Staff Book Reviews
Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart
Tim Butcher
Since the
Portuguese arrived in the Congo
for the first time in 1482, the Congo
has been a source of inspiration but also greed, fascination and mystery for
explorers.
Blood River tells us the journey of Tim Butcher, journalist for
the Daily Telegraph, retracing the paths of the explorer Henry Morton Stanley
whose own task was to find the Scottish explorer Dr Livingstone.
Starting from the Lake Tanganyika, Butcher had to face as rough a challenge
as his famed predecessors because of civil war, border conflicts and
corruption.
This book is
immensely enjoyable. It tells us about the Congo
before and after the colonisation and the broken heart of Africa, as Butcher
calls it, becomes the symbolic country through which we can just start to
understand Africa‘s slow development. How can
a country so rich in diamonds, gold and copper be so poor?
Blood
River is a perfect book to read in
conjunction with Stanley‘s
Through a Dark Continent as Butcher adds to his deep knowledge of history the
critical analysis of a journalist.
Vintage 2007
ISBN 9780099494287
Pbk £7.99
Umberto Eco – The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
Christian Rutherford writes:
Flicking through this
handsome novel, the first thing one notices is the abundance of small
colour illustrations, mostly of inter-war ephemera: adventure magazine
covers, comic strips, movie posters, advertising, propaganda. It
is through these artefacts that our hero, Yambo, attempts to rediscover
his own identity following a memory-erasing accident. Through
this gradual unveiling of the world of his childhood and adolescence,
he reveals an unexpected self, further questions, contradictions and
elusive truths. This book is at once philosophical, playful and
gripping, as well as being a powerful evocation of northern Italy under fascism.
Vintage 2006
ISBN 0099481375
Pbk £7.99
Apsley Cherry-Garrard – The Worst Journey in the World
Victoria Boscawen writes:
Having little interest in polar exploration or the literature surrounding it, it came as a surprise to find myself reading The Worst Journey in the World. Having started, however, I found myself unable to put it down. Cherry-Garrard’s telling of this journey fraught with danger and adversity is a masterclass in understatement, taking the reader with each page closer to the end of the world but amazingly never to the end of Man’s endurance. One comes away at once uplifted, inspired and humbled by the remarkable courage and great goodness of which these men were capable.
Pimlico 2003 (orig. 1922)
ISBN 1844131033
Pbk £9.99
Robert Guest – The Shackled Continent: Africa’s Past, Present and Future
Nick Creagh-Osborne writes:
A penetrating
analysis of Africa’s problems delivered in big categorical statements: “To
understand why Africa is so poor, we must first ask why Africa
is so unproductive”. The book combines vivid journalistic reporting and first
hand experiences from all over the continent, such as driving through Cameroon and
being stopped at 47 road blocks along the way, with incisive economic opinions
and analysis: “No country with good roads has ever suffered famine,” and “Trade
has far more potential to reduce poverty than aid”. Straight forward and challenging but never
simplistic the book is encouraging in its eventual optimism for Africa‘s future.
Pan 2005
ISBN 0330419722
Pbk £7.99
Philip Roth – American Pastoral
Christian Rutherford writes:
American
Pastoral is a story ultimately about the decay of old-fashioned American
idealism as the hero, ‘Swede’ Levov, is thwarted in his striving to pursue the
perfect life for which he seemed destined by his beloved daughter Merry who,
having become radicalized by militant opponents of the war in Vietnam,
carries out an act of terrorism and subsequently disappears. This one event has repercussions that affect
every aspect of his life and brings him to the brink of confused despair. In the background of the story runs the
analogous decay of his home town of
Newark, New Jersey where his glove-making company, founded and nurtured
by his father in more prosperous times has become surrounded by an urban
wasteland. The vivid evocation of this setting as well as that of the small-town bourgeois atmosphere of Old Rimrock where Swede raises his young family justifies the inclusion of this title in the Travel Bookshop‘s stocklist. This is a ruminative and often
dark book but ultimately its vision is as compassionate as it is powerful.
