Fateless: A Book of the Film

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Adam Gussow grew up in suburban New York and graduated in 1979 from Princeton, where he is currently a Ph.D. candidate--a fairly typical background for a white blues fan. But Gussow took his obsession with the blues further than most when he started blowing harmonica on the New York City streets in the mid-'80s along with two gifted African American musicians. Nat Riddles, a near-contemporary and fellow harp player, helped Gussow hone his technique (this is the source of many earthy jokes about what else harmonica men do well with their tongues), and Mister Satan, a much older guitar man, imparted life lessons as well. Gussow's funny, impassioned memoir chronicles the growing success of Satan and Adam at blues festivals and on albums while poignantly depicting Nat's battle with leukemia. The author is wildly romantic about the music (described in passages of intense, charging prose) and extremely clear-sighted about the racial tensions simmering in an art form created by blacks but increasingly listened to and played by whites. Alternating sections describing collegiate musical experiences and a love affair that finally broke up in 1984 are less fascinating, but this is a moving tribute to "our American music, the best in the world." --Wendy Smith

Book Description

" Mister Satan's Apprentice is a rare musical history because, not only can Gussow play, but he can also write. The writing is good enough to bring the music to life." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

Mister Satan's Apprentice is a lyrical and heartfelt account of a remarkable friendship born out of blues music. For Adam Gussow playing blues harmonica is an escape. And one evening while still reeling from a recent breakup, he meets Nat Riddles, a self-described "harmonica-man for all occasions" who recognizes in Adam a kindred musical spirit, offering him an entrée into the blues scene. When Nat flees the city after surviving a near-fatal shooting, Adam turns to a philosophical Mississippi native known as Mister Satan, a brilliant Harlem street musician who plays guitar and percussion simultaneously.

What begins as an apprenticeship evolves into a unique collaboration, one that not only wins the performing duo critical acclaim, but also demonstrates their ability to transcend generational and cultural divides. At once a remarkable coming of age story and a fascinating tale of the redemptive nature of the blues, Mister Satan's Apprentice is also the story of how two muscians form a unique friendship based on a shared love of the blues.

Customer Reviews:

Paying his dues..........2006-07-11

It is an amazing thing when an artist (in this case, Gussow, a writer/blues harp player) can somehow manage to make their mark despite all the confusion and hard knocks life throws at them- and they sometimes throw at themselves. This is a moving story about a burgeoning blues musician captured with excellent dialogue... Gussow has made his characters come alive and jump off the page the way writers are supposed to.

Not only is it Gussow's personal memoirs of his early years in music, but a riveting biography of one of the most unique and original blues acts in recent years- Satan & Adam. Gussow's accounts of his early music/life mentors (such as the underexposed harpist Nat Riddles) with sincerity and genuine emotion is fascinating. The telling of Mister Satan's story is a valuable contribution to blues history that could well have been lost in obscurity.

There are issues explored in this book that have rarely been expounded upon with any meaningful insight in any musician interview or book I can remember. The passages in the book where Gussow is in the middle of Harlem grappling with the rift and misunderstanding between black and white is especially poignant, particularly from his perspective as a young, white, Princeton educated "bluesman".

Although this book isn't an instructional course on technique or musicianship- for those who aren't aware- Adam Gussow is considered by many blues afficionados to be one of the best harmonica players alive today. So he's paid some dues and he knows what he's talking about.

Adam Gussow had the good fortune, the talent, street smarts and the heartfelt focus to get out there and live it- become an apprentice to a bluesmaster- just like most traditional art is passed down from accomplished teacher to eager student. I admire him for it. Mister Satan's Apprentice is a must read for any struggling musician or blues fan- it just might get you thinking about your own life's journey.

Despite bloat, a white-hot must-read for music fans.......2000-02-12

In "Mister Satan's Apprentice," street musician extraordinaire Adam Gussow has left in just about everything, and it's about 40 percent too much; the book would have read far better at a sleek 250 pages. But the good stuff is really good, and the book is well worth reading despite its distractions and digressions. In his early 40s, Gussow is currently a doctoral candidate in Princeton's English department. But thousands know him as the harmonica-wielding half of the "progressive gutbucket blues" duo Satan and Adam -- three-CD recording artists, photogenic subject of any number of newspaper and magazine features, and cameo stars of the U2 movie "Rattle and Hum."

