He decides to test the waters as a volunteer cleaning up after the mess left in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina.
This first trip inspires him to go much further afield, firstly to Costa Rica, and then, over a period of just nine months, to China, Ecuador, Palestine and Kenya.
On some of these trips his wife joins him, and shares the experiences with him.
They meet quirky and sometimes crazy characters, as well as amazingly generous people.
While the book reads as a kind of lengthy travel diary (it is over 430 pages), its purpose is not just to show you where Budd and his wife have been, but to prove to you the great worth of volunteering abroad, the values of going out of your comfort zone (in some cases, well and truly out of it) and of learning how other people live and survive.
The book has a kind of backbone: Budd's wife Julie doesn't want to have any children, and after Budd's father dies Budd is left with the double grief of losing his father and losing the possibility of ever being a father.
This is, in part, the kick-starter to his first volunteer trip.
Budd gradually finds out something of what he's like as a person - "My renewed quest to be a better person began with my being a selfish jerk," he writes - and he continues to work on whether the marriage is sustainable in view of his wife's desire to be childless.
Since the book is about real people (even if some of the dialogue has the ring of the scriptwriter about it), at the end there is no obvious solution to the couple's conflict of views (though they are still living together, according to the book's website).
This is not a page-turner; you need just to relax and take it as it comes.
There's much in it that will reward a leisurely reading.
- Mike Crowl is a Dunedin writer.
