These stories have the fun, lessons, and morals that make you want to memorize them for the next time you're around a campfire.

They're great, because like most tales, they can be summarized in two sentences, yet with the expansion of narrative detail you can imagine yourself in an old council ring with an elder speaking slowly, and dozens of children listening in amazement.

The stories are quite short, quick to read, and very entertaining.

Near the end of a two week trip to a far off land (for me at least), those uncomfortable things that at first seemed new and exciting start to become annoying and old.

It seems like Paul Theroux started feeling this way after his first two weeks... actually maybe even before. He manages to leave his personal stamp of disaproval on every Central and South American country in his wake... er... track.

The good thing is that his negative attitude is so obvious that you become desensitized to it, and it starts to feel like the grumpy narrative to a beautiful slideshow presentation by your Great Uncle Horrace.

Theroux's descriptions of people and places are so vivid, that his journey becomes less of a personal trip, and more of a documentary film of the beautiful landscape and interesting people that he meets. He is but a character in the film that you can choose to ignore.

Sidenote: Before I bought this book I had really wanted to go to the Patagonian area of Chile and Argentina. Since that was the only place that Theroux didn't seem to have a problem with, I instead went to Peru (he both hated it and got altitude sickness there, so I figured it must be a great place... and of course it was).

Occasionally a novel comes along that is so compatible with your life... your situation... that it just pours into you like a continuous chug of grape flavoured Kool-Aid. This was that book for me. I read it from front to back without stopping.

Munroe successfully captures the setting of urban university life that can most accurately be described here as what the tv show "Felicity" tried to do, but failed (of course that's where the similarity stops). With casual narration and often blunt conversation between characters, he describes people we've known for years, and events that have happened to us.

Through all of the crazy, yet somehow realistic Super Hero entertainment, he manages to build an intense and true relationship between the heroes. He is able to fully describe any relationships between Flyboy and the people he knows and meets in a simple sentence, or a clever dialog.

While the anti-corporation messages occupy a fairly small portion of the novel, they are incredibly blatant. They are effective, but I think the social commentary could have been toned down and presented more subtly as he managed to do in his second book "Angry Young Spaceman" (which if you haven't read, is also excellent). It just seemed like the character was rambling in a few places.

The story that is created here has so much depth that the ending seems to come too soon, like a movie that plants the seeds for a sequel.