In his autobiography, Gussow gets deep inside blues, and his relationship to it, and manages to successfully translate the music into language. "Blues harmonica played well was a miniature tongued slalom, a tornado swallowed and contained," he tells us, and his words capture every bit of excitement that the grooves and notes have to offer. "Mister Satan's Apprentice" is about much more than the blues, though -- it's a provocative meditation on race from a white man immersed in a traditionally black genre, neighborhood and world. Playing around with his first harmonica, in 1974, Gussow contemplates the subtleties of playing blues. "It had something to do with being a black guy," he muses.

As the protagonist in his narrative, Gussow pales (no pun intended) next to two marvelous characters: his two mentors, Nat Riddles and Sterling "Mister Satan" Magee. Twenty-two years older than his protégé, Mister Satan is as colorful as they come. He's a visual artist and apocalyptic numerologist with a murky music-industry background, and a font of, if not wisdom, then brilliantly idiosyncratic aphorisms and soliloquies. A Harlem fixture when Gussow approaches the guitarist to jam along, he shouts and hollers, runs hot and cold, towers over other men. Mister Satan looms larger than life, but harmonica player Nat Riddles is entirely real, an odd-job taxi driver with a dazzling smile and soulful tone. "He was perpetually on the verge of becoming the blues world's Next Big Thing," Gussow writes. "A young black harp-player with the Sound." Riddles flits in and out of fortune, showing up unexpectedly to astound a New York club, phoning from somewhere in the South, destitute and desperate, surviving gunshot wounds only to eventually succumb to a cruel wasting disease.

It's the music, finally, that counts most -- Gussow gives his story its own soundtrack, one of restlessness and yearning, of his struggle to capture the Sound: "The Sound was Southern-bound, it was cocky, playful, manic, chucking, resentful, edgy, comforting, relentless. It took incredible lip strength and finesse to produce. It was sexual. It was the haunted, restless feeling of a guy's apartment late at night after the woman who used to live there had moved out. It was whatever nasty things she was doing with the other guy-a virile sensitive soulmate-this very minute. It was the best way of beating those visions back into the ghoulish cave they had crawled out of. Working hard at the Sound was a socially acceptable way of sobbing, raging, and primal-screaming from a hot heart while pretending merely to be practicing." A little of this kind of writing goes a long way, and there's an awful lot of it here. Granted, it's a real challenge to maintain a level of excitement in writing about music page after page, particularly about blues, a genre built on the same few chords locked in a repetitious groove. So it's forgivable that Gussow often leans out a little far: "The sidewalk scene dissolved; I was wandering in a garden of earthly delights, hands cupped against the sweet cold fluid air. Every bent note was a pitch-perfect arrow puncturing the gray dusk. You only live now. Blue notes danced and spun, lines endlessly unfolding like so many wrapped gifts laid bare." You have to remind yourself that he's talking about a harmonica, one of the more prosaic of instruments.

For all Gussow's breathless adjectives and action verbs, he's frustratingly vague about the technical aspects of the duo's "huge raw perfect sound." The book's photos show Gussow with effects pedals at his feet, but he makes no mention of them; he doesn't mention the basic information that he plays in "cross harp" style until page 386; Mister Satan's "phase-shifted guitar wash and deafening clatter" is described pretty much only in metaphorical terms, as, for instance, "an endlessly unrolling Persian carpet with gristle and clanks added." Gussow is so good at getting inside his playing that the narrative sags whenever it moves to other topics. A hefty amount of the bloat deals with his failed relationships. We meet mercurial crackhead Robyn and inconstant ex-fat girl Gail, but mostly there's erratic, irritable hyperfeminist Helen. Gussow tells us on page 30 that Helen left him back in 1984, so we're predisposed to dislike her, and we indeed do. "Most men had a girlfriend," he writes. "I had Aphrodite crossed with Kali the Destroyer, She of infinite ravenous limbs." Worse, the book's artfully jumbled narrative, with short sections ordered sort of sequentially on several tracks, dooms us to read about Helen over the entire course of the book. We think we're finally through with her, and then: "1983. Things with Helen had turned out surprisingly well . . ." Enough already!

