APPETITE FOR RISK What It Is, Who Has It & How I Survived
Robert R. Abbott
ISBN 13: 978-1-58790-654-1 / 256 pages / paperback / 6” x 9” / 20 photographs / $27.95
ABOUT THE BOOK
Appetite for Risk is a brisk, engaging memoir built around Robert Abbott’s long and adventurous life. It is chock-full of wild and dangerous experiences, including many brushes with death, the world over. But more importantly, it explores how he got into these messes and why he survived again and again. After an introduction stating the themes and what is at stake in the book, it opens in 2019 in Peru and the Galápagos Islands. After that, we are taken back to beginnings, proceeding roughly chronologically, beginning with Abbott’s first serious brush with death through skydiving at age 20. The next chapter revolves around his scofflaw attitude toward boundaries and smuggling, including his crossing an international border to assist young women to obtain abortions. He then takes us into his harrowing grad school experience in the Deep South, where he joined in a voter-registration march led by Martin Luther King, which was a peak life experience.
The centerpiece of the book is set in Nigeria while Abbott was in the Peace Corps during the prelude their heart-sickening civil war. These chapters feature a wealth of experience, including some of the toughest times in his life. The aura of pain, suffering, and death were all around him. Signally, he is threatened to within an inch of his life by river pirates and barely survives facing down a giant spitting cobra. Sometime bold action is required and sometimes seemingly mystical words do the trick, but he comes out alive.
Along the way, Abbott intersperses reflections on why such things keep happening to him. He spends nearly a decade in Hawaii, much of it as a charter boat skipper targeting giant blue marlin. Hawaii is where he hits bottom, crushed by drug, alcohol, and sex addictions leading to abysmally poor decision-making and financial disaster. A full to the brim chapter is devoted to a doomed, under-the-influence romance—the one that got away. Matters come to a head with a near disaster when his craft, the Pisces, collides with a volcanic cinder cone, on the Kona Coast. The chapter is also peppered with brief anthropological and biological digressions on the interplay of genetic drivers and family nurturing influences.
Still in Hawaii, Abbott climbs out of the hole he has dug for himself, goes cold turkey, marries, and starts a family. This transition is one of a series of self-described “metamorphoses” as he moves into a belated adulthood.
In his 50s, Abbott began to discern his pattern behavior, including recurring encounters with sharks, both human and aquatic. There were also patterns to how he extricated himself from serious scrapes, sometimes seemingly through divine intervention. On this basis, the following chapters, refracted through family stories, revolve around some rather unusual parenting and a long look down the DNA tunnel to explore the parameters of his biological self, and how he has continually re-manifested the survival characteristics of his ancestors.
Near the end of the book, in his early 80s the author breaks his vow to never return to Africa, a continent he had left sick and exhausted in his 20s. He does return, to Botswana and South Africa, to take part in two Biologists without Borders safaris.
Today, at 82, the hunger for challenge abides in Abbott. He continues to see opportunities to invest in worthy enterprises, and has remade himself into an author. He has also launched a spiritual retreat business.
Though Appetite for Risk is very much of this world, Abbott has also continuously stepped into the spiritual channels of all major religions including ancestor worship, stints with the Sufis, and deep meditation practices leading to remote viewing. Scattered through the adventure are stories of his wing women, remarkably adventurous in their own right, including his mother. There is an evolution in his relationship to women, and eventually a consideration that every adventure, every woman, every man, every animal is part of a spiritual journey.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Abbott, or Bud, as he prefers to be called, grew up in San Diego surfing, fishing, waterskiing, and having a dream childhood playing in the water. As a young teen, he was very temporarily “saved” by Billy Graham at a tent revival rally. He attended colleges in Mexico, Switzerland, Chile, Missouri, and California, focusing on biological studies before eventually, 12 years or so after high school, earning a PhD from the University of Washington with a focus on marine biology, fisheries, and especially the bioacoustics of salmon. During graduate school, he marched with Martin Luther King in a voter registration drive in the Deep South, and then served in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, to stay out of Vietnam, a war he opposed. He taught biology at a government school in Warri before he was forced out of Nigeria at gunpoint during its ugly, protracted civil war.
He then drifted around and went fishing on a variety of vessels before buying his own and becoming a charter boat skipper in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, targeting giant blue marlin and yellowfin tuna. All the while he was leading a dissolute life, in keeping with the times—the 1970s. After a doomed, drug-infused romance—the one that got away—he pulled himself out of this tailspin around the time he met his future wife Cynthia. Still in Hawaii, the couple started a family, adopting two children from Thailand. Bud’s marine biology career took him all over the world; he worked in Nigeria, Egypt, Oman, Morocco, Chile, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Myanmar, Thailand, Fiji, Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Philippines, and the Marshall Islands. His penchant for travel includes 55 countries, among them five Provinces in China.
Wherever he was assigned, he learned as much as he could of the local language and customs, and also studied local religious practices. He is an enthusiastic, if not quite accomplished, musician, especially with the acoustic guitar, and has a large repertoire of remembered songs, including a few that spontaneously came to him over a lifetime. He has participated in performances in Davies Symphony Hall, Carnegie Hall, and the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. He is also an enthusiastic performer and loves to lead sing-alongs. He has practiced Tai Chi Chuan for over 40 years and became a certified yoga instructor in order to participate in the Prison Yoga Project.
As well, he is the author (along with Zochi Young) of a previous book, TRANSFORMATION: The 90-Second Practice Integrating Tai Chi and Yoga to Manage Stress and Unlock Your Potential (2021). He has also published numerous scientific and technical reports. At 82 he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where he is a practicing marine biologist and expert witness. He is the cofounder of Lighten Up Retreats, where he teaches movement-focused meditations such as Tai Chi, Qigong, and Vipassana walking as vehicles to learn mindfulness, non-duality, and the sacredness of the movement of chi as an attribute of the Life Force.