Mona Lisa's Pajamas: Diverting Dispatches from a Roving Reporter

by A. Craig Copetas

High-class armchair travel at its very best! Mona Lisa’s Pajamas gives readers a round-trip ticket for a journey around the world, carrying them to distant destinations most of us will never visit. Originally written for The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News, A. Craig Copetas’s delightfully surprising columns are now collected in book form for the first time. Covering exotic locales, improbable business ventures, artisan winemakers, and memorably oddball characters, Copetas’s vivid writing brings his subjects alive with richly-textured descriptions only a truly gifted observer can capture. From Sparta’s souvenir sword-makers swamped with demand thanks to the hit movie 300, to a Russian golf pro whose favorite clubs were built from the scrapped metal of a Soviet nuclear missile, Copetas writes of unorthodox business pursuits and faraway locations with an infectious joie de vivre and an unerring eye for what makes enjoyable reading.     Unforgettable visits for the armchair   -Israel's Sacred Golf where bomb craters have become bunkers     -How to Succeed in Business and Avoid Serious Head near Stockholm, a former British Special Air Services commando teaches executives how to survive a kidnapping   -An Honorable and Ancient Solution to Boardroom the 21st-century duel     -Propulsion Is a Real Plus with Clubs Made in a Missile A Russian treasures his set of golf clubs—made from an old Soviet missile once aimed at the US   - Da Vinci Code Fans Dig Up the Dan Brown’s devotees swarm a town central to the blockbuster’s story      

Genres: Nonfiction, Travel

272 pages, Hardcover

First published April 7, 2009

Reviews

[Ed Crutchley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mona Lisa's Pajamas is a treat as well as an education. Written by Craig Copetas, who successfully serves his own unique brew of Marmite to his fellow Paris-based journalists on Friday's The World this Week on France 24, it consists of a potpourri of 51 short pieces mostly on how the other half enjoy their time in extravagant sports and at the dinner table. It is so riddled with gems, so many of them funny, that not a word is wasted and much is learned. In this treasure trove of conversation pieces you discover heligolf, squillionaires, $15 million 4-story underwater yachts from Dubai, the Reverse half Cuban in a Breitling championship, Butan's Gross National Happiness, scraping the gold off illuminated manuscripts in order to make a wedding ring, the secretive price of a Ferrari GTO ($3 million and counting), 20-gauge used Shell oil drums selling for $10,000, breeding bullfighting 'brious' for export in the Camargue, purchasing 14-day options on a lion on the Zambezi exchange, the unexpected link between Stockport UK and the Iroquois, a Pepsi chariot ana a `Hoxha slider', the gastropolitics of frog ranching (he quotes a biased French restaurateur "The frog is like a woman - only their thighs are good"), $1500 acorn ham from Salamanca, baking delicious baksam biscuits while dodging bullets in Basra, and so much more besides. One historical titbit, for example; if anyone shot himself at the casino at Monte Carlo, they used to stuff his pockets with 100,000 francs so that the casino would not be blamed. Copetas must have had one whale of a time researching and writing all this, and his then editors nothing short of ulcers when signing his expenses. Highly recommended.

[Cheryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a book about how the other half lives. In today's America where it seems to be the billionaires and their cult followers vs normal people, that can be a loaded topic. Because this book was written 20 years ago and covers very niche subjects, it felt removed enough not to raise my blood pressure. And it was just mildly interesting enough for reading one piece at a time. Topics covered include owning a Formula One car, the places where the Mona Lisa shows up in marketing, aerobatics, luxury personal submarines, actual yacht racing, gold hunters inspired by Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, steel drum making, varieties of wine.