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A Rough Guide to the Dark Side
Ever dreamed of changing the world? Daniel Simpson shows how not to do it. His memoir charts a gonzo career at The New York Times.
Ambitious and idealistic, he was hired to report on the Balkans but quit within months, freaked out by his editor's zeal for starting wars. Disillusioned, Daniel went native in Belgrade. Together with the charismatic G, who'd appeared one night in lavish puffs of dope smoke, he decided to organize Serbia's version of Woodstock: a festival on an island in the Danube.
Music could revolutionize the country. It was run by a wartime mafia, and most young people dreamed of leaving. But what if they made it Ibiza crossed with Glastonbury? To fund this transition, they hustled Daniel's contacts, but shady local businessmen had other ideas. Mr Big muscled in, and embroiled them with his henchmen.
Why do good intentions go awry? With brutally honest humor, Daniel recounts his journey to the edge, and a desperate drug-fuelled quest for the truth. A Rough Guide To The Dark Side is a real-life trip through Balkan organized crime. More irreverent than McMafia, it has the vicarious kicks of Mr Nice and Shantaram, in the travelogue style of Bill Bryson or Tony Hawks, but with added bile and an overdose of hubris.
Ambitious and idealistic, he was hired to report on the Balkans but quit within months, freaked out by his editor's zeal for starting wars. Disillusioned, Daniel went native in Belgrade. Together with the charismatic G, who'd appeared one night in lavish puffs of dope smoke, he decided to organize Serbia's version of Woodstock: a festival on an island in the Danube.
Music could revolutionize the country. It was run by a wartime mafia, and most young people dreamed of leaving. But what if they made it Ibiza crossed with Glastonbury? To fund this transition, they hustled Daniel's contacts, but shady local businessmen had other ideas. Mr Big muscled in, and embroiled them with his henchmen.
Why do good intentions go awry? With brutally honest humor, Daniel recounts his journey to the edge, and a desperate drug-fuelled quest for the truth. A Rough Guide To The Dark Side is a real-life trip through Balkan organized crime. More irreverent than McMafia, it has the vicarious kicks of Mr Nice and Shantaram, in the travelogue style of Bill Bryson or Tony Hawks, but with added bile and an overdose of hubris.
- GenresNonfiction
252 pages, Paperback
First published August 16, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 28, 2013
Serbia in the years after the wars of the Yugoslav breakup was a wilderness zone of corruption and criminal networks that had thrived during the conflict and carried on in business afterwards. The "radical" and "conservative" political options were just 2 sides of a charade when power was really with the men who still had the guns and the drug money. So the memoirs of the old New York Times reporter who covered the region ought to a fascinating journey through what was a failing state.
Unfortunately, Simpson is a Jon Ronson wannabe who reckons himself as a Hunter Thompson wannabe, but drifts near to Danny Wallace at times, and the spirit of Toby Young haunts the text as a possible future. A gap-year-in-India wanker with standard-issue boring drugs stories that no one should have to listen to outside a Freshers Week party, he fumbles the narrative in clattering cliches, rambling incoherence, and (mercifully not too frequent) swerves in to self-pitying introspection in which we merely get to see the hollowness within. He's a slacker squandering the opportunity to do something worthwhile, and gets a nasty surprise when his brief becomes front-page news. The extent to which he falls short of his hero is indicated that he has to resort to quoting the master when describing his final visit to the NYT offices. He's clearly a patsy in the business of setting up a summer festival, and it's a shocker that he didn't see the inevitable rip-off coming, which shows how useless a correspondent he's been.
There is interesting material here about how "rave music" had been thoroughly assimilated in to the high-price showbiz booking agency universe 10 years after it started; about the bureaucratic nonsense in festival organisation and the swarms of parasites getting their cut; and we do get some feel of the no-good-guys political reality, and its distance from Western fantasies about brave "reformers". But it all needs editing, and you have to wonder how it ended up on Zero Books rather than in the mainstream Tragic Life Stories section of W.H.Smiths. I would guess that Simon & Schuster would have demanded the excision of the pretentious ramblings in the final "Revelation" chapter, amongst other changes. This is an occasion where The Man is entirely correct, and the kids should just try to do an honest days work, even if it's only picture-captioning for a Homes & Garden supplement.
