Divorce is never easy. It rocks the familial infrastructure and often shatters the foundation. Daniel Glick's divorce was harder still on his family. In what he terms "a thoroughly epic midlife crisis," his wife moves a thousand miles away from their Colorado home to live with her female lover, leaving Glick to raise his 9 year old daughter and 13 year old son completely solo. A year later - exactly a year later which Glick calls a "perverse cosmic joke" - cancer claims the life of his older brother.

The dual tragedies instill Daniel Glick with a hyper-awareness of the tenuous nature of existence. In a moment of paternal grace, he decides to take his son and daughter on a round-the-globe journey to re-forge the metal of their family while simultaneously exposing the kids to the world's rapidly disappearing natural wonders. "Monkey Dancing" is the story of that journey.

Early in life, Dan Glick proved Kerouacian in nature. At 17, he dropped out of college to hitchhike and ride freight trains back and forth across Canada. At 19, he dropped out again, this time for a European sojourn during which he traveled as a migrant farm worker. His honeymoon itself turned into a three year Asian odyssey, and now he must impart this love of the world and road to his children, Zoe and Kolya, umbilically tied to their Gameboys and their DVD-movies.

It is a healing and wondrous journey. Zoe and Kolya are awed from the start in Australia where they see a rare Cassowary in the wild, dive the Great Barrier Reef, and take a five-day walkabout across the world's largest oceanic island national park. From Australia the trio travels in Indonesia and Malaysia, and further into Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. They spend time in Nepal before heading off for comfortable Western European locales, finally returning to the states just two months post-9/11. Along the way, they are tutored in the havoc that man has played upon the environment, discover a world of cultures foreign to their own, and reinvent their family story in a wealth of shared experience.

Daniel Glick is a freelance writer for a number of periodicals. His re-telling of his family's epic sojourn betrays this in its journalistic attention to detail. Along the way, we are privy to the same historical, cultural, and ecological lessons he imparts to his kids. In Australia, we meet the Crown of Thorns Starfish (COTS) currently devouring the Great Barrier Reef; in Bali, we learn that monkeys are believed to be descended from the fabled monkey warrior, Hanuman, and consequently hold a certain divine status there; and in Borneo, we meet the Orangutan or "person of the forest," one of the world's most endangered primates.

"The Sardine Eater," as Dan Glick calls his itinerant self, brings us into a healing journey during which he and his children rediscover each other and reawaken the ties between them. In the wake of their own loss, and in his attempt to impart his conservationist values to his children, he leads the reader on a world tour of global loss, thus sparking conversation about our role in the global community. Towards the close of their trek, Glick quotes John F. Kennedy's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" ("I am from a citizen of Berlin") speech, in which he expresses solidarity with the people of East Berlin, and the French Le Monde's "We are all New Yorkers" emotional reprise after 9/11, amending the statements globally with his own: "We are all Earthlings."

If only more of us felt that way.