Lawrence Bohme's whimsically told - but scrupulously faithful - story of his first 41 years is entitled My Very Long Youth because "due to a force beyond my control I only began growing up, or calming down, after that age." His erratic four decades of wandering throughout the Western World have been enough "without wasting a single word" to fill sixteen "novel-length" books," exploring the vagaries of circumstance and "human nature at its best and worst, including my own."The author, illustrator and photographer's time in the Morro do Cantagalo, a favela perched between Rio's Copacabana and Ipanema, was "my best adventure along with Haiti a few years later," he fondly recalls. Although he had the honour of leading the community's 1967 carnival parade, disguised as a plantation owner who weds a slave girl, it was his life-long friendship with the family whose shack he shared that is the heart and soul of his memoir.