Monkey Dancing

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY MAY 5, 2003

After an unexpected, devastating divorce, Glick faced the challenge of bonding with his two children. He handled it by taking his 13-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter on a six-month trip around the world. This unusual, superbly written and deeply human story of their travels is a consistently rewarding odyssey. Glick, an environmental reporter (Newsweek, etc.), writes, "I wanted my kids to share my affection for quiet redwoods and cholla cactus, to swim in mountain lakes and sleep under streaking stars during meteor showers." They move from Australia's Great Barrier Reef to Bali, with its contrasting combinations of spiritual awareness and bargaining for surfboard key rings. Glick highlights Borneo's boiling heat and Indonesia's grinding poverty, along with sojourns in Zurich and Kathmandu. The book is striking both as travelogue and personal drama. Glick's memories of his brother, a victim of rare male breast cancer, weave their way powerfully through the story, along with his despair and confusion over losing his wife to a woman. But Glick doesn't sentimentalize and frankly refers to his children's fights by saying, "f sibling bickering were an art form, these two would be Old Masters," while clearly indicating the love beneath their combativeness. His slowly emerging new romance provides another point of interest and tension. By the time Glick is finished talking of lizards, crocodiles, cassowaries, koalas and kingfishers, even readers who lack the author's raging wanderlust will long to encounter unfamiliar cultures and witness firsthand the tigers of Nepal, the Javan rhinos of Vietnam and the orangutans of Borneo. Photos.