Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip
Author: JIM ROGERS
List Price: $27.95
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ISBN: 0375509127
Publisher: Random House (13 May, 2003)
Sales Rank: 7,491
Average Customer Rating: 3.61 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 3 out of 5
Mediocre travelogue
This book is basically a mediocre travelogue, filled with the self-indulgent recollections collected while driving across the world in a custom designed Mercedes. Written by Jim Rogers, a retired hedge-fund manager, it is a recounting of a world-wide adventure. Along the way, Rogers punctuates his wandering narrative with economic observations and glib predictions about the future. Granted, Jim Rogers and his current wife Paige did something few will ever do-spend three years and drive through 116 countries, racking up over 152,000 miles doing it. That is awe-inspiring.
However, while reading this book, I couldn't help but be reminded of the travelogues written at the turn of the last century, where rich families would travel the world jotting self-important journal entries about how superior they were to the local savages.
Jim comes across as self-important and slightly arrogant. Opinionated is putting it lightly. But it is because he is what he is - a rich socialite traveling the world to indulge himself.
He blames European colonialism for most of the corruption and tyranny in Africa. His solution? Simply redraw the political maps around religious populations and end all aid to the countries.
He states that anti-American bias around the world is because of... you guessed it. United States government. He criticizes Clinton, Bush, and Greenspan.
The most interesting parts I thought was when Rogers retells about how he got conned into buying fake diamonds (glass in Africa), and also tracked down a broker that stole his money on a previous trip (South America). He also was surprised about how many of his predictions from his previous trip were just simply wrong.
At least that offers some balance to the "I'm right and everyone else is wrong" tone that permeates the book.
In spite of the negatives, I found it interesting nonetheless, to see the world filtered through Jim's eyes.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Eye opening for all Americans
I highly recommend this narrative of Jim Roger's world wide travels for all Americans. The reason I say this, is because our media, for better or for worse, tends to shelter us from what's going on in the rest of the world. Think about it. Because of world trade and economics, events such as a revolution in Venezuela, or currency delvaluation in China would have much more impact on our daily lives than say, a basketball star getting accused of rape, or two female pop stars kissing on stage. But which events get more press? Jim Rogers' views on the economics of different nations is timely, and gives perspective of where major ecomnomic growth is going to occur in the coming century. And in doing so, it also highlights the mistakes that the US has made, and continues to make, in regards to foreign trade and foreign policy.
The bottom line is, if you're an American, interested in business, and you wonder where the US is headed in the future: read this book.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Could have been better, but still worth the read
Exposure to phenomenally successful people is always illuminating in some form or fashion and the book is worth it for that alone, although it does happen to be a pretty good book on its own merits. Mr. Rogers illustrates very well, albeit briefly, both his logic and his intuition. He does not attempt to be politically correct in any way and the plain common sense that results from his folksy narrative is refreshing and hard to find. There is, in many cases a vast canyon between the reporting/news that we receive from our mainstream media sources--anything about Africa leaps immediately to mind--and Mr. Rogers' actual real life observations and experiences that even small investors will want to know about. The thing that makes this book good rather than great is his companion on the adventure, now his wife. She is, I am sure, a very nice person and all readers will be delighted that Mr. Rogers is obviously madly in love, however it is equally obvious that she is no match for him intellectually or in terms of her accomplishments and the book would have been much more riveting and interesting had her pedestrian observations and thoughts been left out or better yet, replaced with more on-the-fly analysis by Mr. Rogers. Similar Products
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