I read this book earlier this year, as I am interested in linguistics and foreign travel. The exploration of the language is quite fascinating, and the travel/cultural information is cool in a, “Thank God I live in an American suburb!” kind of way.
However, the author went round the bend and turned into a cuckoo. He just must have been borderline-loopy to start with, in order to go wacky-doodles over the “superiority” of a barely-subsisting group of a couple of hundred people. That takes some severe cognitive disjunction.
Maybe he's from Detroit.