Unfortunately, Simpson is a Jon Ronson wannabe who reckons himself as a Hunter Thompson wannabe, but drifts near to Danny Wallace at times, and the spirit of Toby Young haunts the text as a possible future. A gap-year-in-India wanker with standard-issue boring drugs stories that no one should have to listen to outside a Freshers Week party, he fumbles the narrative in clattering cliches, rambling incoherence, and (mercifully not too frequent) swerves in to self-pitying introspection in which we merely get to see the hollowness within. He's a slacker squandering the opportunity to do something worthwhile, and gets a nasty surprise when his brief becomes front-page news. The extent to which he falls short of his hero is indicated that he has to resort to quoting the master when describing his final visit to the NYT offices. He's clearly a patsy in the business of setting up a summer festival, and it's a shocker that he didn't see the inevitable rip-off coming, which shows how useless a correspondent he's been.
There is interesting material here about how "rave music" had been thoroughly assimilated in to the high-price showbiz booking agency universe 10 years after it started; about the bureaucratic nonsense in festival organisation and the swarms of parasites getting their cut; and we do get some feel of the no-good-guys political reality, and its distance from Western fantasies about brave "reformers". But it all needs editing, and you have to wonder how it ended up on Zero Books rather than in the mainstream Tragic Life Stories section of W.H.Smiths. I would guess that Simon & Schuster would have demanded the excision of the pretentious ramblings in the final "Revelation" chapter, amongst other changes. This is an occasion where The Man is entirely correct, and the kids should just try to do an honest days work, even if it's only picture-captioning for a Homes & Garden supplement.
July 27, 2012
Here's an interview I did with the author, from:
http://www.nytexaminer.com/2012/07/th...
MOST JOURNALISTS working in the mainstream media would kill to get one of their stories on the front page of the New York Times. But when that happened to the newspaper's own Balkans correspondent in 2003, he was less than thrilled.
Daniel Simpson had already resigned in disgust at the Times' cheerleading for war, and he was merely serving out the time until his resignation became official. He had reached what he calls "a mirrored ceiling" in his career. The phrase--in Simpson's recently published gonzo memoir A Rough Guide To The Dark Side--conjures up an image of the journalist taking a long, hard look at himself before breaking through the mirror. But the story is, like most stories in Simpson's life, a little more complicated than it first appears.
"I was alluding to the warped world beyond, through Lewis Carroll's looking glass, while also trying to capture how I felt," he said in an interview. "It only seemed possible to rise higher at the Times if I bought their illusions, and having seen through them, this would have been consciously corrupt.
"Until that point, I'd been unconscious of cooption as a journalist--like most of my peers. But as my eyes lost their scales, I saw my own flaws more clearly, and freaked out. It wasn't a question of breaking through, more of running as fast as I could in the opposite direction, which of course led in time to me realizing I'd been wrong: there's no escape from being oneself, as the addict in me fantasized. And that was when the long, hard look at who I was began in earnest, resulting in the book.
Simpson's book charts his journey from private schoolboy and Oxbridge graduate to music festival organizer and drug smuggler, with his promising start as a corporate journalist thrown by the wayside. It ends with Simpson's drug addiction spiraling into another dimension.
"The previous draft of the final chapter was five times as long, and it was largely cut and pasted from my notebooks," says Simpson. "I was trying to reflect what happened as I experienced it, which meant trying to make psychosis come to life. So I sat down and wrote and wrote until all my pens ran out of ink. At the time, I was sure this work would be a masterpiece. Upon rereading--and after seeing a shrink--it clearly wasn't."
Even so, the ideas that inspired him shaped the book. "The structure is a rip-off of Dante's Inferno, descending deeper into hell, and a series of Faustian pacts define the plot," he explains.
UNLIKE MOST mainstream media journalists, Simpson is deeply introspective, constantly questioning the way he sees the world and himself. His complex character, coupled with the complicated characteristics of the Balkans, did not make for ideal New York Times copy.
"Covering the Balkans for the New York Times consisted of monitoring whether The Serbs had agreed they were Bad Guys," reads one passage in the book. "Trying to explain why they hadn't, or how 'we' made the opposite more likely, was tantamount to 'understanding' suicide bombers. And in the fog of War On Terror, this wasn't on, especially not at a paper boasting 'All The News That's Fit To Print.'"
Simpson's book certainly won't rebuild any of the bridges he has burned with the corporate media--and when asked about the industry, he is scathing. "There's something about the general smugness in most newsrooms that's insufferable," he explains. "All that puffed up self-contented self-importance, as if 'telling the story' didn't require you to ask whose agenda you might further in the process, and whether you might have one yourself. When I tried to discuss that sort of thing, people said I was biased or cynical or worse. I found that quite exasperating."
