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APPETITE FOR RISK What It Is, Who Has It & How I Survived: An Adventure Memoir
"Like the appetite for a piece of dark chocolate, risk is alluring, and its taste is savory, dopamine-triggering, life-affirming, delicious."
Robert "Bud" Abbott should know. As a young man, he marched with MLK and joined the Peace Corps to avoid having to kill in Vietnam. Instead, posted to Nigeria to teach, he found himself facing down river pirates and fighting deadly snakes. And that's just from a few early years in a long life chock-full of adventure and more near-death experiences than he can count.
Eventually, Abbott found a career as a globe-trotting marine biologist, even as he embraced mysticism and started a family.
Appetite for Risk ties the dramatic experiences of his life in with digressions on the forces that have contributed to his survival. It combines the perspectives of genetic drivers (DNA), nurturing strategies, and spiritual linkages, looking back in time and generations to reveal the behavior of his ancestors as expressed in his own attitudes and actions. His advice to parents is to present numerous challenges to their children to better enable them to face and adapt to the changes inherent in our rapidly evolving global social-economic environment.
Robert "Bud" Abbott should know. As a young man, he marched with MLK and joined the Peace Corps to avoid having to kill in Vietnam. Instead, posted to Nigeria to teach, he found himself facing down river pirates and fighting deadly snakes. And that's just from a few early years in a long life chock-full of adventure and more near-death experiences than he can count.
Eventually, Abbott found a career as a globe-trotting marine biologist, even as he embraced mysticism and started a family.
Appetite for Risk ties the dramatic experiences of his life in with digressions on the forces that have contributed to his survival. It combines the perspectives of genetic drivers (DNA), nurturing strategies, and spiritual linkages, looking back in time and generations to reveal the behavior of his ancestors as expressed in his own attitudes and actions. His advice to parents is to present numerous challenges to their children to better enable them to face and adapt to the changes inherent in our rapidly evolving global social-economic environment.
245 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 1, 2023
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May 1, 2024
Robert R. Abbott Appetite for Risk: What It Is, Who Has It & How I Survived / An Adventure Memoir (2023) Regent Press, Berkeley, CA is the “confessional” memoir by a heterosexual man I’ve been waiting decades for. Kerouac may have started the serious “guy book” interior monologue craze, but Abbott really uses it to examine what academia, world travel, social change and the Sexual Revolution taught him about gender roles, money, values, addictions and eventually about his real self; the motives for and results of his actions on other people and the world, the interior and exterior paths to good health, a balanced lifestyle, more authentic relationships and even spiritual peace.
He has the same persistent curiosity as Lazard; sheer, passionate, outspoken quick thinking as Khan-Cullors, the daring “life-on-the-edge” addiction Warren does and cross-cultural paradoxes the Cambodian émigrés of Cengel’s Exiled do, often blindsided by the obvious. As far as the book goes, he comes out of it in his eighties not quite “smelling like a rose,” but at least honest about his foibles, “learning experiences” and grateful for his embrace of a more spiritual and “common sense” lifestyle. A very good peek into "an interesting mind at work" (D. H. Lawrence) in an exciting life.
He has the same persistent curiosity as Lazard; sheer, passionate, outspoken quick thinking as Khan-Cullors, the daring “life-on-the-edge” addiction Warren does and cross-cultural paradoxes the Cambodian émigrés of Cengel’s Exiled do, often blindsided by the obvious. As far as the book goes, he comes out of it in his eighties not quite “smelling like a rose,” but at least honest about his foibles, “learning experiences” and grateful for his embrace of a more spiritual and “common sense” lifestyle. A very good peek into "an interesting mind at work" (D. H. Lawrence) in an exciting life.
Displaying 1 of 1 review