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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