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1250278597
| 9781250278593
| 1250278597
| 3.80
| 869
| May 06, 2021
| Apr 05, 2022
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really liked it
| As he left Agra behind, Lewis had no way of knowing that he was walking into one of history’s most incredible stories. He would beg by the roadside As he left Agra behind, Lewis had no way of knowing that he was walking into one of history’s most incredible stories. He would beg by the roadside and take tea with kings. He would travel with holy men and become the master of a hundred disguises. He would see things no westerner had ever seen before, and few have glimpsed since. And, little by little, he would transform himself from an ordinary soldier into one of the greatest archaeologists of the age. He would devote his life to a quest for Alexander the Great.--------------------------------------- There’s an old Afghan proverb: ‘First comes one Englishman as a traveller; then come two and make a map; then comes an army and takes the country. Therefore it is better to kill the first Englishman.’ He did not know it yet, but Masson is the reason that proverb exists. He was the first Englishman.You have probably never heard of Charles Masson. At the time of his creation in 1827, no one else had either. Nor had his creator. For six long years, Private James Lewis had endured soldiering in the military force of the East India Company (EIC) in sundry nations and city-states, in what is now India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. He had hoped for a life better than what was possible in a squalid London. Dire economic times had driven large numbers of people into bankruptcy and poverty. And if they were already poor, it drove them to desperation. The government’s response was to threaten to kill those protesting because of their inability to pay their debts. There had to be a better option somewhere, anywhere. But it had turned out not to be the better life that he had hoped for. [image] Edmund Richardson- image from RNZ Lewis suffered from the multiple curses of curiosity and intelligence. He had tired of the often corrupt, ignorant, mean-spirited officers and officials above him, and knew he would not be allowed to leave any time soon. When opportunity presented, Lewis and another disgruntled employee took off, went AWOL, strangers in a strange land. And in the sands of the Indian subcontinent, having fled across a vast no man’s land, feverish, desperate, and terrified of being apprehended by the EIC or its agents, Lewis happened across an American, Josiah Harlan, leading a small mercenary force in support of restoring the king of Afghanistan, and the adventure begins. Lewis vanished into the sands and Charles Masson was born into Lewis’s skin. [image] Josiah Harlan, The Man Who Would be King - image from Wiki A ripping yarn, The King’s Shadow (Alexandria: The Quest for the Lost City in the UK) tells of the peregrinations and travails of Lewis/Masson from the time of his desertion in 1827 to his death in 1853. It will remind you of Rudyard Kipling tales, particularly The Man who Would Be King. The real life characters on whom that story is based appear in these pages. [image] Dost Mohammad Khan. – considered a wise ruler by many, he was devilishly dishonest - image from Genealogy Adventures Live It certainly sounds as if the world James Lewis thought he was leaving in London, a fetid swamp of human corruption, cruelty, and depravity, had followed him to the East. There is an impressive quantity of backstabbing going on. Richardson presents us with a sub-continental panorama of rogues. Con-men, narcissists, spies, the power-hungry, the deluded, the pompous, the vain, the ignorant, and the bigoted all set up tents here, and all tried to get the best of each other. There are political leaders who show us a bit of wisdom. More who know nothing of leadership except the perks. They all traipse across a land that Alexander the Great had travelled centuries before. His quest would take him across snow-covered mountains, into hidden chambers filled with jewels, and to a lost city buried beneath the plains of Afghanistan. He would unearth priceless treasures and witness unspeakable atrocities. He would unravel a language which had been forgotten for over a thousand years. He would be blackmailed and hunted by the most powerful empire on earth. He would be imprisoned for treason and offered his own kingdom. He would change the world – and the world would destroy him.The American mercenary with whom Lewis/Masson joined forces was a fanatic about Alexander, seeing himself as a modern day version. He taught Masson about his idol and in time Masson took the obsession on as his own, albeit without the desire for a throne that drove his American pal, reading up on histories of Alexander. [image] Shah Shujah-al-Moolk, circa 1835 – the restored king of Afghanistan who served as a British puppet) - image from Genealogy Adventures