Financier Rogers retired at 37 and motorcycled around the world, turning the trip into the book Investment Biker, a hybrid of business advice and travelogue. That journey, however, failed to squelch his wanderlust. Instead of enjoying his sedate life teaching finance, Rogers decided to take his fiancée and a souped-up Mercedes on a frighteningly intense road trip: three years, 116 countries and 152,000 miles. Like the car that plowed through snow, mud, sand and highways on every continent, Rogers's memoir of the journey is its own breed. Although Rogers writes, far too briefly, of life-changing events like getting married and hearing of his father's death, the book has an uncommon level of detachment. Also, even though Rogers shares investment advice and observations about the planet's political economies, his thoughts are too general to serve as business lessons. The result is an adventure tale without heart and a finance book without teeth. Rogers tries to make up for this by describing experiences like eating fried silkworms and watching prostitutes caught in the world's sex trade. Mainly, though, he chronicles prosaic details, like taking car ferries and talking to border guards, and then riffs on politics, money, immigration and culture.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Rogers, a Wall Street success story who has been called "The Indiana Jones of Finance," once circled the planet on a motorcycle, which landed him in The Guinness Book of World Records and resulted in his first book, Investment Biker (1994). In 1999 he set out on another world-record drive around the world in a custom-built yellow Mercedes convertible with his fiancee, Paige Parker. Starting out in Iceland, the trip took three years and encompassed 116 countries, many of which are rarely visited, in a continuous swath across Europe, the former Soviet Republic, China, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. No one had ever driven overland following these routes, a total of 152,000 miles, another Guinness world record. Rogers' insightful commentary on the political and historical topography of these diverse countries cuts through stereotypes to give us a glimpse of the world the way it really is, for better or worse. This is a gutsy travelogue adventure from a guy who shoots straight from the hip, and it really hits the mark. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“My success in the market has been predicated on viewing
the world from a different perspective.”—Jim Rogers, “the Indiana Jones of finance” (Time magazine)
From the Inside Flap
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 Back Cover
“My success in the market has been predicated on viewing
the world from a different perspective.”—Jim Rogers, “the Indiana Jones of finance” (Time magazine)
About the Author
Born in 1942, Jim Rogers had his first job at age five, picking up bottles at baseball games. Winning a scholarship to Yale, Rogers was coxswain on the crew. Upon graduation, he attended Balliol College at Oxford. After a stint in the army, he began work on Wall Street. He cofounded the Quantum Fund, a global-investment partnership. During the next ten years, the portfolio gained more than 4,000 percent, while the S&P rose less than 50 percent. Rogers then decided to retire—at age thirty-seven—but he did not remain idle.
Continuing to manage his own portfolio, Rogers served as a professor of finance at the Columbia Univer-sity Graduate School of Business and as moderator of The Dreyfus Roundtable on WCBS and The Profit Motive on FNN. At the same time, he laid the groundwork for his lifelong dream, an around-the-world motorcycle trip: more than 100,000 miles across six continents. That journey became the subject of Rogers’s first book, Investment Biker (1994), now available from Random House Trade Paperbacks.
While laying plans for his Millennium Adventure 1999–2001, he continued as a media commentator at Worth, CNBC, et al., and as a sometime professor.
He now contributes to Fox News, Worth, and others as he and Paige eagerly await their first child.
He can be reached at www.jimrogers.com.
