{"id":274,"date":"2021-12-06T13:30:36","date_gmt":"2021-12-06T21:30:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/travel\/?p=274"},"modified":"2021-12-06T13:30:38","modified_gmt":"2021-12-06T21:30:38","slug":"book-review-why-the-dutch-are-different","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/travel\/2021\/12\/06\/book-review-why-the-dutch-are-different\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Why the Dutch are Different"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Author Ben Coates is from the U.K., where he worked for the government as a speech writer for politicians in Parliament. Leaving that work behind, he traveled to the Caribbean, and there, on board a charter sailboat, he met a woman from the Netherlands. Many months later, on a different trip returning to the UK, he found himself stranded at the Schiphol airport with no place to stay and realized he still had her email address &#8211; and got in touch.  He notes he never resumed his flight back to the UK (and yes, they are still together years later).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<iframe style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&#038;OneJS=1&#038;Operation=GetAdHtml&#038;MarketPlace=US&#038;source=ss&#038;ref=as_ss_li_til&#038;ad_type=product_link&#038;tracking_id=commonsensevi-20&#038;language=en_US&#038;marketplace=amazon&#038;region=US&#038;placement=B014GBMMOA&#038;asins=B014GBMMOA&#038;linkId=13d4e6f2658e9a1ca50fcbfc0f0ac637&#038;show_border=true&#038;link_opens_in_new_window=true\"><\/iframe>\n\n\n\n<p> <em>(This is an affiliate marketing link. If a purchase is made, I may receive a sales commission at no cost to you.)<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>After living in the Netherlands for five years, he wrote this book, he notes, as sort of a &#8220;love letter&#8221; to the country he has come to adore. Through a series of travels, events and anecdotes, he documents life in the Netherlands today, but wraps it together with extensive historical context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In effect, this book gives insight into both contemporary life and culture and the history of the Dutch. You&#8217;ll learn that a surprising number of global brand names and products originate in the country, for example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Pilgrims of Mayflower fame (this is not really covered in this book), had left the UK and were living in the Netherlands &#8211; where they learned of key ideas about democracy, freedom of religion and more from the Dutch. After years living in Holland, they set sail for America &#8211; and proceeded to found the U.S. on principles they had learned from the Dutch. The Dutch impact is immense &#8211; famous names such as Wall Street and Broadway originated from the Dutch, for example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The text is an enjoyable and fun read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I have not traveled and have not been to the Netherlands so I cannot say if his view is accurate. However, the Netherlands are one of the countries I would like to visit, early in my hoped-for-future travels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Netherlands is a small country with a large impact on world history and contemporary life.  Ideas the Dutch promoted hundreds of years ago became central to the founding of the U.S., for example.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":276,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coldstreams.com\/travel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}