First Footsteps in East Africa or an Exploration of Harar Review

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(More customer reviews)Sir Richard F Burton is one of the most famous of unread authors. Nearly everyone can tell you about his scandalous doings with native women, his marriage to an ultra-Catholic Englishwoman, and the latter's destruction of the author's private papers after his death.
Ever since I read Fawn Brodie's excellent biography, THE DEVIL DRIVES, I have collected some 20 different Burton books and read most of them. If you make allowances for Burton's diabolical thoroughness (involved footnotes, appendices, foreign language quotes, tables, etc.) and his Victorian circumlocutions in dealing with taboo subjects, he is a truly wonderful read.
Although FIRST FOOTSTEPS is not his most famous book, it is probably the best one to start with. The action is not only more focussed, but Burton did feel he needed quite so much of a scholarly carapace to report back to the scholarly organizations back in Britain. And it finishes up with a stirring postscript about an attack on Burton's camp by Somalis in which the author barely escaped with his life.
Perhaps this is a book that Presidents Bush and Clinton should have read before committing U.S. troops to the region: Burton shows us that not much has changed in the region in 150 years. He was in constant danger, and survived only because his knowledge and guts were more than an a match for his enemies.
This is an exciting book and deserves to be better known.

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Subjects: Horn of Africa -- Description and travelNotes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be numerous typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes.When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there.--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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My Life as an Explorer: The Great Adventurers Classic Memoir (Kodansha Globe) Review

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(More customer reviews)Sven Hedin's "My Life as an Explorer" is an exceptional work. Stylistically situated somewhere in between scholarly works such as those by Aurel Stein and pure "adventure for its own sake" works such as those by Thesiger, Hedin's explorations are astounding and wonderful stories. His bravery and thirst for adventure are unmatched--he seems to have a total inability to turn back from his goals. Yet the goals are noble, and his methods meticulous and scholarly, so one is not left with the impression that he is simply a daredevil seeking thrills. He singlehandedly filled in, in a fairly detailed manner, one of the last white spaces of "terra incognita" on the map of the world.
At certain moments in the book, especially (in my opinion) the discussions of the Lama Rinpoche, who vows to remain walled inside his cave for his entire life, Hedin's narrative reaches the heights of great literature, placing his work, I believe, among the greatest travel or exploration writings ever produced.

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Lost in Tibet: The Untold Story of Five American Airmen, a Doomed Plane, and the Will to Survive Review

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(More customer reviews)In 1943 during WWII, five U.S. airmen flying the "Hump" between Burma and the U.S. ally Nationalist China were blown off course into Tibet in a storm and bailed out of their plane before it crashed. After an arduous trek across the forbidding Tibetan mountainous terrain, they arrived in the capital of Lhasa--only to find themselves at the center of precarious international affairs. The Chinese were trying to take over Tibet. Since the U. S. was an ally of China in the war against Japan, the Tibetans could not believe that the American airmen were not somehow involved with China's hostile aims toward their country. The Chinese were concerned that the airmen would be witnesses to their actions taken to occupy Tibet even while the U. S. government was trying to keep the Chinese movements from becoming widely known. The authors tell this complex, engaging tale clearly, skillfully keeping its different elements in balance while keeping a focus on the plight of the airmen resented by both Tibet and China and dealt with at arm's length by the U. S. until they made their timely overland escape to India with the aid of British citizens in the region who were acting as surrogates for the American government. The authors, both journalists, recount the full story of this little-known episode of WWII that has heretofore received only passing attention. From their travels to mountainous areas of Asia, they bring a special sense of the five airmen's struggles to survive in the Tibetan terrain at the beginning and again at the end of their incredible story.


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