Vintage 1998
ISBN 0099771810
Pbk £7.99
Siri Hustvedt – What I loved
Natasha Shafi writes:
From the outset, Siri Husvedt in her novel
“What I Loved” instantly creates an air of mystery making us aware this will be
a story far deeper than what is said on the surface.
We are transported to the New York art scene where a story is told of
the daily routines, lives and relationships of friends, artists, partners,
lovers and sons, and how each of these relationships moulds the life of Leo the
narrator. Husdvedt has the magical quality of making the narrative both
subjective and objective at almost the very same time- it is almost as if the
narrator is a spectator far removed, reliving his life with the reader standing
next to him. Yet Husvedt assimilates touching and raw emotional details that
instantly shift us to the particular moment in time that is described.
As the story unfolds, so does the brooding
dark quality behind the story, which increases the deeper we get, illustrating
the simplicities of life that are often taken for granted. This is best
described through the young character of Mark. The subtle details of his
character that Husvedt incorporates throughout the novel eventually become the
novel’s premise overtaking the dramatic and tragic events that had occurred
previously.
There are moments in the novel where Husvedt
interjects vivid details of a New Yorker feeling displaced in various states in
America and also characterises the strong sense of place in which the novel in
set.
This becomes a novel that superseded my
expectation. Yes it is a novel that describes the New York art scene, the
concept of art history, the lives of artists, their partners, living and
working closely to such people as well as dissecting the mundane, the tragic,
the complex concept of love; but it essentially makes you think outside of the
subject matter, it grips you and presents twists and turns that you would not
expect. The eloquence and potency of the Husvedt’s written word is only
justified by reading the novel itself. This most certainly is a book one will
learn from and be enchanted by.
Sceptre 2003
ISBN 0340682388
Pbk £7.99
Alexander Maitland – Wilfred Thesiger
Nick Creagh-Osborne writes:
Alexander
Maitland, who knew Thesiger well for many years, has a written a biography which
although being illuminating and penetrating never feels as if it might be
intruding on the privacy of a very self contained man who was chronically wary
and mistrustful of people all his life.
This warm and remarkable book is full of analysis and psychological
insight and is fascinating on the motivations behind Thesiger’s journies, what
he hoped to find among tribal peoples and why he “cherished the past, felt out
of step with the present, and dreaded the future”.
A great
biography which succeeds in submitting its subject to a rigorous examination
but which handles the process with great sympathy, delicacy and respect, and
which is never prying or intrusive.
HarperCollins 2006
ISBN 0002556081
Hbk £25.00
Robert Whitaker – The Mapmaker’s Wife
Nick Creagh-Osborne writes:
In the 1720’s, during the peace which followed the end of the Spanish War of Succession, scientific debate raged in Europe. Proponents of either Newton or Descartes hotly disputed the size and shape of the earth, the laws of gravitation and those of planetary motion.
As Spain sank into isolationism, reviving the Inquisition and closing its New World empire to foreigners a French scientific expedition was permitted to penetrate the Andean interior of Peru.
Years later, as the expedition draws to a close, its youngest member, Jean Godin, who has married Isabel Grameson, the daughter of a local family, journeys on ahead over the mountains and down the Amazon to find a route to bring his wife back to France. Then, disaster strikes; the borders between French and Spanish territories are closed and Jean is stranded for twenty years in French Guiana.
Eventually Isabel follows him down the Amazon. Her epic journey becomes a horrifying nightmare as she left the only survivor of the expedition, alone and starving to confront the terrors of the jungle.
The book is a fitting memorial to an exceptional woman whose tale of courage and endurance is one of the greatest journeys in all Travel.
Bantam 2005
ISBN 0553815393
Pbk £7.99
Jules Stewart – Spying for the Raj
Nick Creagh-Osborne writes:
Returning to his theme of Britain in India in the days of Raj, recently
explored in The Khyber Rifles, Jules Stewart here presents the history of the
Pundits. The Pundits were the key players and unsung heroes in the
protracted duel of intrigue and espionage indulged in by the British and
Russian empires in Central Asia during the
nineteenth century. As Russian influence advanced steadily towards
British India, progressing from one desert khanate to the next – Bokhara,
Tashkent, Samarkand, Merv, Khiva – the officers of the Great Trigonometrical
Survey in Dehra Dun responded by training their own native spies in the arts of
map making, subterfuge and espionage. The Pundits were launched
northwards into the completely unknown and unmapped void of terra incognita
beyond the Hindu Kush , the vacuum into which
Russian influence was insidiously creeping from the north.
