Donn Beach liked to tell a good story.

This was fortunate, because he had a lot of them.

One of his favorites concerned a choice his father supposedly offered him: money for college, or money to travel around the world. Donn chose the world, naturally, and embarked on what became an unusually long trip. He wandered through the Caribbean and elsewhere, picking up stories, recipes, bits of folklore and, apparently, whatever else he thought might come in handy later.

It is a wonderful story.

It is also a Donn Beach story, which means we should probably enjoy it without insisting too strongly on the paperwork. The problem with Donn's biography is that Donn himself was one of its principal authors.