Live You will learn a bit about Alexander, of whom stories are still told. He may not seem so great once you learn of his atrocities. The British government and the East India company tried to keep up, demonstrating a capacity for grandiosity, cruelty and inhumanity, whilst also armed with alarming volumes of incompetence and unmerited venality [image] Alexander Burnes - image from Wiki In his travels, aka invasions, conquests, and or large-scale slaughter, Alexander established a pearl necklace of cities along his route. Some were grander than others. One, in Egypt, is still a thriving metropolis. Most vanished beneath the drifts of time, whether they had been cities, towns, villages, or mere outposts. But Charles Masson was convinced that one of Alexander’s cities could be found the general area in which he was living. The evidence on which he based this view was cultural, appearing in stories, legends, and local lore, but then more concrete evidence began to appear (coins) and appear, and appear. Time and again, Masson is dragged away from his work, and time and again he finds his way back, his passion for unearthing the lost Alexandria becoming the driving force in his life. Surely, if his own survival were his highest priority, he would have sailed for home a long, long time before he finally did. His work was hugely successful, all the more remarkable because he was a rank amateur. Much of Lewis’s work, thousands of objects and drawings, is still on display at the British Museum. He was a gifted archaeologist, and made several world-class advances. These include discovering a long-lost Alexandrian city and using ancient coins he had discovered, that contained Greek on one side, and an unknown language on the other, to decipher that language. And significantly modify the historical view of Alexander’s era. [image] Ranjit Singh, maharajah of the Punjab - image from Genealogy Adventures Live The King’s Shadow is an adventure-tale biography, which focuses on Masson’s life and experiences more than on Alexander. Sure, there is enough in the book to justify the UK title, but barely. There is a lot more in here about him trying to secure the connection between his head and his shoulders, threatened by a seemingly ceaseless flood of enemies. He is a remarkably interesting character, which is what holds our interest. He has dealings with a large cast of likewise remarkably interesting characters, all of which serves to keep us interested, while passing something along about what life in this part of the world was like in the early 19th century. (Remarkably like it is today in many respects) There are few downsides here. One is that there is a sizeable cast, so it might be a bit tough keep track of who’s who. That said, I was reading an ARE, so there might be a roster offered in the final version. I keep lists of names when I read, so managed, but that it seemed needed should prepare you for that. Second was that there were times when events went from A to D without necessarily explaining the B and C parts. For example, there is an episode in which Masson is sent along with a subordinate of Dost Mohammad Khan’s, Haji Khan, to extract taxes from a recalcitrant community. But Haji has no intention of returning, yet somehow Masson is back in Kabul in the following chapter. Really, did he escape? Did he get permission to leave? How did the move from place A to place B take place? In another, a military attack fails, yet there is no mention of why the fleeing army was not pursued. Things like that. There are multiple LOL moments to be enjoyed. Not saying that there is any chance of passing this off as a comedy book, but Richardson’s sense of humor is very much appreciated. You may or may not find the same things amusing. His descriptions are sometimes pure delight. An itinerant Christian preacher arrives at the palace of Dost Mohammad Khan, intent on converting him. The preacher had encountered serial misfortunes in his travels and had arrived in Kabul stark naked. Richardson refers to him at one point as “the well ventilated Mr Wolff.” He also describes Masson arriving late at night at the home of Rajit Singh, the local maharaja, only to find an American in attendance, singing Yankee Doodle Dandy. Another tells of a message Masson left for future explorers at what was then an incredibly remote site. LOL time. As much as you will frown at the miseries depicted in these pages, you will smile, maybe even laugh, a fair number of times as well. I noted five LOLs in my notes. There are more than that. Charles Masson, despite the lack of appreciation and recognition he received, made major contributions to our knowledge of the Alexandrian era. Edmund Richardson fills us in on those, while also offering a biography that reads like an Indiana Jones adventure. Richardson has a novelist’s talent for story-telling. His tale shows not only the power of singlemindedness and passion, but the dark side of far too many men, and some unfortunate forms of governance. It is both entertaining and richly informative. Bottom line is that The King’s Shadow darkens nothing while illuminating much. Jolly Good! This is a story about following your dreams to the ends of the earth – and what happens when you get there. Review posted – April 8, 2022 Publication date – April 5, 2022 I received an ARE of The King’s Shadow from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review and a couple of those very special coins. Thanks, folks. And thanks to NetGalley for facilitating. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review will soon be cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF From Hazlitt Edmund Richardson writes about the strangest sides of history. The Victorian con-artist who discovered a lost city. The child prodigy turned opium addict. Several homicidal headmasters. A clutch of Spiritualists. A prophet who couldn’t get the end of the world right. And Alexander the Great. He’s currently Lecturer in Classics at Durham University. Cambridge University Press recently published his first book, Classical Victorians: Scholars, Scoundrels and Generals in Pursuit of the Ancient World.The King’s Shadow is Richardson’s third book. Interviews -----Travels Through Time - Interview with Edmund Richardson on Charles Masson and the search for Alexandria with Violet Mueller – re prior book Tttpodcast.com -----Travels Through Time - Interview with Edmund Richardson on Charles Masson and the search for Alexandria - audio – 48:03 -----Listen Notes - Edmund Richardson, "Alexandria: The Quest for the Lost City Beneath the Mountains" (Bloomsbury, 2021) - with David Chaffetz and Nicholas Gordon – audio – 36:14 ----- Alexandria: The Quest for the Lost City | JLF London 2021 - Edmund Richardson with Taran N. Khan - video – 45:32 – begin about 3:00 -----ABC - Deserter, archaeologist and spy – the extraordinary adventures of Charles Masson - audio – 55:28 – with Sarah Kanowski Item of Interest from the author -----A pawn in the Great Game: the sad story of Charles Masson Items of Interest -----Wiki on Charles Masson -----Encyclopedia Iranica - Charles Masson - a nice history of his life and accomplishments -----Josiah Harlan -----Alexander Burnes -----Gutenberg - The Man Who Would Be King by Rudyard Kipling – full text -----Wiki on the story - The Man Who Would Be King ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 05, 2022
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Apr 06, 2022
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1250273609
| 9781250273604
| 1250273609
| 3.22
| 806
| Sep 21, 2021
| Sep 21, 2021
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really liked it
| When I first learned that Raiders of the Lost Ark, my favorite movie, might have been based on an actual archaeological expedition, I felt like my fac When I first learned that Raiders of the Lost Ark, my favorite movie, might have been based on an actual archaeological expedition, I felt like my face was melting off. - from The Untold Story… articleBefore he was the Police Commissioner stuck having to deal with Jack the Ripper, (who was at first, BTW, called, much less memorably, “Leather Apron”) Captain Charles Warren, a Royal Engineer, spent parts of several years near Jerusalem doing archaeological work for the British Crown, digging out some ancient tunnels, and laying the groundwork for explorations to come. About thirty years later, a Finnish scholar believes he has found a code in the Book of Ezekiel that addresses some of the tunnels Warren had excavated. Dr. Valter Juvelius’s code-breaker, he says, points the way to the secret location of the Ark of the Covenant. [image] Brad Ricca - image from Amazon Of course, today this guy would be one of a thousand cranks flogging his wares on the internet, generating eye-rolls, and maybe trying for a spot on Shark Tank. But in 1909 he was taken seriously and was embraced by a group of men willing to spend some of their considerable excess cash on an adventure, and look to their wealthy friends and associates to provide the rest of the needed funding. They formed a group called J.M.P.V.F. Syndicate, for their initials, but referred to it as The Syndicate (nothing sinister there), hoping to find the Ark, reputed to have properties that allowed one to communicate directly with God. Whether it provided an early version of the iPhone, a Star Trek communicator, an eight-ball, a metal can with a very, very long string attached, or no comms-capacity at all, they estimated it to be worth hundreds of millions of pounds, or something on the order of twenty three billion dollars in today’s money. Adigging they will go. [image] Charles Warren in Palestine, 1867 - image from The History Reader We follow the progress of the digs over several years, noting the discoveries that were made, and the challenges the participants faced. Some very Indy-ish adventures are included. The point of this book is not to tease you about the location of the Ark. Ok, maybe