In the late '80s and early '90s, a period when racial violence kept flaring up in the outer boroughs of New York City, Satan and Adam's young-old, white-black novelty made a splash, but momentum slipped away. "Minor celebrity beckoned, then faded," Gussow writes. And despite the book's vibrant cover photo of the pair, they no longer perform, according to an e-mail Gussow sent me. "[I]t's impossible to keep the act together," he wrote, noting that Mister Satan now lives in south-central Virginia and has no telephone. That's a real shame.

If you love the blues, you'll love this book!.......1999-04-08

I could hardly put this book down to perform activities of daily living, let alone going to work. "Mr Adam" has created a masterpiece of American musical literature. Being a blues lover of many years, I was bored to death by the almost clinical approach of most writers on the subject. Not so, Mr. Gussow! He delivers a passionately honest and heart felt memoir filled with wonderfully alive and vibrant individuals, sharing with us the one true American music, the blues.

A book for lovers and players.......1999-02-25

Recently it was my privilege to see author and harmonica player Adam Gussow at my local huge independent bookstore here in the Eastern US. I rarely do commercials, but if you can't catch Adam, you can check out his new novel "Mr. Satan's Apprentice". Adam calls it "a blues memoir", and so it is. The guy is a no-shit, kick-butt, street-smart harp player! FYI, I have fairly high standards in this realm. If you've seen or heard the New York duo "Satan and Adam", you'll know what I mean. The guy is ALSO a juicy and creative, energetic, sexy writer - something I'm also picky about. Princeton Ph.D. candidate - English.

Adam's book describes a journey that a few of us know, but most do not. The musician in you will relate to the tale of the emergence of deep and powerful music from the little instrument - and the romantic in you will throb with the ways the emerging harmonica player and boundary-crosser discovers the things he needs to grow musically and personally - and then sometimes fearlessly, sometimes not, sets out to acquire them. You'll meet his teachers and mentors, and like it or not, you'll see life through the eyes of this seeker of musical and personal connection. You'll go with Adam on the romantic roller coaster as loves come and go - and you'll travel with him to Paris to play in the Metro and on the street; to the American South, and to other places exotic and otherwise - including a hitch with the road company of Broadway show based on Mark Twain's Sawyer and Finn. Later we get into the recording studio with Mr. Gussow and Mr. Satan - the Harlem street mystic and one-man band who becomes Adam's main-man mentor and muse, the Mr. Satan of the book's title. Throughout the book you'll find Adam the street intellectual examining his position as a white man among black men (and black women) in this blues-filled world - an examination in which Mr. Satan plays a key role.

A book for players and lovers - of the spirit of the music, of the street; of the endless forms of beauty and love, as they are found ALL over the place. The author is one who knows, and magically, describes, many of the gut experiences we players know; to my knowledge no one's ever written quite this way about these things before. Like the performing moments, the pulling out of all the everything you've got and then some, when the audience is on it's very EDGE, right there with you; when you are truly and purely the great IT! Blowing and drawing deep, and deeper, and then high and higher; and the room is all whoops and smiles, and all there in your hand. A good player knows these things, and believe me, in a blues band, nobody gets that kind of juice but the harp player.

OK, so maybe you don't know the peak of performance grace and light - but you know your peaks, and Adam's telling can stir it back into view...

Adam Gussow writes of music, romance, conflict, and awakening in an intimately physical and heart- connected way. As a player, I'm rocked. -"Harmonica Jack" Merrylees (JMerrylees@aol.com)

lyrical and uplifting.......1999-02-20

Mr. Satan's Apprentice is a heartfelt, soulful journey of self-discovery and self-expression. Gussow writes powerfully and lyrically about his complex friendship/partnership with the eccentric blues genius Mr. Satan. In the end, this is an uplifting example of a real-life "dialogue" between two very different -- and equally compelling -- central characters.

