Khaki shirts and dental picks, that's what studying Human Origins at a Harvard field school in Kenya brought to mind. Pretty dry business. A tame experience with fossil geeks raking African deserts for the bones of ape-men. A little world populated with characters as dusty as the landscape, working to a monotonous soundtrack of tiny hammers tinkling against rocks.Then an Argentine anthropologist started bringing hookers to my room. Trucks snapped their axles, a heavy-drinking student went missing and two others went insane. Three days in and we hadn't even left Nairobi....things would never get back to being as dull as they were supposed to be.Call it a "Survival Guide to Human Evolution" Roberts has you riding shotgun as he roams Nairobi's littered chasms to Kenya's volcanoes, forests and desert lakes. Saints, scholars and scum trample through the workdays as Anthropology cavorts with dysentery, transportation terror, twisted sex, street fights, back-biting and organizational politics. Amid shrieking escapes from marauding beasts and the quest for human origins, he loses himself amid East African wonders; falling in love with a country, its people as well as a girl. Or maybe two.With its cache of dangerous and crazy events in exotic, alien locales Jackass on a Camel is a memoir that is as thoughtful as it is profane and hilarious. It captures the human capacity for humanity as well as our deeply etched shortcomings in a style that's tawdry, hallucinatory and intelligent. Throughout the provocative narrative Roberts bares all, showing himself as a jackass struggling to evolve into less of one.