it is, a bit, but rest assured that if the Ark had been found and the author had figured out where it is, I seriously doubt he would be telling us. He would be living VERY LARGE somewhere, and who knows, maybe having daily chats with you-know-who. (Sup, G?) True Raiders is my love letter to Raiders of the Lost Ark, but also to the conspiracy-minded genre of eighties properties like In Search Of, Amazing Stories, and Holy Blood, Holy Grail…I…want to ask real questions about the intersections between fact, story, and truth. Did Monty really go after the Ark? Yes, he did. What did he find? That answer is more complicated. - from The Untold Story… article [image] Monty Parker - image from Wiki If you picked up this book without having examined the flap copy or inspected the cover too closely, you could easily mistake it for a novel. Ricca has taken liberties, fleshing out the structure of known events with bountiful interpretation. It makes for a smoother and more engaging read than a mere recitation of facts might allow. I was reminded of the shows aired on The History Channel in which actors portray historical events. Ricca does it with panache. A sample: Ava Lowle Willing Astor was in a mood. She reclined back on her chair and paged through the Times to take her mind off things. She pushed through the headlines to the society pages, to look for the names of people she knew and parties she had attended—and those she had ruthlessly avoided. The Sunday-morning light was streaming through her high windows. Her daughter Alice was around, somewhere. [image] Ava Lowle Willing Astor - image from Wikipedia Ava and Monty flirt. But it seems she is here more for social context, and to offer a take on what challenges were faced by uber-rich women with more independence than was thought proper at the time. There are few women playing a significant role in this story. One is Bertha Vester, a Chicago-born local, brought to Jerusalem as a child. She became a towering figure in Jerusalem, internationally renowned for her charitable work with children of all faiths, through the organization her father had established, The American Colony. She was also a major source for Parker, connecting him to local experts able to help in the dig. And offering him the benefit of her knowledge of area history, including Charles Warren’s work. [image] Bertha Spafford, (later Vester) age 19, in 1896. - image from IsabellaAlden.com In the Notes that follows the text of the tale, Ricca says: Rather than a history, this is a history of the story. Chapters are grouped into parts that are based on the point-of-view of the person or source used.That is true enough. Monty Parker’s expedition was the one looking hard for the Ark, but Warren’s work thirty years before had done the initial digging, and the de-coding by Dr. Juvelius provided the actual spark. The stories merge when Parker is helped by Bertha Vester to connect with Warren’s work, and with local archaeological experts. [image] Valter Juvelius (left) around 1909–1911 in the Siloam tunnel. There are personalities aplenty on display here. Ricca gives us some individual histories, although nothing that might smack of a stand-alone biography. Some of the characters were involved in newspaper headlines or related notoriety. Ava Lowle Willing Astor was involved in a front-page divorce from John Jacob Astor IV, who would later sail on the maiden voyage of an ill-starred ship, prior to her involvement with the expedition. As noted earlier, Charles Warren had the misfortune of being the Police Commissioner when Jack the Ripper was cutting his way through London. Monty and his pals gained notoriety of an unwanted sort after one of their (certainly unauthorized) digs. Their hasty retreat was an international incident, garnering coverage in the New York Times, and generating mass outrage among the locals in Jerusalem. [image] NY Times headline about Parker absconding …on May 14, 1911, The New York Times ran a story titled “Mysterious Bags Taken from Mosque.” In it, the expedition is described as having worked for two years just “to reach that one spot.” And though the article asserts that “what they really found no one knows,” it notes that the expedition “told different persons that they are ‘very satisfied.’” The article claims that four or five men, including Parker, Duff, and Wilson, invaded the Haram at midnight, having gained entrance by bribery, and that they lifted up a heavy stone, entered a cavern, and “took away two bags.” Before they left on their white yacht from Jaffa, they had a cup of tea. The caretaker they had bribed was in jail and suffered a further indignation: his great beard and mustache had been shaved off in public.The book raises questions of where found relics belong, not, ultimately, showing Monty and his partners in the kindest light. Part of that portrayal is to show the self-regard of the upper crust, presuming that their privileged upbringing carried with it not just an inflated