Hold the Enlightenment: More Travel, Less Bliss

In Hold the Enlightenment, America’s favorite and funniest adventure writer returns with his most entertaining collection of essays yet, as he travels the globe and faces down challenges that are animal, topographical—and human.

Hold the Enlightenment takes Tim Cahill to sites as far-flung as Saharan salt mines, the Congolese jungle, and Hanford, Washington, home of the largest toxic-waste dump in the Western hemisphere. With his trademark wit and insight, Cahill describes stalking the legendary Caspian tiger in the mountains bordering Iraq, slogging through a pitch-black Australian eucalyptus forest to find the nocturnal platypus, diving with great white sharks in South Africa, staving off enlightenment at a yoga retreat in Jamaica, and much, much more. In these essays, vivid and masterly storytelling combine with outrageously sly humor and jolts of real emotion to show one of the most popular journalists of our time at the absolute peak of his game.