Travelling disguised as pilgrims or
traders the Pundits were men of exceptional resourcefulness and courage who
mapped vast Trans-Himalayan regions, in constant danger and at the greatest
risk of their own safety, with phenomenal accuracy.
Jules Stewart’s exhaustive research
has reclaimed the Pundits’ heroism and devotion to the now out-moded concept of
duty from the historical obscurity to which they might otherwise have remained
consigned. He tells their story with the fastidious eye for detail of a
historian combined with the novelist’s keen appreciation of a tale of
derring-do, excitement and high adventure.
Sutton Publishing 2006
ISBN 0750942002
Hbk £17.99
John Reader – Africa: A Biography of the Continent
Nick Creagh-Osborne writes:
A
staggering achievement: to condense into 700 pages the story of Africa from a
ball of gas before the Big Bang, over thousands of millions of years, through
geological time, into archaeological time, right up to the Rwandan genocide in
the 1990s, and Nelson Mandela. Detailed
and scholarly certainly, but also magnificent and accessible. Reader asks why the early human population
which migrated out of Africa grew so much faster than that which remained, and
sets out to “illuminate the history of human interaction with Africa” – as if
Africa itself was a character, and hence in the title the book is referred to as
a biography and not as a history, which puts one in mind Conrad’s description
in “Heart of Darkness” of the interior of the continent containing a “stillness
of life [which] did not in the least resemble a peace; it was the stillness of
an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention”.
Penguin 1998
ISBN 014026675
Pbk £15.99
Jason Elliot – Mirrors of the Unseen
Nick Creagh-Osborne writes:
One does not have to read very far
into Jason Elliot’s new book, subtitled “Journeys in Iran “, to know that it will be
long-hailed as one of the great travelogues. The weight of knowledge,
research, intellect, passion and curiosity which the author brings to bear on
his subject is extraordinary, as is the fact that this erudition and enthusiasm
should be expressed with such articulate fluency. Often Mr. Elliot’s
descriptive power and his linguistic range and precision scale heights which
place him in company with Patrick Leigh Fermor at his best, (see for instance
the last paragraph on page 62, which runs over on to page 63).
As well as the main trajectory of
the author’s narrative, his asides and digressions are equally memorable: short
essays on the tiles of Isfahan
, the Persianization of the Mongols, and equine culture in the Caspian region
to name but three.
The book is timely of course, as the
West squares up to the perceived threat of Iran ‘s nuclear ambitions and the
openness, friendliness, generosity and hospitality of the ordinary Iranians
encountered by the author shine out like beacons of hope in the gathering gloom
of geopolitics and international relations.
Picador 2006
ISBN 9780330486576
Pbk £8.99
Sara Wheeler – Too Close to the Sun
Nick Creagh-Osborne writes:
The life and times of Denis Finch
Hatton, the man best known to posterity as Karen Blixen’s lover in Out of Africa and as the original of the Robert Redford character in the film of the
same name. Finch Hatton, a man said to have all but invented the concept
of charm, went out to British East Africa, latterly Kenya, in pursuit of the
space and freedom in which to live and breathe and to escape from the
prevailing atmosphere at home of expectation and suppression. Late in his
short life he eventually found his niche as a white hunter and guide to touring
V.I.P’s, most notably the future Edward VIII, and he was one of the very first
to appreciate the need for the conservation and protection of game in Africa.
The book is especially good on the
historical context and background of Finch Hatton’s life: the gradual eclipse
of aristocratic influence in England, the forgotten chapter of the First World
War fought with dreadful suffering in East Africa, and the evolving British
experience of Africa from rediscovered Eden, through the excesses of Happy
Valley, to the loss of confidence in Britain’s colonial mission and waning
assumptions of white supremacy. The book, like Finch Hatton’s life, ends
suddenly with the fatal crash of his light aircraft in which he perished in the
rolling hills of Kenya
.
