The good book in here is Pearls, arms and Hashish, although the other two are OK. De monfried tells of how his father was from America and a painter while his mother was French. He went to school in Paris, where he was nicknamed the savage. On his holidays he sailed in the mediterranean with a fishing fleet, in his own little boat. He also met a man who had tramped down through france and started growing and selling flowers on the beach. By the time he was thirty he had been a door to door salesman and milked cows and delivered the milk. After going to visit his father he decided to head abroad. He went to djibouti as a trader and went inland to operate but still he was just a bean counter, he wanted more. He bought a boat and began trading in arms from Djibouti to arabia. So began an adventurous life of sailing that lasted eighteen years. The somalis who crewed for him believed he had special powers and that if his ship foundered the dolphins would come and rescue him. There are inconsistancies between this book and other books he wrote, he was a bit of a "loup de mer", a teller of tall tales about the sea. It is fascinating reading nevertheless. He certainly had nerve, blindly turning into a gap in the reef on the arabian coast after a long journey at night, or ducking under the table of his imprisoning British officer to check what or what not was in his log book while the man went out the room. He didn't fight in the war because he was rejected from the army on medical grounds.