, then maybe it would have been relevant, but he cracks jokes about the child after seeing a missing poster. Dude, do that with your drinking buddies, but it really doesn't belong in a travel memoir.

The author and his companion, Petra, seem to think everything is stupid, in fact, I don't think I've ever read a book that includes the word "stupid" as often as this one. There are virtually no sympathetic accounts of any people or areas they have visited. Really, the tourists are stupid, the locals are stupid. I guess the only enlightened beings on the whole island of Corsica were Brian Bouldry and Petra.

3 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, and that's just the "acknowledgements" section, October 24, 2007

By 

Lawrence D. Wood (Chicago, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Honorable Bandit: A Walk across Corsica (Hardcover)

I have just finished the "acknowledgments" section of Brian Bouldrey's new book, and it's one of the best I've ever read. That may sound like hyperbole, but it's not. I'm a voracious reader -- I tear through 5-10 "acknowledgments" sections every week -- and Mr. Bouldrey's is as good as any penned by Mailer, Updike, or (God rest his soul) Vonnegut.

Instead of struggling in vain to adequately describe the merits of Bouldrey's acknowledgements, let me just quote a short passage from what is destined to become a classic of the form:

"The author wishes to thank . . . Larry Wood . . . ."