Book Description

Rock the 'Mech world
·Crucial maps and detailed walkthroughs for each mission
·Comprehensive stats and details on all BattleMechsTM
·All weapons and gear detailed
·Complete combat strategies included
·Multiplayer tips and tricks
·Salvage strategies revealed
·BattleMech selection tips—take the right 'Mech for the job

Customer Reviews:

Invaluable guide for campaign walkthroughs and mech stats.......2002-12-23

While I prefered to go through each campaign on my own initially, there frequently comes that point of "what am I doing wrong here?" The guide was the most useful during the "Thor on the Rocks" campaign, which is one of the most difficult ones. There are secret caves of salvage I would have never found on my own, and certain tactics to follow to enable to to finish the campaign in one piece. The battle tactics and weapons overview in general is extremely useful.

You also get more complete info on the ALL the mechs in the game. The guide with the game disc only gives basic info on some of them, with no info on Ragnarok, the mech you use in the final campaign. You also find out that finishing the last campaign unlocks Ymir, a variant of Ragnarok you can use in multiplayer games.

Anybody who really enjoys this game and is a serious player should get this guide.

Book Description

Drive . . . and grow rich!

The bestselling author of Investment Biker is back from the ultimate road trip: a three-year drive around the world that would ultimately set the Guinness record for the longest continuous car journey. In Adventure Capitalist, legendary investor Jim Rogers, dubbed “the Indiana Jones of finance” by Time magazine, proves that the best way to profit from the global situation is to see the world mile by mile. “While I have never patronized a prostitute,” he writes, “I know that one can learn more about a country from speaking to the madam of a brothel or a black marketeer than from meeting a foreign minister.”

Behind the wheel of a sunburst-yellow, custom-built convertible Mercedes, Rogers and his fiancée, Paige Parker, began their “Millennium Adventure” on January 1, 1999, from Iceland. They traveled through 116 countries, including many where most have rarely ventured, such as Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, Angola, Sudan, Congo, Colombia, and East Timor. They drove through war zones, deserts, jungles, epidemics, and blizzards. They had many narrow escapes.

They camped with nomads and camels in the western Sahara. They ate silkworms, iguanas, snakes, termites, guinea pigs, porcupines, crocodiles, and grasshoppers.

Best of all, they saw the real world from the ground up—the only vantage point from which it can be truly understood—economically, politically, and socially.

Here are just a few of the author’s conclusions:

• The new commodity bull market has started.
• The twenty-first century will belong to China.
• There is a dramatic shortage of women developing in Asia.
• Pakistan is on the verge of disintegrating.
• India, like many other large nations, will break into several countries.
• The Euro is doomed to fail.
• There are fortunes to be made in Angola.
• Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are a scam.
• Bolivia is a comer after decades of instability, thanks to gigantic amounts of natural gas.

Adventure Capitalist is the most opinionated, sprawling, adventurous journey you’re likely to take within the pages of a book—the perfect read for armchair adventurers, global investors, car enthusiasts, and anyone interested in seeing the world and understanding it as it really is.

From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews:

The Ultimate Road Trip, indeed.......2007-04-05

I am quite impressed by this book and Jim Rogers trip. We all would like to do a tour of the world, but very few of us can spare the time or the money. Being a retired billionaire does help in that respect and if only because it gives the necessary funding to construct your own vehicle and do as you please. Jim Rogers does precisely that. In a way, we all ought to be jealous or make a killing money-wise and do it ourselves.

I loved the description of his trip from Ireland to Tokyo and back to Ireland as well as his trip down and up through Africa. Jim Rogers being an investor he was bound to make all sorts of observations on the economies he traveled through. Some of these I found spot-on. I also agreed with his observation on foreign aid projects given that I have also seen them in action.

The one disappointment for me were his travels from India to New Zealand and his trip through the American continent and largely because he describes it rather briefly. I think they would have deserved at least as much attention as Part One and Part Two of his trip.

But apart from that, this is excellent stuff.