Vintage 2006
ISBN 9780099450276
pbk £8.99
Ahmadou Kourouma – Allah is Not Obliged
Nick Creagh-Osborne writes:
In an unedifying tale of murder, violence,
torture, extortion, cannibalism, anarchy and appalling cruelty young Birahima
spends three years searching for his aunt in Liberia, a land which warring
factions have reduced to a state of barbarism.
After the death of his mother Birahima becomes one of thousands of
child-soldiers, adolescent warriors high on drugs and armed with Kalashnikovs,
who kill and destroy at the behest of one warlord or another. The child-soldiers live in camps surrounded
by human skulls on stakes; they murder and rampage without mercy, compunction
or moral qualms, although when one of their own number is killed they are
reduced to paroxysms of grief and floods of tears. The fate of Birahima and his friends Siponni
the Viper and Johnny Thunderbolt certainly does not make for an enjoyable read
but this apocalyptic tale of West Africa‘s
descent into hell has an important and salutary message for us all.
Heinemann 2006
ISBN 9780099433927
Pbk £7.99
William Dalrymple – The Last Mughal
Nick Creagh-Osborne writes:
Drawing on
the newly rediscovered “Mutiny Papers”, a vast store of virtually unused
documents in Persian and Urdu in the National Archive of India, William
Dalrymple presents a completely new view of the Indian Mutiny. Dalrymple’s researches have shown that from
the Indian perspective the Uprising was from the first a war of religion: a
response to missionary activity, the rise of Christian Evangelism, and the
ambition of many on the British side to impose Christianity on India.
Both the
British retreat from Delhi and their return were marked by violence and
viciousness on both sides but this was as nothing compared to the mass murder
and wholesale destruction unleashed by the British once they had retaken Delhi. Many seemed to be engaged in a war of
extermination as members of the Mughal court were hunted down and the still-
“beating heart of Indo-Islamic civilisation was ripped out”.
A sad,
shaming story of Imperial conceit and catastrophic retribution which Dalrymple
concludes by tracing a direct link from the consequent hardening of Moslem
attitudes towards the Raj which occurred at the Deobandi madrassa from where,
140 years later, the radicalism of the Taliban and al-Qaeda would also spring.
Bloomsbury Publishing 2006
ISBN 9780747587262
Pbk £8.99
Peter Carey – 30 Days in Sydney
Nick Creagh-Osborne writes:
This is “a
wildly distorted account”, claims Peter Carey, of his return from New York to his home town, where together with a number
of lifelong friends he sets out to examine the character of Sydney through the four elements: Earth, Air,
Fire and Water. Approaching the city
obliquely and tangentially Carey gives his boisterous, argumentative and
opinionated friends full rein and what emerges, although often unruly, idiosyncratic
and highly individual, is a rather charming and endearing portrait not only of
the city and its magnificent bay but also of Carey and his friends.
Bloomsbury 2001
ISBN 0747555001
Hbk £9.99
David Downing – Zoo Station
Nick Creagh-Osborne writes:
Zoo
Station is not only a tense and subtly understated novel of espionage,
inhabiting the same shadow world as Alan Furst and early John le Carre, it is also
powerfully set in time and place: Berlin
1938, after Kristallnacht and on the cusp of war. The squares, streets, canals, trams, railways
and even specific buildings are meticulously described, so as well being a
cracking good read the book would form a fascinating pendant to any visit to
present day Berlin. (Please note that if purchased, this title will be dispatched subsequent to its Publication date of 07/03/07).
Old Street Publishing 2007
ISBN 1905847084
Pbk £10.99
Wilfred Thesiger – Arabian Sands
Nick Creagh-Osborne writes:
Classic
Travel Literature at its very best, Arabian Sands is Wilfred Thesiger’s
account of his two great crossings of the Empty Quarter in Arabia
between 1945 and 1950. Living with the
Bedu and sharing their lives Thesiger was the first European to visit much of
the desert he travelled in. They were
journeys of incredible hardship and almost superhuman endurance which are
recounted here in a style which is so spare and direct as to be quite humbling
for the reader.