sense of entitlement, but an enhanced level of self-regard as being of strong, moral character. Juvelius was relieved. He knew that one would have to have mediocre intelligence to think they could milk secrets from an English gentleman.Another participant, Robin Duff, let on to Rudyard Kipling that he was responsible for raping local virgins in Jerusalem. Maybe not quite the highest moral character. [image] Father Louis-Hughes Vincent There is a far-too-lengthy where-are-they-now series of chapters at the back of the book that might have been more alluring in a longer work, one that had offered more beforehand about the people involved, made us more interested in their stories. It makes sense in the overall intent, but seemed too large a tail for a creature of this size. [image] (the unfortunately named) Warren’s Shaft - image from Wikimedia You will learn some interesting intel reading True Raiders, such as where the Indy writers got the notion of that gigantic boulder rolling through a tunnel, a possible origin for a Scandinavian deity, and how George Lucas decided on the Ark as the target of Indiana Jones’s first great quest. It seems possible that Monty Parker was one of many real-world models for the fictitious Indy. The location of the Ark should surely spark some interest of the did-they-or-didn’t-they find it sort. You will see the sort of competition Parker faced while attempting to find the Ark, from both the rich and powerful billionaire sorts and more local interests. Ava Astor has some interesting whoo-whoo experiences, unrelated to Monty’s dig. Ricca offers a sense of adventure in a real-world story, however embellished the details might be. He brings actual archaeological knowledge along, showing the significance of the finds made by both the Warren and Parker digs, gives us a look at some of the social mores and activities of the times, and loads it all up with a wonderful sense of fun, allowing readers to wonder, Would I have done this or that if offered the chance? No fedora, leather jacket, or whip needed. True Raiders is definitely worth exploring. No snakes involved. [image] Fake, but fabulous Raider - image from Mental Floss Review first posted – September 21, 2021 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - September 24, 2021 ----------Trade paperback - December 13, 2022 I received an e-ARE of True Raiders from St. Martins through NetGalley in return for doing some digging. Thanks, folks. This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Come say Hi! [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, and Twitter pages Interview -----Constant Wonder - Searching for the Ark of the Covenant - by Markus Smith - audio – 40:34 Items of Interest from the author -----Excerpt from The History Reader - True Raiders: Charles Warren -----The Untold Story of the Expedition to Find the Legendary Ark of the Covenant I try not to think about it too much, but I think I spent a great many lonely years earning a doctorate solely because of Raiders. I may not have been lost in Egyptian tombs or navigated ancient mazes, but I have found lost documents and have taught for many years out of cramped offices that resembled utility closets. And it was all great. But I never thought it would lead me to the Ark. Somewhere, I was disappointed not only that it hadn’t, but that I had foolishly believed it would.Items of Interest (Wikions?) -----Wiki on Charles Warren -----Wiki on Monty Parker -----Wiki on Cyril Foley -----Wiki on Book of Ezekial ----- Library of Congress - The Bertha Vester diaries -----World History Encyclopedia - The Moabite Stone [Mesha Stele] by William Brown ----- Wiki on Ava Lowle Willing Astor by Mark Meredith ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 18, 2021
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Sep 18, 2021
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Hardcover
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1250783712
| 9781250783714
| 1250783712
| 3.59
| 379
| Aug 26, 2021
| Aug 31, 2021
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it was amazing
| We think of wilderness as an absence of sound, movement and event. We rent our rural cottages ‘for a bit of peace and quiet.’ That shows how switch We think of wilderness as an absence of sound, movement and event. We rent our rural cottages ‘for a bit of peace and quiet.’ That shows how switched off we are. A country walk should be a deafening, threatening, frantic, exhausting cacophony.