A travel saga through an investor's eyes.......2006-07-18

Jim Rogers, an independent, insightful global investor, wrote this great modern adventure story. He made his money by being an investment iconoclast and that maverick attitude shows in his forthright assessments of entire nations and government bureaucracies. His ground-level adventures are entertaining, but they also provide fundamental research about global markets that economists and corporate strategists should find very valuable. If Rogers is right, his feedback could save strategists hundreds of thousands of dollars in research or consulting fees. He seems to report his observations honestly. He flatly states which countries he thinks are disintegrating, and which ones he thinks seem to be ascending. And, he throws in some disturbing opinions about the U.S. We find this book valuable for global investors, corporate strategists and people interested in adventure travel. While Rogers and his traveling companion had to endure months of inconvenience, inoculations and car trouble to make their trek, you can enjoy their story from your home or office - unless, of course, it inspires you to hit the road.

CEO Blog reviews.......2006-04-13

I finished one of the books I started on the weekend called Adventure Capitalism by Jim Rogers. It is an awesome book. More like a novel or travel narration in many ways than a business book. This makes it slightly slower reading. Jim, and his wife Paige, drive around the world in a modified Mercedes. He comments on the business environment and economy of the countries he visits. Part of what makes the book interesting is the stories he tells of their experiences. He is a natural story teller.

He is a big believer in free trade and open borders and cites numerous examples of countries with open (or closed) borders that prosper (or whither). For example, Burma was a wealthy country which closed its borders in 1962 - it is now a disaster. Same for Ghana, the wealthiest country in the British empire in the 50's(ever wealthier than England) which closed it borders in 1957. Seven years later it was bankrupt.

He has a view is that handouts to countries create dependency and slow self reliance. This is similar to a view taken in one of my favourite books The Millionaire Next Door to handouts to our children..

Trade tariffs (or things like the beef embargo) act as an inefficient tax on the citizens of a country. The citizens pay more for their products which allow local producers to make a bit more profit. This creates a laziness and inefficiency in the local producers that cause them to not be competitive on a world scale. Interesting view.

His view on India differs from The World is Flat (see June 19th post on my blog). Good on the ground R and D.

Rogers can sure execute a plan.......2005-12-17

Rogers writes this book as a follow-on to "Investment Biker" which he wrote in the early 1990's. The difference is he doesn't get rained on as much as his exposure to the elements is limited by his surrounding automobile versus his totally-exposed-to-the-elements motorcycle.

The crux of his book isn't so much a travelogue as about his exploits as a commodity maven or as one who seeks to improve his human capital in that regard. Throughout the book I marveled at his insights and comparisons, and his doggedness at learning by keeping his ear to the ground and his eyes on the road. He knows a great deal about history and the ebb and flow of successful (and unsuccessful) societies. He recounts his own take on the historical, social, political, military, and financial (seen thru currency spreads) realities on every country he visits, - all 116 of them. He's a courageous guy, one with the genes for adventure and risk taking even though he claims to never take risks while investing. This implies that he always buys when there's "blood in the streets" (at the bottom), but his latest problems with Refco, the bankrupt commodity trading operation and it's fraudulent books are a testament and refutation to this claim. That may seem rather cavalier of me to say, but there are always unforseen risks in investing no matter how thorough your research and he knows this better than I.

As a contrast to the high regard in which I hold Rogers as an investor, I am somewhat flummoxed with his claims to be anti-war. After all, he had to occasionally be escorted by armed convoys when he traveled thru Africa and other countries of the sub-continent. Why does he think we give guns to cops? Put another way, the only way you can ultimately neutralize the bad guys is with force. If you want peace you must be prepared for war or so the saying goes. While Rogers correctly states that avaricious politicians are almost always the culprits with regard to war mongering, there are some wars which are wars of liberation i.e. our forays into Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, etc. One need only look at the tremendous outpouring and participation of those who have recently voted in Afghanistan and Iraq. These events make George Kennan's containment theory look a bit dated though it did work acceptably at the time, some 55 to 60 years ago. From my personal perspective Reagan had it right in his dealings with the Soviets and we could have shortened the Cold War considerably had we followed his dictums.

