A global journey of discovery for self and family

Monkey Dancing

A Father, Two Kids, and a Journey to the Ends of the Earth

Daniel Glick

PublicAffairs: 346 pp., $26

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Many parents may dream of pulling up roots for a while, bidding adios to regular work hours and kids’ school routines with their nightly homework torture, packing up the family, renting out the house and hitting the road to see the world: Australia. Bali. Borneo. Vietnam. Bangkok. Nepal. Amsterdam. All the fascinating places that could be explored as a family, foreign locales made tangible with exotic smells, tastes and sounds.

Former Newsweek correspondent Daniel Glick took this fantasy and made it come true. “ ‘How would you like,’ ” Glick asks his children in February 2001, using his “best game show do-you-want-what’s-behind-door-number-two announcer voice, ‘A Free Trip Around the World!’ ” Initially baffled by the offer, Kolya, 13, and Zoe, 9, would soon get on board, as long as their key provisions were allowed: a skateboard, Game Boys and a laptop computer with DVD capabilities. Glick’s engaging book, “Monkey Dancing” -- part memoir, part travel writing, part environmental study -- follows the three Glicks’ day-to-day thrill and turmoil as they make their way around globe and, in doing so, come to see the world they inhabit, as well as with each other, in a new light.

For Glick, the trip wasn’t just a lark. His wife of 15 years had left him abruptly the year before, moving 1,000 miles away, leaving him to his own devices as a full-time single father. Still dazed by that loss, he then watched as his beloved older brother Bob, 48, died from a rare male breast cancer. This commingled grief fueled his desire to show his children the world and its innumerable wonders, as he says, “before they were gone.” “Before they were gone” becomes Glick’s mantra for the journey, understood as a triple-entendre: He hopes to view with his children the planet’s amazing animals and environments before they’re further ruined by development and global climate changes; to spend time with his children while they’re still young; and lastly, to embrace his own life while it’s fully present. “[A]fter witnessing my brother’s untimely death ... I knew viscerally that I possessed no guarantees regarding how long any of us would be around.”

His rich narrative traces their five-month sojourn, a trip filled with wonder and awe, kids bickering and whining, uncomfortable lodgings combined with exotic foods, the hassles of travel balanced against the joys of discovery. Serving as a kind of ad hoc eco-tour guide, Glick undertakes specific environmental case studies to teach his children about the fragile condition of our planet and its inhabitants. “My kids, raised on flashes of music videos and DSL Internet downloads, had only the barest suburban inklings of the natural world that I clung to as my spiritual core. Perhaps I could help them make a deeper connection....”

Together, they look into the disintegration of coral reefs in Australia, skin diving in the healthy regions and examining where devastation is occurring and why. They visit an Orangutan Care Center in Borneo, where a small Los Angeles-based nonprofit group is trying to save the animal in the wild. The plight of a subspecies of the Javan rhino in Vietnam -- the “most endangered large mammal in Asia, if not the world,” -- is considered firsthand, as is the disappearing Bengal tiger in Nepal. Along the way, they stay in seedy hotels, witness appalling poverty, come to appreciate flush toilets and learn to make their way in a world quite different from the Colorado suburb they normally inhabit.

Bits of the children’s journal entries give readers a taste of the experience from Kolya and Zoe’s perspective, and although readers may disagree with some of Glick’s parenting choices along the way, we see clearly how huge an endeavor it is to travel around the world as a single father with two children.

Woven into the travel details, Glick writes of his marriage and the world trekking he’d undertaken with his wife when they were newlyweds, as well as his bewilderment at the end of that union. He recounts as well childhood journeys with his brother, and in a way, the trip becomes a homage to Bob. A bit of romantic tension enters when the author invites his new girlfriend to join the family for one leg of the journey.

The family is in Singapore on Sept. 11, 2001 when tragedy at home provides Glick with an unanticipated narrative thread. Dismayed to find himself halfway around the globe with his kids, he’s initially concerned about traveling as Americans in areas with significant Muslim populations. He briefly considers abandoning the journey before deciding to push fear aside and continue on.

Eventually, they return home, tired and safe, with expanded world horizons and deeper self-understanding. “Our ‘round-the-world journey