The tall ship Sofia sank off New Zealand's North Island in February 1982, stranding its crew on disabled life rafts for five days. They struggled to survive as any realistic hope of rescue dwindled. Just a few years earlier, Pamela Sisman Bitterman was a naive swabbie looking for adventure, signing on with a sailing co-operative taking this sixty-year-old, 123-foot, three-masted gaff-topsail schooner around the globe. The aged Baltic trader had been rescued from a wooden boat graveyard in Sweden and reincarnated as a floating commune in the 1960s. By the time Sofia went down, Bitterman had...

Muzungu, the Swahili word for white folk, translated literally means "confused person wandering about." During the author's months working and traveling through Kenya, this description fits her to a tee. Her audacious Kenyan adventure makes for a bucket load of anecdotes and impressions born of heart and hands-on experience--enough to knock your socks off. The devil in Africa is in the details, and Muzungu is there in the trenches - raw, down and dirty, unapologetic. The author witnesses religious elders morphing into villains, political leaders exposed as criminals, tribal chiefs engaging in...