The French call it le coup de bamboo, an incurable form of tropical madness that may not be lethal but can still slow you down to a dead crawl. Unless, of course, you're the Observer's Alexander Frater, the kind of cat who embraces such conditions with open arms, an open heart, and — yes — open eyes. Then such a disease becomes just what the doctor ordered — to keep you alive.

In Tales, our man in the Tropics comes down with le coup, all right, as well as a little bug called mal de jaune ("said to be common among those who yearn nostalgically for Indo-China"), and not only lives through the longing and the lassitude, but lets us live through it too.

Talk about travel. In a single chapter, Frater goes from Fiji to Senegal to Laos to Uganda, crossing open expanses, war zones, and sometimes even the natives themselves, who seem loathe to welcome what they consider yet another colonialist. Mostly, though, Frater flies above and beyond with the greatest of ease, and any restlessness from the natives comes from their wanting to see the man whose kin made such a mark on whatever New Hebrides island atoll he's happened to land upon — the church-building grandfather who saved scores from a volcanic eruption at Ambryn, the doctor father who delivered a generation in Paama, the educationally inclined mother who founded two nurses' schools on Iririki. Yes, Frater, descendent of Christian-mission medicine men and women, was born in these parts, and torrid as they are, Tales is his homecoming.

But don't think for one hot second that this is the kind of warm and fuzzy book that brochures are made of. What Frater doesn't come down with, he comes close to — very often too close for the comfort of most. Elephantiasis, Burkitt's lymphoma, leprosy, and that old standby, malaria, all make lethal appearances, as do dumdum fever, beri beri, and kuru, "a fatal degenerative condition caught from eating the brains of loved ones killed in battle." Add that nasty rodent ulcer our intrepid adventurer needs to have removed from his face, and it makes for quite a scarring, indeed.

-John Hood