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Title: A potentially interesting but a flawed and failed book
Review: The title's second line "a private voyage" promises to add depth and context to an already interesting premise for this book. Regrettably, it only serves to degrade, diminish, and ultimately destroys the value and joy in reading this book. In retrospect, it's better to take a pass and go to another book.The author's political and social views that are so arrogant, corrosive, and over-bearing that they all but wash out the other values of this book, which come from his observations of people and places while sailing around the British Isles. The former are unfortunately painted in primary colors, while the latter are done in pastels.The balance in this book between the interesting, nuanced observations and the ham-handed political critiques is so skewed as to make this work not worth the effort to sort through. It's as if one has to sift through pounds of political debris to find an ounce of interesting observational insight.It's not worth it.
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