Simpson's natural allies would seem to be media critics, but his consistently critical nature doesn't always make him an easy bedfellow. In 2004, he approached the editors of the British watchdog website Media Lens to suggest they collaborate on something more constructive than critique: original reporting. "We should be skeptical of binary analysis, like corporate bad, independent good, especially when the former does most of the reporting that the latter reinterprets," he explains.
But Simpson's discussions with Media Lens petered out. They took issue with his questioning of everything, and questioned his intentions, which he thinks were unrealistic. "As with my experience with the Times, it says as much about my own shortcomings as theirs," he says. "I got lost in trying to find the perfect answer, whereas they were getting on with something flawed."
He also once got into an 8,500-word argument with world-renowned media critic Noam Chomsky over Chomsky's support for a writer who denied some Balkan war crimes. But Simpson now questions the "merits of fixating on fractions of anyone's work, however important it is to be accurate."
Sometimes he can even seem conflicted, possibly rueful, about leaving the Times in the first place, if only to help his other work get published. He now pays the bills with a low-profile job in investment research, while dabbling in activism. He once produced a fake Financial Times, but admits to "a long-standing pattern of short-term commitment to anything," until he saved up for a six-month break to write his book.
"It was much the same with brief flirtations with independent media, which seemed as dogmatic as the mainstream media world I'd left," he says. "More importantly, most alternatives weren't very interested in reporting--or at least understanding what it meant. They'd conflated it with commentary, which is fine, if you acknowledge that's the goal."
Some may see Simpson as simply exhausting, but he has a saving grace. A Rough Guide To The Dark Side is packed with the kind of uncontrived humor that will leave readers laughing out loud, while wondering, "Hang on, how did he do that?"
The author is planning a speaking tour of the U.S. to launch his book. Maybe comedy will prove his true calling.
http://www.nytexaminer.com/2012/07/th...
MOST JOURNALISTS working in the mainstream media would kill to get one of their stories on the front page of the New York Times. But when that happened to the newspaper's own Balkans correspondent in 2003, he was less than thrilled.
Daniel Simpson had already resigned in disgust at the Times' cheerleading for war, and he was merely serving out the time until his resignation became official. He had reached what he calls "a mirrored ceiling" in his career. The phrase--in Simpson's recently published gonzo memoir A Rough Guide To The Dark Side--conjures up an image of the journalist taking a long, hard look at himself before breaking through the mirror. But the story is, like most stories in Simpson's life, a little more complicated than it first appears.
"I was alluding to the warped world beyond, through Lewis Carroll's looking glass, while also trying to capture how I felt," he said in an interview. "It only seemed possible to rise higher at the Times if I bought their illusions, and having seen through them, this would have been consciously corrupt.
"Until that point, I'd been unconscious of cooption as a journalist--like most of my peers. But as my eyes lost their scales, I saw my own flaws more clearly, and freaked out. It wasn't a question of breaking through, more of running as fast as I could in the opposite direction, which of course led in time to me realizing I'd been wrong: there's no escape from being oneself, as the addict in me fantasized. And that was when the long, hard look at who I was began in earnest, resulting in the book.
Simpson's book charts his journey from private schoolboy and Oxbridge graduate to music festival organizer and drug smuggler, with his promising start as a corporate journalist thrown by the wayside. It ends with Simpson's drug addiction spiraling into another dimension.
"The previous draft of the final chapter was five times as long, and it was largely cut and pasted from my notebooks," says Simpson. "I was trying to reflect what happened as I experienced it, which meant trying to make psychosis come to life. So I sat down and wrote and wrote until all my pens ran out of ink. At the time, I was sure this work would be a masterpiece. Upon rereading--and after seeing a shrink--it clearly wasn't."
Even so, the ideas that inspired him shaped the book. "The structure is a rip-off of Dante's Inferno, descending deeper into hell, and a series of Faustian pacts define the plot," he explains.
UNLIKE MOST mainstream media journalists, Simpson is deeply introspective, constantly questioning the way he sees the world and himself. His complex character, coupled with the complicated characteristics of the Balkans, did not make for ideal New York Times copy.
"Covering the Balkans for the New York Times consisted of monitoring whether The Serbs had agreed they were Bad Guys," reads one passage in the book. "Trying to explain why they hadn't, or how 'we' made the opposite more likely, was tantamount to 'understanding' suicide bombers. And in the fog of War On Terror, this wasn't on, especially not at a paper boasting 'All The News That's Fit To Print.'"
