Zen Explorations in Remotest New Guinea: Adventures in the Jungles and Mountains of Irian Jaya

As a writer, Shulman (Zen in the Art of Climbing Mountains) takes the Zen principle of mindfulness to extremes, packing his travelogue with an excess of mundane detail. Shulman began his trek to Irian Jaya (West Irian), the part of New Guinea that belongs to Indonesia, fueled by a need ""to shake off some of the bonds of civilization."" No detail of the journey seems irrelevant to Shulman . Some of his minutaie is charming (on the way to Irian Jaya, he wormed his way into the cockpit of a delayed flight to ask the pilot ""to fly the plane a little faster""), but much isn't, as, for example when he recounts an operator-assisted phone call, apparently fascinated by the process. The chief drawback of this very personal travel memoir isn't its digressive detail, however, but its near absence of humor. For an adventurer who bumbles through encounters with everyone from airline cargo managers to penis gourd-wearing Dani tribesmen, Shulman exhibits little sense of the absurd. What gives his memoir its best moments is his penchant, when not carried too far, for focusing on his surroundings and his vivid descriptions of the land and its people. Shulman made it to the mountaintops with his Zen approach intact, but more mindfulness of the art of storytelling would make his next adventure book more exciting. (Dec.)