Product Description

There are only a handful of places left on this earth where you can't buy a McDonald's hamburger or stay in a Holiday Inn - and John Simpson has been to them all. This hugely successful volume of writing is a celebration of some of the world's wilder places. His extraordinary experiences include stories about a television camera that killed people, about how Colonel Gadhaffi farted his way through an interview and how he - Simpson - mooned the Queen.

'Highly entertaining' The Times

'What amazing tales he has to tell, and with what enthralling vividness . . . Riveting' Daily Mail

'The range of his travels is staggering . . . Never less than entertaining, sometimes moving and often funny' Sunday Telegraph

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #100077 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-03
• Format: Unabridged
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Some people just aren't cut out for the suburbs. As one of the BBC's top foreign correspondents, John Simpson has been at the epicentre of many of the world's flashpoints for more than 30 years. Afghanistan, Belgrade, Hong Kong, Baghdad; you name it, he's been there. And what's more, he hasn't just met the great and the good, such as Clinton and Blair, he's met the top bogey men, too. He's had Osama Bin Laden pleading with some Afghani guerrillas to kill him and his crew, he's interviewed Emperor Bokassa, Colonel Gadhafi and Arkan and had close up dealings with Saddam Hussein. And it goes without saying he was one of the first people in the entire world to see in the new millennium on the specially named Millennium Island, which the Kiribati government claimed just squeezed inside the international date line.

Small wonder, then, that Simpson is a source of dozens of good stories. Many of these have been written up elsewhere in his autobiographical Strange Places, Questionable People, but there are plenty left over for this latest book in which Simpson eschews chronology and just sticks to some plain old-fashioned story telling, with sections on villains, spies, icons etc. Unsurprisingly, Simpson has a journalistic eye for detail and nuance and never holds back from telling you the things you want to know; so when he went to interview Bokassa, he managed to sneak a look inside his giant deep freeze to see if there were any human body parts. It sounds trivial but it isn't; in a strange sort of way the examination of the contents of a deep freeze can be every bit as revealing as an hour on a shrink's couch.

Simpson is a genial companion, not much given to introspection, and the book races seamlessly from anecdote to anecdote. And yet underpinning the narrative is Simpson's global malaise, a feeling that everywhere in the world is becoming more and more similar and that it's increasingly hard to find anywhere genuinely wild and remote. Simpson has been to many of those places, but the way he describes them makes them seem fairly similar in their own kind of way. McDonalds and the Gap may be thin on the ground, but there are bullets and danger aplenty. To have been to so many of these places is an achievement in itself; to have returned unscathed is a minor miracle; John Simpson has led a charmed life in more ways than one. --John Crace

Review
'Highly entertaining' The Times; 'What amazing tales he has to tell, and with what enthralling vividness...Riveting' Daily Mail; 'The range of his travels is staggering...Never less than entertaining, sometimes moving and often funny' Sunday Telegraph

About the Author

John Simpson is the BBC's World Affairs Editor. He has twice been the Royal Television Society's Journalist of the Year and won countless other major television awards. He has written several books, including five volumes of autobiography, Strange Places, Questionable People , A Mad World, My Masters, News from No Man's Land and Not Quite World's End and a childhood memoir, Days from a Different World. The Wars Against Saddam, his account of the West's relationship with Iraq and his two decades reporting on that relationship encompassing two Gulf Wars and the fall of Saddam Hussein, is also published by Pan Macmillan. He lives in London with his South African wife, Dee, and their son, Rafe.

Customer Reviews

Skirts over too much
There are some real gems in this book but, on the whole, it deals with too many subjects and incidents to really flow. It's rather like being down the pub with someone telling you about all the crazy things that have happened to them - interesting at first but wears a bit thin after the third pint. Given his unique perspective, I was hoping Simpson would shed some new light on world affairs but I did not think the book went into enough depth to achieve this. I don't know, maybe that's not what he intended, but it's what I hoped for when I bought it.

You know how boring other people's holiday stories are?
... Well, you will probably get your mind changed by this book. John Simpson is an excellent, if occasionally grumpy travelling companion, and his stories are funny, moving and enlightening in turns, and rather neat and short. I also like someone who has been all over the place and done everything constantly taking the trouble to remind you how attractive his wife is.

I started this book on the tenth of September, and found myself disagreeing with his introduction, in which he bemoans the homogenisation of world culture- I personally am happy to put up with as many Gaps and Starbucks and monolinguists as you like if it guarantees a calmer world.

The events of the 11th September of course may well have changed that for all of us. It was sobering to read about a man going to parts of the world considered dangerous, then to wake up in a world where nowhere is safe.

Amusing, informative, realistic, humble and excellent read
This book is an extremely good read. Simpson visits some of the most difficult places in the world. Instead of inflating the reader's impression of him by overstating the danger, he is frank, understating and sees the funny side to everything.

He is honest about the charm of villains (a pleasant change from the grotesque moral righteousness of some journalists' writing) and he looks for the beauty in places and people.

Simpson's style brings to mind everything good about British culture: humour, honesty, humility, courage and adventure. Simpson's wit, similar to that of Robert Cooper, who he mentions in the book, is admirable.

This book will make you laugh out loud, and wish you too could visit some of these places or meet some of the villains. I wish there were more books like this.