Home schooled on the western mountain range of Colombia, the author’s bucolic child-hood in an isolated wilderness abruptly ended when his family moved to the country’s capital when he was ten. There he soon lost his rural identity but not his headstrong individuality in a school with over one thousand students; he has been frantically and unsuccessfully searching in unlikely places for an alternative identity ever since. After graduating from high school in Bogota, the author earned a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, worked for a few years in Colombia, and moved to Italy, where he married and broke a leg skiing, a double whammy. He then at-tended the University of Padua for an MBA, for which he wrote a thesis on maximizing the out-put of Austrian sawmills, his only credential as a writer of humor books. Highlights in the author’s life include a journey with Italian and Swiss friends on a sec-ond-hand Land Rover jeep from Italy to Pakistan and back via the Balkans, Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan. Equally adventurous, but of a different kind, another highlight was abducting his two young daughters at rush hour in downtown Paris and taking them out of Europe, a feat that brought on some discord between nations.