Simpson's book certainly won't rebuild any of the bridges he has burned with the corporate media--and when asked about the industry, he is scathing. "There's something about the general smugness in most newsrooms that's insufferable," he explains. "All that puffed up self-contented self-importance, as if 'telling the story' didn't require you to ask whose agenda you might further in the process, and whether you might have one yourself. When I tried to discuss that sort of thing, people said I was biased or cynical or worse. I found that quite exasperating."
Simpson's natural allies would seem to be media critics, but his consistently critical nature doesn't always make him an easy bedfellow. In 2004, he approached the editors of the British watchdog website Media Lens to suggest they collaborate on something more constructive than critique: original reporting. "We should be skeptical of binary analysis, like corporate bad, independent good, especially when the former does most of the reporting that the latter reinterprets," he explains.
But Simpson's discussions with Media Lens petered out. They took issue with his questioning of everything, and questioned his intentions, which he thinks were unrealistic. "As with my experience with the Times, it says as much about my own shortcomings as theirs," he says. "I got lost in trying to find the perfect answer, whereas they were getting on with something flawed."
He also once got into an 8,500-word argument with world-renowned media critic Noam Chomsky over Chomsky's support for a writer who denied some Balkan war crimes. But Simpson now questions the "merits of fixating on fractions of anyone's work, however important it is to be accurate."
Sometimes he can even seem conflicted, possibly rueful, about leaving the Times in the first place, if only to help his other work get published. He now pays the bills with a low-profile job in investment research, while dabbling in activism. He once produced a fake Financial Times, but admits to "a long-standing pattern of short-term commitment to anything," until he saved up for a six-month break to write his book.
"It was much the same with brief flirtations with independent media, which seemed as dogmatic as the mainstream media world I'd left," he says. "More importantly, most alternatives weren't very interested in reporting--or at least understanding what it meant. They'd conflated it with commentary, which is fine, if you acknowledge that's the goal."
Some may see Simpson as simply exhausting, but he has a saving grace. A Rough Guide To The Dark Side is packed with the kind of uncontrived humor that will leave readers laughing out loud, while wondering, "Hang on, how did he do that?"
The author is planning a speaking tour of the U.S. to launch his book. Maybe comedy will prove his true calling.
August 21, 2012
GONZO ENGLISHMAN PARACHUTES INTO BALKANS
By Ivan G. Goldman
Author Simpson, an Englishman who appeared to be on a charmed course, read history at Cambridge and moved somewhat effortlessly on to Reuters and then the New York Times, where his life took a gonzo detour. The Times assigned him to the Balkans in 2003. By then the wars and massacres had stopped and the usual medieval feuds, quarrels, assassinations, malicious plots, and double-crosses had resumed. He and Times editors very quickly ran into disagreements on how all this should be covered, and he began disengaging from his journalistic mission. Smoking a lot of hash and cannabis, Simpson, for reasons that are never made clear, decided instead to put together a rock festival in Serbia. It didn’t quite work out the way he’d planned. That’s not a spoiler, by the way. The fact that his festival bombed, a victim of the endemic corruption all around him, is revealed in a description of the contents that appears even before the title page.
Simpson’s reasons for quitting the Times are spelled out with immaculate skill. I found it the most compelling part of his distinctive, candid memoir. This was when the Bush-Cheney Administration was gearing up to invade Iraq and clear it of all those weapons of mass destruction so we could all be safe. It’s also while the Times, along with most of the self-castrated U.S. media, failed to ask the right questions. But Simpson’s employer, a key relay switch along the misinformation circuit, was among the more grievous media malefactors, and its failures were arguably the most damaging because the administration fed lies and faulty suppositions to the Times. The Paper of Record gobbled them up, and Administration deceivers then cited the Times as a source for their own falsehoods. Even the paper’s Balkans correspondent was called upon to become part of this closed circle of stupidity and betrayal. Simpson ably relates from the inside how Times editors were hoodwinked into asking so many wrong questions and ordering up stories that -- given their foolish premise -- could only result in erroneous, misleading crap. He names names, too. These pages should be mined by historians, but unfortunately the book has no index, an indication that the publisher didn’t understand the significance of the manuscript. Too bad.
When memoirists admit to their stupidities and atrocities they are more credible, and Simpson owns up to some doozies. After giving notice to his employer he cribbed sentences word for word from wire services and pasted them into his dispatches. It’s an amazing confession, equivalent to a politician going on YouTube to describe his intercourse with a reptile. Simpson was clearly out to grind his bridges into dust after he burned them.
