To summarize, this first book is a series of many inter-related and often humorous essays.
It's about how a free-thinking boy experienced many adventures on his way to fulfilling a dream of becoming a reporter, writer and eventually an author of numerous books.
But this one is different.
It's personal. It's told in the first-person, as if he is reminiscing or telling tales around a crackling camp fire beneath a star-studded sky.
He wonders how many seven-year-olds find themselves asking, "Who am I?" "Where did I come from?" "What is the meaning of life?" "Where do we go when we die?"
He speaks of a young runaway who would rather watch trout in the river than be in class at school, yet he would also be top of one school, and expelled from another. Why? Not because he would fight bullies and win, but because he took revenge on a teacher - in a way that should have you laughing your socks off.
Is it just luck, or divine intervention, that sees him survive more than one brush with death? We see him running for his life across a logjam in a flooded river, and suddenly, there is nothing but raging water between him and the bank....
We see him buried alive under a collapsing sand-hill....
...and the suspense builds as his campfire audience waits for the old codger to get on with it.
These vignettes are about a young man who thinks for himself, makes his own choices (not always wise ones) and who is willing to swim against the tide.
In many respects he's just an average kid, but he is also an enigma, even to himself, for although he does his best to fit in, he is essentially a loner. Inwardly he has many questions about the beliefs and dogma and the social norms and expectations that make up the matrix - the matrix within which he was indeed a misfit.
Born of mixed heritage in the (once idyllic) but beautiful South Pacific country of New Zealand, his story so far is but the early years of a life that would eventually have him become a world-traveling reporter, and eventually a citizen, and patriot, in the (once idyllic) United States.
But that's in the future. Or, as they say in the newspaper trade "MTC" - which means "More To Come."
And there is indeed more to the story - but for now, this story starts at the beginning.
