Wow. What a depressing book. In it, Danziger (Danziger's Adventures) recounts his attempt to discover, interview, and photograph "the huge ranks of the excluded and marginalized people of Great Britain." Danziger covers the gamut, from inner city, to tiny village, from recent immigrants, to the purest English, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, everywhere. I don't think I can sum up the result any better than the print reviews: "A chilling indictment of what we've let happen in the past two decades.... This book is so important that every one of us should read it and weep." --The Independent, "Grips and appalls the mind....The sheer extent of civil catastrophe and human waste here threatens to beggar belief." --Sunday Times. None of what he describes (children drug addicts, single mothers, welfare catch-22s, no future) would be considered particularly newsworthy in the US, on its own, but it does shatter the common perception Americans tend to hold of Great Britain. A polar opposite to Bill Brysons's fairly affectionate British travelogue, "Notes From a Small Island."

Having read several travel journals dating back to the 19th centuries, when it truly was dangerous and pioneering to travel the old silk roads, I found Danziger's travels both needlessly self-aggrandizing and unlikely. While the writing style is fine, it seems as every other passage was created to make put the author in the best light. Furthermore, the run-ins with the authorities are patently false, having dealt with Chinese officials in all the areas that Danziger covers. They are much much less accomodating to foreigners than the book portrays; believe it or not, one cannot simply took oneself out of the local laws (much less twenty times in a row).

While I cannot speak for some of the regions covered in the book, the whole escapade seems to me filled with plot holes and other faults of a fictional nature - futhermore, the main narrator not once noted a linguistic/communications problem, which is of course absurd given that he spoke none of the languages on the route he travelled.

All in all, a good science fiction book would be equally enteraining.

This is Nick Danziger's account of is travels from Britain across to Tibet and China; but really, it's mostly about Afghanistan. Danziger spent several months in Afghanistan while they were at war. I found it a little bit obsure, in places, but he seems to have roamed around with a gang of Afghanistan men, met rebel leaders, and survived appalling conditions. For example, he described Russian helicopters hovering over a village and destroying while he watched on a hillside. He was so taken up with his experiences there that he kept on his Afghanistan outfit for the rest of his trip, and even wore it for the first few weeks back in Britain. Nick sounds a lot like a hard-eyed idealist. He put his safety in the hands of others a lot, and took a lot of risks. Much of his time was spent trying to cross borders, and dealing with officials.

This is a very nice answer to all those types who claim that there is nowadays there is nothing more to explore, and no adventures to be had.

Travel writing can be annoying, but I found this book fascinating and very readable. Afghanistan, one of the most dangerous and closed-off places on Earth, is always going to be interesting.

Danziger's Travels is an excellent read for someone who is interested in difficult, adventurous travel accounts. I read travel writing much of the time, and this is one of the three or four best books about a journey I've come across. The soul of Danziger's narrative is his ability to stay composed and to remember who he thinks he is as he re-traces the The Silk Road by foot, bus, lorry, horse, and any other means of transport from London to Beijing (he refers to it as Peking) in 1984. Danziger's Travels is like the now-popular guide The World's Most Dangerous Places but written in first-person instead of travel-guide style; it's all the more compelling because Danziger describes his crossing of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, China before adventure travel found a market and became all the rage (i.e. before corporations saw there was money to be made on these kinds of journeys if marketed correctly). So, reading Danziger is like reading one of the last of the real pioneers. Danziger is a young Brit--24 or 5 at the time--with a bad case of wanderlust. He's traveled before, having been to South America and the Amazon. So he applies for and wins a Winston Churchill grant, about 1,500 pounds sterling, from Her Majesty's government, to follow the Silk Road and to write about the ancient route. The journey is scheduled to last three months. Seventeen months after he sets off, Danziger returns home. He made it for that long on the original grant money. Along the way (this is 1984, remember), he penetrates an Ayatollah Khomeini-led Iran; falls in with the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan and fights with them against Russian insurgency; crosses the death-trap border into Pakistan and becomes the first foreigner since Mao's revolution to cross the Khunjerab Pass into western China; and makes a daring and roundabout route through most of The Middle Kingdom en route to his final destination, Peking. I have only scratched the surface here, giving an extremely broad overview of Danziger's Travels. The book is worth reading if only to understand a bit more about human resourcefulness and plasticity (plasticity in a situational sense) and, yes, compassion. Nick Danziger often shows, maybe unintentionally, which makes it all the more compelling, why we can all view ourselves as travelers on this earth, each in our own time. We can learn from him in the way he moved through the world.

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.

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.

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.