-------------------------------------- All humans are Sheherazades: we die each morning if we don’t have a good story to tell, and the good ones are all old.Up for a bit of time travel? No, no, no, not in the sci-fi sense of physically transporting to another era. But in the mostly imaginary sense of picturing oneself in a prior age. Well, maybe more than just picturing, maybe picturing with the addition of some visceral experience. Charles Foster has written about what life is like for otters, badgers, foxes, deer and swifts, by living like them for a time. He wrote about those experiences in his book, Being a Beast. He wonders, here, how experiencing life as a Paleolithic and a Neolithic person can inform our current understanding of ourselves. I thought that, if I knew where I came from, that might shed some light on what I am…It’s a prolonged thought experiment and non-thought experiment, set in woods, waves, moorlands, schools, abattoirs, wattle-and-daub huts, hospitals, rivers, cemeteries, caves, farms, kitchens, the bodies of crows, museums, breaches, laboratories, medieval dining halls, Basque eating houses, fox-hunts, temples, deserted Middle Eastern cities and shaman’s caravans. [image] Charles Foster - image from Oxford University His journey begins with (and he spends the largest portion of the book on) the Upper Paleolithic (U-P) era, aka the Late Stone Age, from 50,000 to 12,000 years ago, when we became, behaviorally, modern humans. Foster is quite a fan of the period, seeing it as some sort of romantic heyday for humanity, one in which we were more fully attuned with the environments in which we lived, able to use our senses to their capacity, instead of getting by with the vastly circumscribed functionality we have today. Interested in the birth of human consciousness, he puts himself, and his 12 yo son, Tom, not only into the mindset of late Paleolithic humans, but into their lives. He and Tom live wild in Derbyshire, doing their best to ignore the sounds of passing traffic, while living on roadkill (well, I guess they do not entirely ignore traffic) and the bounty of the woods. They deal with hunger, the need for shelter, and work on becoming attuned to their new old world. We’re not making the wood into our image: projecting ourselves onto it. It’s making us. If we let it.In one stretch Foster fasts for eight days, which helps bring on a hallucinatory state (intentionally). Shamanism is a major cultural element in the U-P portrait he paints. It is clearly not his first trip. He recalls an out-of-body experience he had while in hospital, the sort where one is looking down from the ceiling at one’s physical body, seeing this as of a cloth with a broader capacity for human experience. He relates this also to the cave paintings of the era, seeing them, possibly, as the end-product of shamanic tripping. This section of the book transported me back to the 1960s and the probably apocryphal books of Carlos Castaneda. Social grooming was important to ancestors of our species. But, with our enlarged brains able to handle, maybe, a community of 150 people, grooming became too cost-intensive. To maintain a group that size strictly by grooming, we’d have to groom for about 43% percent of our time, which would be deadly. Something else had to make up for the shortfall, and other things have. We have developed a number of other endorphin-releasing, bond-forming strategies that don’t involve touching [social distancing?]. They are…laughter, wordless singing/dancing, language and ritual/religion/story.It sure gives the expression rubbed me the wrong way some added heft. He has theories about religion, communication, and social organization that permeate this exploration. He posits, for example, that late Paleo man was able to communicate with a language unlike our own, a more full-body form of expression, maybe some long-lost form of charades. There is an ancient language, thought to have been used by Neanderthals, called HMMM, or holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical, and memetic communication. It is likely that some of this carried forward. And makes one wonder just how far back the roots go to contemporary languages that incorporate more rather than less musicality, more rather than less tonality, and more rather than less bodily support for spoken words. He writes about a time when everything, not just people, were seen as having a soul, some inner self that exists separately, although living within a body, a tree, a hare, a blade of grass. This sort of worldview makes it a lot tougher to hunt for reasons that did not involve survival. And makes understandable rituals in many cultures in which forgiveness is begged when an animal is killed. This becomes much more of a thing when one feels in tune with one’s surroundings, an experience Foster reports as being quite real in his Derbyshire adventure. This tells him that Paleo man was better able to sense, to be aware of his surroundings than almost any modern human can. Foster has a go at the Neolithic as well, trying to see what the shift from hunting-gathering to agriculture was like, and offers consideration of the longer-term impacts on humanity that emanated from that change. This is much less involved and involving, but does include some very interesting observations on how agriculture revolutionized the relationship people had with their environment. …the first evidence of sedentary communities comes from around 11,000 years ago. We see the first