Do wilderness books drive you wild? New Book Reviews
Readers review three very different 'into the wild' adventure stories
Our main picture comes from Lynn Schooler's remarkable Walking Home, which appears in Encounters this month.
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Our customers tell us that they can't admire wilderness adventures where the reckless author seems to set out with a death-or-injury wish from page one. So we asked three Encounters readers to give their views on books about wild nature—Congo Journey, Pink Boots and a Machete, The Riverbones—that they've all enjoyed, for different reasons.
By the way, our main picture comes from Lynn Schooler's remarkable Walking Home, which appears in Encounters this month.
To read about his hair-raising clashes with a grizzly bear, click here.
To read about his hair-raising clashes with a grizzly bear, click here.
Tim Nolling reviews Congo Journey:
Accompanied by an ailing, neurotic American academic, an oversexed, equally neurotic Congolese naturalist called Marcellin, and sundry heavily armed locals in the grip of sorcery, blood feuds, disease, drink and drugs, OHanlon sets out in search of the fabled dinosaur of Lake Tele, in the heart of Africa's last unexplored rain forest. The journey becomes the point: it ultimately doesnt matter that the dinosaur turns out to be invented tourist bait, as we suspect all along. True to form, the author writes hilariously of horrific situations, but also with an acute ear for character, dialogue, and spooky atmospherics. He brings his naturalists formidable powers of obervations to bear on people as well as animals, establishing rapport with tinpot village commissars, crazed elephant poachers, and the tortured Marcellin, a French-educated African caught between two worlds and rejected by both. Told with the author's usual deadpan, unforced humour.Ronald Robert liked Pink Boots and a Machete by Mireya Mayor:
Mireya Mayor grows up in Miami's Little Havana neighbourhood with a fascination for animals. The tomboy is the only child of a single mother who fled communist Cuba in 1965. Mireya's over-protective and traditional mother would prefer that her daughter play with dolls and grow up to be schoolteacher or nurse. Instead, Mireya creates her own 'zoo' of local critters in her bedroom. As Mireya matures, she embarks on a short career as a cheerleader for the hometown Miami Dolphins, but her true talents and infectious enthusiasm break free when Mireya turns first to the classroom and then the jungle to become one of the world’s leading primatologists. Fieldwork takes her to the remote corners of Guyana, and through Africa, including Madagascar, where she finds a hitherto unknown species of lemur. Along the way she is discovered by National Geographic, which soon puts her to work as a host and wildlife expert for some of its television programs, a job for which she is well suited.
Lydia Pigeon found Andrew Westoll's The Riverbones eye-opening:
The Riverbones is a spellbinding tale of survival, heartbreak, mystery and murder—and a seach for redemption in Suriname, a country haunted by a troubled past and an uncertain future. Very well written, sociologically, politically, ecologically eye-opening. Reading this book makes you realize the effects of man's destruction on this earth and especially the still-undiscovered-by-the-white-man mysteries of the jungles and how we should all get involved in their conservation. You will never see gold with the same eye!
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