Rogers is certainly correct in understanding the damage that unscrupulous politicians can wreak citing endless examples of it in this book, and his major investment thesis is to buy into a country when no one else will consider it. Given that many of these countires seem to be not countries at all but oil wells with a flag over them, Rogers is true to his calling as an investigative commodities investor, one with his nose close to the ground. By contrast, most large investors are "top-down" guys who look for expanding or contracting spreads after which they invest in the biggest companies in the sector. If you pay close attention to Rogers you see that he always goes for the stocks of staple industries: tobacco, banking, brewing, oil, gas, etc; all industries with a local as well as a potential global market. Because most countries don't manufacture anything that any global consumer will buy, they sell what they can grow and what they have underground in the way of natural resources. If they can cost effectively get it in deliverable form they can export it. After that their next gambit is arms and tourism. As an aside, Rogers points out and correctly so that when the price of oil drops again the Russians are in for a heap of trouble, all the way around. But, it's always something isn't it (Remember Roseanne-a-danna-danna?)

I'd recommend this book to anyone who is an investor and intersted in a macro level birds-eye view of the world. Not many guys have Rogers' keen insights nor his zest for getting down and dirty in the pursuit of the next profitable natural resource or currency play. He's a real maverick and a successful on at that. My hat is certainly off to him and I will faithfully read his next offering which though unannounced will, I'm guessing, be about either undersea or space travel as he seems to have covered everything else, what do you think?

Post-script with a dolled-up Mercedes AMG.......2005-11-27

Following-up on the Investment Biker travelogue, Rogers decides to take this trip in the comforts of an AMG spruced up car. While traveling to more locations and experiencing more life-changing events (death of father, marriage), Roger's 2nd world travel account lacks the cutting adventure of the first. Unique to it's moment in history the first explored the vastly changing political and economic changes that occured with the overnight end of the Cold War, while this account alienates its field description due to a more distanced and experienced writer, as well as more entrenched world situation.

Just as winning a 2nd championship doesn't compare to the first, going around the world and being exposed to things you could never describe or fully understand unless there in person is mitigated by a 2nd serving. Upon trying a new fruit, the possibilities and diversions are endless, but upon experiencing the taste, texture, and terrain of a fruit, analagous to a geographic continent, becomes less revelatory and more familiar. Despite the more distanced, more fragmented, and less nuanced description of each area, this is still an amazing account, few of which can match living in the world today.

THE ULTIMATE INVESTOR'S ROAD TRIP: ADVENTURE CAPITALIST.

Average customer rating:

Amazing story, profound insight

THE ULTIMATE INVESTOR'S ROAD TRIP: ADVENTURE CAPITALIST.
Jim. Rogers
Manufacturer: John Wiley
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Popular Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

Download Description

Drive . . . and grow rich! The bestselling author of Investment Biker is back from the ultimate road trip: a three-year drive around the world that would ultimately set the Guinness record for the longest continuous car journey. In Adventure Capitalist, legendary investor Jim Rogers, dubbed ¿the Indiana Jones of finance¿ by Time magazine, proves that the best way to profit from the global situation is to see the world mile by mile. ¿While I have never patronized a prostitute,¿ he writes, ¿I know that one can learn more about a country from speaking to the madam of a brothel or a black marketeer than from meeting a foreign minister.¿ Behind the wheel of a sunburst-yellow, custom-built convertible Mercedes, Rogers and his fiancée, Paige Parker, began their ¿Millennium Adventure¿ on January 1, 1999, from Iceland. They traveled through 116 countries, including many where most have rarely ventured, such as Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, Angola, Sudan, Congo, Colombia, and East Timor. They drove through war zones, deserts, jungles, epidemics, and blizzards. They had many narrow escapes. They camped with nomads and camels in the western Sahara. They ate silkworms, iguanas, snakes, termites, guinea pigs, porcupines, crocodiles, and grasshoppers. Best of all, they saw the real world from the ground up¿the only vantage point from which it can be truly understood¿economically, politically, and socially. Here are just a few of the author¿s conclusions: ¿ The new commodity bull market has started. ¿ The twenty-first century will belong to China. ¿ There is a dramatic shortage of women developing in Asia. ¿ Pakistan is on the verge of disintegrating. ¿ India, like many other large nations, will break into several countries. ¿ The Euro is doomed to fail. ¿ There are fortunes to be made in Angola. ¿ Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are a scam. ¿ Bolivia is a comer after decades of instability, thanks to gigantic amounts of natural gas. Adventure Capitalist is the most opinionated, sprawling, adventurous journey you¿re likely to take within the pages of a book¿the perfect read for armchair adventurers, global investors, car enthusiasts, and anyone interested in seeing the world and understanding it as it really is. From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews:

Amazing story, profound insight.......2003-06-01

Review of Adventure Capitalist, by Jim Rogers

Reviewer: Mark Lamendola, MBA, and author of over 3500 articles in print or online.

