Another Roadside Attraction in Around the World in 80 Books

Mar 24, 2024 Missyjohnson1 rated it liked it · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. what an unusual book. at times very funny and serious at others. scathing social commentary. some of the descriptions were like someone with ADD because of the crazy associations that would be combined on someone's thoughts and commentary. I read that Tom Robbins is a bit of a cult author and I can easily see that. his wild plot that takes on government, authority, Christianity, religion as a whole would not appeal to some. Amanda meets John Paul Ziller while she is working with a traveling circ what an unusual book. at times very funny and serious at others. scathing social commentary. some of the descriptions were like someone with ADD because of the crazy associations that would be combined on someone's thoughts and commentary. I read that Tom Robbins is a bit of a cult author and I can easily see that. his wild plot that takes on government, authority, Christianity, religion as a whole would not appeal to some. Amanda meets John Paul Ziller while she is working with a traveling circus called the Indo-Tibetan Circus & Giant Panda blues band. John Paul is a drummer of some renown as well as an artist and magician. Amanda believes in free love, nature and is a fortune teller. She also has a young son named Thor. Ziller travels with a baboon named Mon Cul. The book was written in the early 1970's but the social commentary is still relevant today. (sad that 50 years later we are still mired in some of the same stuff) Amanda and Ziller leave the circus and open a road-side zoo in Washington state in the skagit area. their friend Plucky Purcell arrives with his wild life and stories to tell. Plucky was a college athlete and was somewhat disgraced when he ran off to Mexico with the coach's wife. He is also a karate expert. for the majority of this story he has stumbled into a secret order of militant Catholic monks that serve the Vatican as a combination CIA and Green Beret unit. Plucky gets sent to the Vatican to teach the Swiss Guards karate and ends of finding a hidden mummified body in the catacombs. He believes that it is the body of Christ so he steals it and brings it back to Washington state and his friends at the Roadside attraction. the other character at the attraction is Marx Marvelous who is the narrator of the story. he is a scientist who had worked at a think tank examining the demise of religion. All of this craziness allows the author to go in many directions as to commentary. I will add a sample of Plucky's descriptions where he describes the first kick-off that he was set to receive when he went to Duke University. page 248.

“The ball seemed to float for hours in the tobacco-yellow Carolina September, hovering against the Indian summer blue sky like a sausage with gland trouble hovering over a meadow of hungry hobbits, lolling toward his end of the field with no more movement than a sailboat in a Dufy watercolor, tumbling finally toward his waiting embrace like a suicidal actress falling in slow motion at the climax of a French film, end over end in lazy lyrical descent while every eye in the bourbon-bathed stadium focused upon the much-heralded sophomore sensation; and eleven angry men, none smaller than himself, thundered toward him at one hundred times the speed of the buoyant football. A muted whump as the pigskin settled in his arms. Squeezed it harder than he had ever squeezed any hot-pants cheerleader in his daddy's old Pontiac. A leap down the field. Five yards. Fifteen. Then the nauseating crush. The breath flew out of him as wildly as if a buffalo in a rocking chair had suddenly rocked back on his lungs.” ...more

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Jul 25, 2017 Ryan rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2017, fiction

A pretty beginning

A muddy middle

A wonderful ending

I'm interested in reading more TR, but this was an uneven introduction to his work. ...more

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May 08, 2008 Megan rated it it was ok

I feel traitorous, giving a Tom Robbins book such a low rating, but I just didn't like this one. I had to struggle my way through it. When I picked it up again a few years later, thinking the first time had been a fluke, I didn't get more than a chapter in before giving up on it. ...more

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