But what I never understood was why he went from the Times to this rock festival business, particularly since he got the idea from a Serb slickster he calls “G,” a blowhard who in his twisty, crazy English constantly explains how the world works. Here’s a relatively representative sample of his pronouncements: “Everyone has inside him wolf and lamb, and dancing helps us balance out those forces.” G sounds like the kind of con artist who goes around asking strangers for carfare to get to a nonexistent job interview. Yet Simpson makes G his business partner. Given language and cultural barriers, much of what happens around Simpson is related through this Rasputin-like schemer. And after everything’s fallen apart Simpson, somewhat endearingly, asks G the identity of those who ripped “them” off, apparently not suspecting that G himself was one of the buzzards feasting on the author’s entrails. Even now Simpson doesn’t seem to suspect him of a double-cross. Evidently they don’t teach you about people like G at Cambridge. Simpson should have spent a couple years at my high school in Chicago. He might have saved himself a lot of heartache later on.
Anyway, the author’s fantasy, fed by G’s pompous babble, was to create a rock festival on an island in the Danube that would somehow usher Belgrade and perhaps all the Balkan territories into a heavenly place of peace, love and kindness. So we end up with a tale by a drug-fueled protagonist who takes on an impossible mission, all the while surrounded by fear, loathing, and generic weirdness. Sound familiar? Like Hunter Thompson perhaps? Lots of writers pay homage to Thompson in their work, which is fine. Trouble is, though Hunter made his stuff look easy, it isn’t. Also, Hunter was self-destructive, but unlike Simpson, he was never a chump. When reading Thompson you don’t care whether he fulfilled whatever mission he had on the ground in Las Vegas or Washington or wherever his loony assignment took him. The fun was in the journey. But when Simpson tells us even before the book begins that this is a head-long dive into concrete, it somehow deflates the tale of dramatic tension. Besides, it's not always easy to care about the fate of the doomed festival. Thompson’s writings were often bereft of dramatic tension too, but it didn’t seem to matter. Dark Side is a wild ride, all right, but at times it gives us too much time to think.
Goldman’s latest novel Isaac: A Modern Fable was released in April by the Permanent Press.
By Ivan G. Goldman
Author Simpson, an Englishman who appeared to be on a charmed course, read history at Cambridge and moved somewhat effortlessly on to Reuters and then the New York Times, where his life took a gonzo detour. The Times assigned him to the Balkans in 2003. By then the wars and massacres had stopped and the usual medieval feuds, quarrels, assassinations, malicious plots, and double-crosses had resumed. He and Times editors very quickly ran into disagreements on how all this should be covered, and he began disengaging from his journalistic mission. Smoking a lot of hash and cannabis, Simpson, for reasons that are never made clear, decided instead to put together a rock festival in Serbia. It didn’t quite work out the way he’d planned. That’s not a spoiler, by the way. The fact that his festival bombed, a victim of the endemic corruption all around him, is revealed in a description of the contents that appears even before the title page.
Simpson’s reasons for quitting the Times are spelled out with immaculate skill. I found it the most compelling part of his distinctive, candid memoir. This was when the Bush-Cheney Administration was gearing up to invade Iraq and clear it of all those weapons of mass destruction so we could all be safe. It’s also while the Times, along with most of the self-castrated U.S. media, failed to ask the right questions. But Simpson’s employer, a key relay switch along the misinformation circuit, was among the more grievous media malefactors, and its failures were arguably the most damaging because the administration fed lies and faulty suppositions to the Times. The Paper of Record gobbled them up, and Administration deceivers then cited the Times as a source for their own falsehoods. Even the paper’s Balkans correspondent was called upon to become part of this closed circle of stupidity and betrayal. Simpson ably relates from the inside how Times editors were hoodwinked into asking so many wrong questions and ordering up stories that -- given their foolish premise -- could only result in erroneous, misleading crap. He names names, too. These pages should be mined by historians, but unfortunately the book has no index, an indication that the publisher didn’t understand the significance of the manuscript. Too bad.
When memoirists admit to their stupidities and atrocities they are more credible, and Simpson owns up to some doozies. After giving notice to his employer he cribbed sentences word for word from wire services and pasted them into his dispatches. It’s an amazing confession, equivalent to a politician going on YouTube to describe his intercourse with a reptile. Simpson was clearly out to grind his bridges into dust after he burned them.
