Recounts the author's experiences hitchhiking on a bet all the way around Ireland with a small refrigerator, and shares his impressions of the people and places along the way.

You can take the man out of the city, but is the countryside ready for him? Comedian and born and bred townie, Tony Hawks is not afraid of a challenge - or indeed a good bet. He's hitchhiked round Ireland with a fridge and taken on the Moldovan football team at tennis, one by one. Now the time has come for his greatest gamble yet - turning his back on comfortable city life to move to the wilds of the West Country. With his partner Fran in tow and their first child on the way, he embraces the rituals of village life with often absurd and hilarious results, introducing us to an ensemble of eclectic characters along the way. One minute he's taking part in a calamitous tractor run, the next he's chairing a village meeting, but of course he still finds time for one last solo adventure before fatherhood arrives - cycling coast to coast with a mini pig called Titch. In the epic battle of man vs countryside, who will win out?

At the end of a winter-long journey into manhood, Little Hawk returns to find his village decimated by a white man's plague and soon, despite a fresh start, Little Hawk dies violently but his spirit remains trapped, seeing how his world changes.

The first major biography of one of Old Hollywood’s greatest directors. Sometime partner of the eccentric Howard Hughes, drinking buddy of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, an inveterate gambler and a notorious liar, Howard Hawks was the most modern of the great masters and one of the first directors to declare his independence from the major studios. He played Svengali to Lauren Bacall, Montgomery Clift, and others, but Hawks’s greatest creation may have been himself. As The Atlantic Monthly noted, “Todd McCarthy. . . . has gone further than anyone else in sorting out the truths and lies of the life, the skills and the insight and the self-deceptions of the work.” “A fluent biography of the great director, a frequently rotten guy but one whose artistic independence and standards of film morality never failed.” —The New York Times Book Review “Hawks’s life, until now rather an enigma, has been put into focus and made one with his art in Todd McCarthy’s wise and funny Howard Hawks.” —The Wall Street Journal “Excellent. . . . A respectful, exhaustive, and appropriately smartass look at Hollywood’s most versatile director.” —Newsweek

"Agatha is a Hawk, brave and fierce, who patrols the high walls of her island home. She takes pride in her duties, though some in her clan whisper that she has only been given them to keep her out of the way, because of the condition she was born with. Jaime, thoughtful and anxious, is an Angler, but he hates the sea. To make matters worse, he's been chosen for a duty that has been outlawed by the clan for generations: to marry. The elders won't say why they have promised him to a girl from a neighboring island, but there are rumors of approaching danger. When disaster strikes and the clan is kidnapped, it is up to Agatha and Jaime to travel across mainland Scotia, a land devastated by a mysterious plague, where forgotten magic and dark secrets lurk in every shadow..."--Page [2] of cover.

Reproduction of the original.

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