'This book describes highlights, and the occasional lowlight, of Michael Newman's life. It will make you laugh, shudder and reflect. Newman takes you to far-flung places - Jamaica, America, South Africa, France and England - with a witty mind and a cross-cultural vision of the world. This is a personal memoir delighting in the inconsistencies of life. Among the highlights, he talks his way out of a mugging in Kingston, Jamaica, tells the world's longest joke in Covent Garden, joins a picket line of a clothing workers' strike in Johannesburg, and finds himself in Paris during the riots that swept across France in May 1968. Among the lowlights, he flies a car in north Pakistan and comes a social cropper in Dallas.' (Publication summary)