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5 comments about Danziger's Adventures: From Miami to Kabul.

1. Nick Danziger here goes deeper than his previous outing in 'Danziger's Travels'. Again he travels to disparate corners of the globe, but here he focuses more on the people he meets there, and on the wider significance of their lives. The book has some great photos by the author, and ultimately asks the reader to reflect on their place in the global scheme of things. Certainly as a Western reader familiar with some of the places in Britain and abroad he writes about, it is often an uncomfortably truthful read.



2. This is a somewhat disappointing follow up to "Danzinger's Travels" which utterly lacks the cohesiveness and compelling tale of that earlier book. There are interesting tidbits here and there as the author skips back and forth from Afghanistan to the luxury lecture circuit, with occasional forays into Tijuana and New York life, but for the most part I was left unmoved. There are some horrifying first-person accounts of the tragedy in Afghanistan, and an interesting chapter about Ayatollah Khomeni's funeral, but one's time is better spent skipping most of these musings.



3. A sequel to Nick Danziger's original story of travels through Afghanistan and other foreign lands, the book was unmoving. This work seems to be an attempt to capitalize on the limited success of his previous work but fails to capture the excitement or imagination of a true journey.



4. I too read "Danziger's Travels" before reading this and was charmed and entertained by that story. Apparently the modest success of that book has lead Mr. Danziger to consider himself a world class pundid. His tired clichés and platitudes are served up here time and again as if they were keen insights.

   I was very disappointed in the first half of the book to find Mr. Danziger reeling off the, almost canonical, list of disparaging opinions that modern Brits hold of Americans: that Americans are crass, materialistic, totally ignorant of anything happening outside their borders. But the real topper is the one about America's gun laws rendering it some kind of non-stop wild west cowboy shoot out. All these opinions are trotted out with smug delight and treated like they were gospel. Perhaps British school children are given this book to read in order to educate them about Americans. It would certainly explain a lot. I've talked to a number of British people in chat rooms and on ICQ in the last 3 years, and its stunning how they parrot the same self-righteous, uninformed opinions over and over.

   I began reading this book in good faith, and I made it almost half way through before I realized that very little real content was being presented. I realized that I was being sold a bunch of lines that even Alan Alda in M*A*S*H would have blushed to speak.

   Mr. Danziger condemns American plutocracy, but that doesn't stop him from taking money from it. Mr. Danziger condemns America's role in poverty and war and oppression in the world, but he says very little about his own country's, and western Europe's, complicity.

   This book became almost unreadable for me about half way through. This was part way through the "Kabul Fightning Season" section of the book, the supposed "meat" of the book. This section was padded (as was much of the rest of the book) with vacuous sociological commentary. He moans on and on about the horrors of war and the crushing povery war brings as if this is something new, or that this is something the reader might otherwise miss. By not letting the facts speak for themselves, Mr. Danziger really insults the intelligence of his readers. Anyway, I bravely plodded on, sometimes only choking down one or two pages a day, until I finished.

   This book reminds me very strongly of something I read about Christopher Hitchens lately. Hitchens actually is a world class pundit, but the edge had come off of some of his writing lately, so a commentator noted sadly that he had become a "saloon-bar bore".

   "Danziger's Travels" was a charming boyish adventure story. Mr. Danziger is anything but charming or boyish in this outing.

   Oh, as a minor side note, I note here (and in the "Travels" book as well) the new practice the British have of publicly bragging about their romantic exploits. I wonder if Mr. Danziger realizes how silly he looks when he clutters up his book with such bragging?

   So, at the end of the day, I would have to say that the only real interest that this book would hold is to give a pretty comprehensive catalog of the species of modern day British arrogance and prejudices. Not an "adventure", but a litany of misery.




5. I've read this book twice and throughly enjoyed reading it.

   I think some of the other reviewers were a little harsh, particuarly the gentleman from the United States, who states that Danziger is of the opinion that "Americans are crass, materialistic, totally ignorant of anything happening outside their borders".

   I think that the reviewer has a personal axe to bear, but I would say that this opinion is shared by many people throughout the world.

   Unfortunately, many Americans are ignorant of world Geography. Many Englishman on visiting the US are asked, "where is England is that near Great Britain". This doesn't inspire confidence coming from the worlds only super-power.

   Passport ownership is low in the US, and relatively few Americans have visited other cultures etc.

   Please encourage all Americans to travel and perhaps to learn a little more about the world, if they are going to dictate Global policies. This is perhaps the message that Mr Danziger was trying to get across.

   The US ain't perfect.

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