But what I never understood was why he went from the Times to this rock festival business, particularly since he got the idea from a Serb slickster he calls “G,” a blowhard who in his twisty, crazy English constantly explains how the world works. Here’s a relatively representative sample of his pronouncements: “Everyone has inside him wolf and lamb, and dancing helps us balance out those forces.” G sounds like the kind of con artist who goes around asking strangers for carfare to get to a nonexistent job interview. Yet Simpson makes G his business partner. Given language and cultural barriers, much of what happens around Simpson is related through this Rasputin-like schemer. And after everything’s fallen apart Simpson, somewhat endearingly, asks G the identity of those who ripped “them” off, apparently not suspecting that G himself was one of the buzzards feasting on the author’s entrails. Even now Simpson doesn’t seem to suspect him of a double-cross. Evidently they don’t teach you about people like G at Cambridge. Simpson should have spent a couple years at my high school in Chicago. He might have saved himself a lot of heartache later on.
Anyway, the author’s fantasy, fed by G’s pompous babble, was to create a rock festival on an island in the Danube that would somehow usher Belgrade and perhaps all the Balkan territories into a heavenly place of peace, love and kindness. So we end up with a tale by a drug-fueled protagonist who takes on an impossible mission, all the while surrounded by fear, loathing, and generic weirdness. Sound familiar? Like Hunter Thompson perhaps? Lots of writers pay homage to Thompson in their work, which is fine. Trouble is, though Hunter made his stuff look easy, it isn’t. Also, Hunter was self-destructive, but unlike Simpson, he was never a chump. When reading Thompson you don’t care whether he fulfilled whatever mission he had on the ground in Las Vegas or Washington or wherever his loony assignment took him. The fun was in the journey. But when Simpson tells us even before the book begins that this is a head-long dive into concrete, it somehow deflates the tale of dramatic tension. Besides, it's not always easy to care about the fate of the doomed festival. Thompson’s writings were often bereft of dramatic tension too, but it didn’t seem to matter. Dark Side is a wild ride, all right, but at times it gives us too much time to think.
Goldman’s latest novel Isaac: A Modern Fable was released in April by the Permanent Press.
June 7, 2013
Rough Guide to The Dark Side is a perfect title for Daniel Simpson's account of his adventures in Serbia shortly after the end of the Balkan wars -- after all, it was a hell of trip. He did what few people in his position would do. He quit his job at one of the world's top newspapers, abandoning the promise of an illustrious career because he no longer had faith in his employer. He chose freedom. What followed was a quest for a new identity, by organizing a rock festival. Did he find it? Yes he did. Not as a festival manager, but as a consummate writer buzzing with restless talent. A heady hash haze lingers over parts of this book but his prose punches through it on every page, describing with sparse, intense clarity his increasingly desperate struggle to arrange a gigantic music event in a country governed by a cabale of corrupt politicians and shady militiamen. It's an entertaining, thought-provoking read not just for music and dope fans but for the silent majority of us who yearn to ditch the day job and follow our instincts, for better or worse. Simpson took a risk and has come out on top with this work, which is worth more than a lifetime of slavish bylines -- however grand the masthead. I'm looking forward to his next one.
March 5, 2013
The Rough Guide to the Dark Side actually deserves three stars as a book. It was just the wrong book for me.
These are the memoirs of an ex NYT reporter who ends up trying to organize a festival (ECHO) in Belgrade, Serbia. It is filled with the reality of the Balkans, organizing a festival in general and in Serbia in particular as well as information on all the dope that can be found in Eastern Europe.
The information on the Balkans is really interesting. The way the creation of the festival is depicted is also good. The characters are fine. Too much is happening without many explanations and that is where the book loses steam. There is a lack of concentration on one topic - but then again, this is not fiction.
Still, it would have been an even better read if the book had been structured in advance of writing it and there had been less conversations and some more explanations.
These are the memoirs of an ex NYT reporter who ends up trying to organize a festival (ECHO) in Belgrade, Serbia. It is filled with the reality of the Balkans, organizing a festival in general and in Serbia in particular as well as information on all the dope that can be found in Eastern Europe.
The information on the Balkans is really interesting. The way the creation of the festival is depicted is also good. The characters are fine. Too much is happening without many explanations and that is where the book loses steam. There is a lack of concentration on one topic - but then again, this is not fiction.
Still, it would have been an even better read if the book had been structured in advance of writing it and there had been less conversations and some more explanations.
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