Jaguars Ripped My Flesh
Tim Cahill (1987)

THE A5 BOOK REVIEW

Tim Cahill’s first collection of adventure travel writing is maybe his best, curated mainly from his work at Outside Magazine.  The title, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, is meant to be sarcastic; Cahill produces stories on adventure travel for normal people, written from the point of view of a real person who experiences real fears and doubts.  He clearly loves his job though, and he makes it very easy for one to be swept up by his curiosity and love of a thrill.  He travels extensively, with articles covering kayaking in Alaska, cave-diving in Florida, hang-gliding in his home state of Montana, visiting silverback gorillas in Rwanda, and trips to Australia, Guyana, and Peru.  He is a funny writer with a self-deprecating sense of humor, and our recommendation for those who don’t know Cahill is to start first with this book.
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OTHER A5 RECOMMENDED TRAVEL BOOKS - TIM CAHILL
Tim Cahill is a celebrated adventure travel writer and an editor-at-large for Outside Magazine. His work has appeared in a number of national publications including National Geographic Adventure, the New York Times Book Review, and Esquire. Learn more about Tim Cahill here.

GREAT QUOTES:

"Finally, consider your predicament a privilege in a world so shrunken that certain people refer to it as the 'global village.' The term 'explorer' has little meaning. But exploration is nothing more than a foray into the unknown, and a four-year old child, wandering about along in the department store, fits the definition as well as the snow-blind man wandering across the Khyber Pass. The explorer is the person who is lost.”
- Tim Cahill, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

"One final truth: savage blood-crazed razor-tooted jaguars have been ripping at my flesh without surcease for over ten years now, and I have yet to see one in the wild."
- Tim Cahill, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

INTERESTING LINKS:

  • The title of the book came from work colleagues who claimed that adventure travel stories were sub-literate and always had imbecilic titles like "Jaguars Ripped My Flesh".
  • Read the New York Times 1987 review of Jaguars Ripped My Flesh by Diane Ackerman, as one of her five favorite adventure travel books.