Reviving an old post because I REALLY think the book is great - I read it, laughed, cried. My teenager read it and the older kids are passing it around now - - a really GOOD read.

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Dan Glick was a Newsweek reporter who covered the Ramsey case from the beginning - - I think of him as a friend.

He just sent this announcement which I want to share with all of you.

I am pleased to announce the birth my second book, entitled Monkey Dancing: A Father, Two Kids, and a Journey to the Ends of the Earth, which will officially be published on May 27 by PublicAffairs. Monkey Dancing is a chronicle of a half-year, around-the-world journey I took with my two children after their mother and I divorced, she moved out of state to live with her new girlfriend, and my older brother Bob died of breast cancer.

Whew is right.

With my life in unconditional disarray, I chose to embark on my odyssey into single fatherhood in an admittedly unusual way: by taking my kids to python-infested jungles in Borneo searching for wild orangutans; into remote mountains in Vietnam tracking Javan rhinos; and to the northern edge of the Gangeatic plains stalking Bengal tigers. I wanted to show my 13-year old son and 9-year old daughter this planet’s amazing animals and extraordinary landscapes before overpopulation, poverty, global climate change, pollution, and development maimed or destroyed them. I knew they would become fledglings too soon, and I wanted to stamp an indelible shared memory on all of us. Launching this extraordinary journey together seemed like a much better idea than staying home and watching Grounded for Life. Perhaps, I thought, we could forge a new family of three, using adventure as our crucible.

We did, and lived to tell about it in Monkey Dancing.

Book promotion is a draining and daunting prospect, so I unabashedly ask your help spreading the Monkey Dancing word, and hereby deputize you all as authorized publicists. Tell people about the book, forward this email, show the unbroken circle the way to my website (http://www.danielglick.net), buy the book as a gift for your father and one for yourself. The website has links to purchase books at your favorite cyber-bookstore, as well as information about the Monkey Tour -- which as of now includes Boulder (6/3),Chicago (6/7), the San Francisco Bay Area (6/8 and 6/14), Portland (6/9), Seattle (6/11 and 6/13), Denver (6/26), Sun Valley (6/28), and Los Angeles (7/30). If you have people in any of these places, please alert them to the event in question.

Hopefully, Monkey Dancing will not disappoint. Kirkus Reviews summed it up as a "Big-hearted, pleasingly fitful narrative of the kind of journey that scours the soul of its karmic gunk," which is an awfully nice thing for a book trade publication to say. Publishers Weekly wrote in a starred review that "This unusual, superbly written and deeply human story…is a consistently rewarding odyssey." I’ll take that as well. And USA Today, that arbiter of American taste, picked Monkey Dancing for its summer recommended reading list.

Here’s how Monkey Dancing begins:

In the middle of the night, after my daughter Zoe woke me for the third time because she was afraid of the snakes, I wondered, not for the first time, whether this trip had really been such an inspired idea. Earlier, Zoe had been complaining about leeches, and before that mosquitoes, and it dawned on me that unless you were raised in the rainforest, accustomed to strangler figs and spiders the size of gerbils, Borneo was a pretty forbidding environment. For a nine-year old girl reared in suburban Colorado, this place looked downright menacing. My thirteen-year old son Kolya, also awakened by his sister, didn’t help things when he authoritatively informed Zoe that since she was the smallest mammal among us, any predator would obviously eat her first.

Dan is a great guy - - wonderful father - - and the book promises to be a fun read. I hope others will buy it - - I know I will.