Thesiger
longed for a world far from the tyranny of man’s machines where all pretense
was stripped away and life could be lead free of all but the essential material
possessions. He found this life with the
Bedu and his book is written on the cusp of a time when Western man’s desire
for oil would completely change and destroy the world of “Arabian Sands”.
Penguin 1991
ISBN 0140095144
Pbk £10.99
Laurens van der Post – Venture to the Interior
Nick Creagh-Osborne writes:
Summoned to
Whitehall in 1949 van der Post is sent to
explore an uncharted region of Nyasaland in what was then British Central Africa. Two
journies run in parallel in the book: one a travelogue to the interior of Africa, the other a journey to the interior of Western
man. The author sees Europe as
conscious, male, masculine, and of the father, whereas he identifies Africa as intuitive, female, feminine, and motherly. Van der Post’s fascinating contention is that
Western man can only be made whole again “by embracing the African within
us”. The record of the expedition’s
journey through Africa provides the building
blocks and catalysts for the journey within.
Vintage 2002
ISBN 0099428733
Pbk £7.99
Eric Newby – A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
Nick Creagh-Osborne writes:
What better
way to commence a wild, romantic and improbable journey to the mountains of Afghanistan than to suddenly cable a friend “Can
you travel Nuristan June?”. He could and they did! The result was a journey and a book suffused
with the best spirit of British amateurism.
Intelligent, witty, self deprecating and full of charm. The book concludes with the memorable meeting
in the mountains with Wilfred Thesiger who, on seeing the two travellers
blowing up their air beds before sleeping on sharp rocks, snapped “God you two
must be a couple of pansies!”.
Picador 1981
ISBN 0330266233
Pbk £8.99
Neshani Andreas – The Purple Violet of Oshaantu
Nick Creagh-Osborne writes:
There is
very little Namibian fiction available in translation in this country but the
“The Purple Violet” is a gem. It is a
slowly evolving story of village life in the vast, scrubby, flat lands of
northern Namibia
suffused with what to a European reader might be said to be “African
Wisdom”. The novel gives the impression
of slowly unfolding at a speed dictated by an evolving process quite
independent of the author and this has an unfamiliar and intriguing feel to a
Western reader more familiar with a goal oriented will-based world.
Heinemann 2001
ISBN 0435912089
Pbk £9.99
Norman Lewis – Voices of the Old Sea
Simon Hardy writes:
The book charts
the three consecutive summers Norman Lewis spent in the late 1940s in a little
Spanish fishing village in what is now the Costa Brava.
What we get
is a meticulously observed description of village life, its customs, its key
characters and the first inklings of tourism that would change the village and
that entire area of coast line forever.
Executed
with humanity, humour and the author’s extraordinary descriptive powers Lewis
brings the village to life with beautifully simple yet telling portraits. We
are introduced to the priest for example, San Ignacio, who “was well thought of
on the whole, largely because he had lived with a mistress quite openly, and
had learned to mind his own business”.
It was a
life in which the average age of a fisherman was 45 and in which marriage could
only be contemplated if the sardine and tunny fish haul was good and the
fisherman could pay off his debts.
But Lewis
is not misty eyed about his adopted village and never passes up a chance to
expose the absurdities and foibles of communal life. He charts the gradual and
subtle ways in which the community is exposed to change and the arrival of
outsiders who see the economic potential of the village and the gradual trickle
of upmarket visitors venturing south from France.
It is
Lewis’s descriptive powers that stay with the reader – none more so that his
painting of the fishermen and the sea they live by. The author once described himself as the only
person he knew who could walk into a room full of people, and leave it some
time afterwards without anyone realising he’d been there. As a writer he used that very quality to quietly
observe the village and beautifully capture a life and a community that would
otherwise be lost forever.
Picador 1996 (orig. 1984)
ISBN 0330345613
Pbk £7.99
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