In 1999, I began tracking an incredible journey chronicled each month by Jim Rogers in Worth Magazine. I'm a front to back reader, but I made an exception to that rule by going directly to Rogers' column and reading it first. In a moment, you'll see why I felt so compelled to do that.

First, let's move back a few years. Mark Benjamin, with whom I attended grade school, walked around the world in the 1990s. He got a frost-bitten thumb in the Sahara while doing so! The insight he gained from his journey amazed me. Anyone who can travel the world, I mean really travel it up close, has a fascinating story to tell. Unfortunately, Mark didn't write a book about his adventures.

However, we all have an opportunity to read about another inquisitive mind making a journey "up close and personal" to 116 countries. Only this time, it's not Mark Benjamin walking. Nor is it Jim Rogers on a motorcycle (another amazing story, chronicled in The Investment Biker). This time, it's Jim Rogers with the beautiful Paige Parker, in a customized bright yellow Mercedes. And what a story they have to tell.

The Adventure Capitalist is a book you can read for entertainment or for education. You can read it for both, if you wish. One thing you cannot do with this book is easily set it down once you start reading it. Believe me, I tried.

On the adventure side, I was chewing my nails when troops from the Angolan Army stopped them at gunpoint and refused to let them go further. I won't spoil the story for you, but it was definitely exciting. And their trek across Siberia was chilling due to more than the weather. The account of Rogers' encounter with a Russian Mafia chief immediately brought to mind Robert Ludlum's thriller novels. Truth is often stranger than fiction, and in this case it's downright intriguing.

The real value of Adventure Capitalist to me is the insight. I found the book immensely informative. The combination of facts, figures, and logic impressed me, but the way Rogers put them together reminds me of what happens when those big lights go on at a football stadium-you can see things that you couldn't see before.

I now clearly understand which country will dominate the 21st century and why. I now know why the monetary policy of the USA (like that of most nations)is insane, not just unsound as I had previously described it.

And I now know what our insanely unsound monetary policy means for people all over the world, and how dire the consequences are becoming for the millions of folks in countries like Argentina. Even more, I can see past propaganda, such as the idea that a nation that downsized its navy from 200 aircraft carriers to 12 and ran out of missiles in Afghanistan (and again in Iraq) is a "military superpower."

The consequences of mismanagement, incompetence, and corruption at the highest levels of government (and it just rolls downhill from there) are readily apparent to one who, like Rogers, has seen the devastation firsthand-nearly everywhere. It wasn't that Rogers and Parker visited 116 countries. It was that they visited the people of 116 countries. They experienced the economies of those countries, ate the native food-including the grilled worms, and endured the native bureaucracies and absurdities. Some of their troubles made me laugh aloud, while others had me shaking my head in dismay.

But the book also brings hope. In the end, when I set it down, I could only smile.

What makes Rogers' observations and analysis so keen isn't his genius IQ-he never even alludes to that. (I have that information from another source. By the way, he and Mark Benjamin are both in Mensa-maybe traveling is a smart thing to do!). This is a guy who co-founded and ran the Quantum Fund. Over ten years, the portfolio gained more than 4,000 percent at a time when the S&P rose less than 50 percent. This is a ten-year track record, not some flash in the pan stroke of luck. He's got other impressive credentials (e.g., professor of finance and Columbia University Graduate School of Business).

But, there is another factor that plays a big role in making his analysis so accurate. Paige Parker, whose background is different from his, was his partner on that trip. As he chronicled the events and built his analysis, he did so under the watchful eye of someone who wasn't afraid to challenge his views. He had to make sure he got his facts right. And as you read this book, you cannot help but come to the conclusion that he did.

Yet, for all the adventure, all the insight, all the facts and figures, this book provides a deeply personal touch. The writing is at once food for thought and food for the soul. This book is a must read. But, don't ask to borrow my copy-it stays with me.

I want to see the movie, too.

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