How to Travel with a Salmon is a highly engaging collection of what Umberto Eco calls his diario minimo -- minimal diaries -- after the manazine column in which he began "pursuing the pathways of parady." These essays are his playful but unfailingly accurate takes on militarism, computer jargon, Westerns, art criticism, librarians, bureaucrats, meals on airplanes, Amtrak trains, bad coffee, maniacal taxi drivers, express mail, multi-function watches, fax machines and cellular phones, pornography, soccer fans, academia, and -- last but definitely not least -- the authors' own self.

How to Travel with a Salmon gives us Eco's acute vision of the absurdities of modern life.