A quirky little book about a quirky little country. You learn about cheese sandwiches and why the Dutch are so forward and why the heck all that orange. Good fun. ( )

There are interesting parts, and some of the history is reasonably presented, but Coates insists on inserting inane observations of his own. He prides himself on his integration (Look! I bought a bicycle!), but unfortunately, after having lived in the country for nearly five years, he still lacks a basic understanding of many aspects of life. Worse, he ridicules some things he doesn't understand. And worst of all, he cites numbers and statistics without sources.

And this is where the book really falls flat. There are too many inaccuracies and flat-out wrong statements to take it seriously. Many of the statistics quoted are right-wing nutcase scare stories. Given Coates's history as a hack writer for conservative British politicians, perhaps one ought to forgive his unfamiliarity with objective truth.

Just one example, from page 266: no, Ben, Amsterdam was not the fourth "most murderous" metropolis in Europe in 2012, as fifteen seconds on Google would have told you.

I started reading this with interest and sympathy, but ended doing so in annoyance and anger. Shame. ( )

When my best friend of almost 30 (gasp!) years and I were at university, she met a Dutchman who was spending a year studying abroad. In the way of such things, she married him and moved to the Netherlands. It took me about 5 years to get over that curiously American reluctance to travel overseas (so decadent!) to see her (time warp: that first non-stop round-trip ticket on KLM was $250), but once I did I was hooked and she was stuck with my not-infrequent visits until my move to Australia, where the sheer number of hours involved put a damper on my spontaneous visits.

Maybe because it was my first European destination, but I love the Netherlands best and Amsterdam is my favorite city in all the world. I'm forever quizzing my poor BF and her husband about all things Dutch ("what's the word for this? How do you say that again?) and I constantly gush about most of it: the architecture, the bike lane system, the flowers!!! So when MT saw this at the bookshop, it was a no-brainer. If you asked him, he'd probably say it was the easiest present decision for me he's ever had to make.

I devoured it and moderately tortured both him and my BF by quoting and exclaiming over particularly fascinating facts (people used to use windmills to send messages! NL actually invaded England in 1688/89!). At 297 pages the book is densely packed with information yet very readable. Coates uses Dutch history - both the good and the bad - to create a context for the liberal and tolerant culture they have today and muses over how and why that liberalism and tolerance is being tested.

Coates has done his research and includes a selected bibliography at the back with further reading and sources. He covers the gamut of what makes NL different, including the most sensitive topics and he makes frequent mention of how verboten some topics were with the normally open Dutch, making it awkward at best to objectively discuss these issues. While it was obvious to me that he tried to represent the largest cross-section of Dutch society he could and strived for objectivity, this remains a cross-section. I'm sure my BF's husband would find a few things he'd disagree with, but largely, I thought it just perfect: well-written, well-edited* and relatively objective; if you find Dutch culture interesting, this would be an excellent overview.

*The only editing errors I ever ran into was a handful of missing words. Oddly enough, it was actually the same word "to" every time. ( )

A quick overview of the most distinctive features of modern Dutch society, as seen by a young British professional who settled here a few years ago. Despite the "hidden heart" bit in the subtitle, it doesn't go beyond the obvious things — the Golden Age and colonialism; World War II; football; bicycles; the Zwarte Piet crisis; Pim Fortuyn, Theo Van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders; euthanasia, soft-drugs and prostitution; carnival; etc. — but what it says about them seems to be sensible and well-researched.

Nothing much about the arts, except Rembrandt and Vermeer, and not much about places other than Rotterdam (where Coates lives) and Amsterdam (where he works). Maastricht, Eindhoven and Breda appear in the Carnival chapter, and there's a trip to Westerbork in the WWII section, but that's about it for geography.

Coates isn't the most exciting writer: he has learnt one trick, building chapters by breaking up passages of objective background material with short passages of mildly funny subjective experience, and he applies that scheme doggedly throughout the book. But he is clearly good at condensing an argument to the essentials, and doesn't take up more of the reader's time than he needs to.

Obviously I'm not the target audience for this book: I've been living in the Netherlands a lot longer than Coates, and there is little in what he says that was in any way new to me (except the stuff about football, which is something I have even less interest in than he claims to...). But it all seems to be reasonably fair.

One minor caveat I had was that the external baseline Coates typically compares the Netherlands to is his experience of a few years in a very high-pressure job in London, which is scarcely "normal" by anyone else's standards. Perhaps because of that he sometimes picks out characteristics as "typically Dutch" when they could equally well be called "typically German" or "typically Swedish", for example. But I still think this would be a valuable starting point for someone visiting the Netherlands or considering coming to work here. ( )

Witty and fairly informative, although the author's past as a sort of spin doctor sometimes makes him talk nonsense for the sake of sounding witty. Like when he claims that the Dutch are as serious about WWII as the British are about WWI, and would never make a WWII comedy like Dad's Army ... or Blackadder. Or when he admires the high numbers of Dutch football associations, their members and games played "in a country half the size of Scotland", happily ignoring the fact that the Netherlands has more than three times as many inhabitants, which is far more relevant. One wonders how much blarney one's presented without knowing it. ( )