Abel's Outback: Explorations and Misadventures on Six Continents, 1990-2000

For many years, as news correspondent, television host, and journalist, Allen Abel has travelled to some of the world’s most fascinating, remote, or newsworthy spots to bring back his stories – often offbeat, moving, perceptive, or humorous, but always wonderfully written.

Now, in Abel’s Outback, he has drawn on his writing of the last decade. Here is a sampling of ten years of adventure on all six continents. Whether he is hunting for the wild platypus with an Australian forest ranger, boating up the Amazon with a descendant of Charles Darwin, journeying to catch a glimpse of remote Timbuktu, cringing before the oil-well fires in Kuwait, taking tea with cousins of the Queen Mum, spending Christmas in Hong Kong, reporting on the plight of a Sudanese taxi driver in Inuvik (how do you have sundown prayers in a place where the sun doesn’t go down?), or revisiting one of the strangest spots of all – his native Brooklyn – Allen Abel is inquisitive, original, observant, and often hilariously funny.

Fans of Allen Abel will greet this book with delight – but so will anyone who enjoys high adventure and superb writing.

• Allen Abel was prominent in the television coverage of the Sydney Olympics, and his reportage for the National Post received highly favourable attention
• Abel is also regularly before television audiences as a feature host on “Hockey Night in Canada”
• Allen Abel is widely admired as an excellent writer – and these pieces will add to that reputation