On this tack, Buffett plans an opulent, laid-back trip for his brood and goes into so many details about his favorite possessions (three pages on knapsacks!) that the cheerful vagabond in flip-flops is nearly eclipsed by the rich, domesticated businessman/dad he's become. In addition, stinging losses and limitations--his dad's Alzheimer's disease, his own terrifying solo plane crash in 1996--creep into his cozy yarns. Yet Buffett's infectious, grinning attitude towards life eventually finds resurrection in extended riffs on fly-fishing, solo piloting over water, and surfing. In such passages, he earns his claim to a "saline psyche," a legacy inherited from his grandfather, skipper of a five-masted barkentine that ferried lumber from New Orleans to the Caribbean. Sailing and soaring over Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific seas, Buffett looks at 50 and sees a very good life.

Product Description
Jimmy Buffett "has gregarious charm . . . and a bottomless well of stories to tell. . . . Reading "A Pirate Looks at Fifty" is like sitting with Buffett at a beachside bar, listening to him spin tales . . . discourse on life and share nifty bits of geography and history ("Time"). "America's . . . good-time guy joins Hemingway, Dr. Seuss, and Steinbeck as one of the few who have topped both the fiction and nonfiction bestseller lists.--"Rolling Stone".