Fyodor, meet Evan

Of my post about Fyodor Nesterchuk's inability to sleep (a suspicious claim, I know), BB reader Andrew Pollock says:

Your post reminded me of a fun series of books by Lawrence Block called the Evan Tanner books. They're about a guy who gets injured and loses the ability to sleep when he's shot in the head in the Korean War. He makes his living writing term papers and dissertations before he gets recruited by a spy agency and sent all over the world by them. The gag of the books is that he belongs to a million differerent political groups and knows a million languages, so for instance, in one book I remember that he gets out of trouble by tapping into an underground PLO cell and a Mossad underground support group in the space of a few days.

In a weird bit of BoingBoing synchronicity, in one of the books there is an extended description of chewing betel nut, which was my first exposure to betel, when I was about 12 years old.

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