evidence of domesticated plants and animals at about the same time. Yet, it is not for another 7,000 years that there are settled villages, relying on domesticated plants or fixed fields. For 7,000 years, that is, our own model of human life, which we like to assume would have been irresistibly attractive to the poor benighted caveman, was resisted or ignored, just as it is by more modern hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers only become like us at the end of a whip. Our life is a last resort for the creatures that we really are.He notes that even when farming took root, many of those newly minted farmers continued living as hunter-gatherers for part of the year. He finishes up with a glance at the contemporary. More of a screed really. He notes that phonetic writing severed the connection our languages have with the reality they seek to portray. Pre-phonetic languages tend to be more onomatopoeic, the sounds more closely reflecting the underlying reality. He sees our modern brains as functioning mostly as valves, channeling all available sensation through a narrow pipeline, while leaving behind an entire world of possible human experience that we are no longer equipped to handle. To that extent we all have super-powers, of potential awareness, anyway, that lie waiting for someone to open the right valve, presuming they have not been corroded into inutility by disuse. He tells of meeting a French woman in Thailand whose near-death experience left her passively able to disrupt electronic mechanisms. She could not, for example, use ATMs. They would always malfunction around her. He takes a run at what is usually seen to indicate “modern” humanity. I’ve come to wonder whether symbolism is all it’s cracked up to be, and in particular whether its use really is the great watershed separating us from everything else that had gone before.He argues that trackers, for example, can abstract from natural clues the stories behind them, and those existed long before so-called “modern man.” He calls in outside authorities from time to time to fill in gaps. These extra bits always add fascinating pieces of information. For example, Later I wrote in panic to biologist David Haskell, an expert on birdsong, begging him to reassure me that music is ‘chronologically and neurologically prior to language.’ It surely is, he replied. ‘It seems that preceding both is bodily motion: the sound-controlling centers of the brain are derived from the same parts of the embryo as the limb motor system, so all vocal expression grows from the roots that might be called dance or, less loftily, shuffling about.Foster is that most common of writers, a veterinarian and a lawyer. Wait, what? Sadly, there is no telling in here (it is present in his Wiki page, though) of how he managed to train for these seemingly unrelated careers. (I can certainly envision a scenario, though, in which we hear lawyer Foster proclaiming to the court, “My client could not possibly be guilty of this crime, your honor. The forensic evidence at the scene clearly shows that the act was committed by an American badger, while my client, as anyone can see, is a Eurasian badger.”) It certainly seems clear, though, from his diatribes against modernity, where his heart is. In the visceral, physical work of dealing with animals, which lends itself to the intellectual stimulation of a truer, and deeper connection with nature. The first time (and one of the only times) I felt useful was shoveling cow shit in a Peak District farm when I was ten. It had a dignity that piano lessons, cub scouts, arithmetic and even amateur taxidermy did not. What I was detecting was that humans acquire their significance from relationship, that relationships with non-humans were vital and that clearing up someone’s dung is a good way of establishing relationships.In that case, I am far more useful in the world than I ever dreamed. GRIPES Foster can be off-putting, particularly to those us with no love of hunting, opening as he does with I first ate a live mammal on a Scottish hill. (Well, as least it wasn’t haggis.) I can well imagine many readers slamming the book shut at that point and moving on to something else. Will this be a paean to a manly killing impulse? Thankfully, not really, although there are some uncomfortable moments re the hunting of living creatures. Sometimes he puts things out that are at the very least questionable, and at the worst, silly. Our intuition is older, wiser and more reliable than our underused, atrophied senses. Really? Based on what data? So, making decisions by feelz alone is the way to go? Maybe I should swap my accountant for an inveterate gambler? He sometimes betrays an unconscious unkindness in the cloak of humor: The last thing I ate was a hedgehog. That was nine days ago. From the taste of them, hedgehogs must start decomposing even when they’re alive and in their prime. This one’s still down there somewhere, and my burps smell like a maggot farm. I regret it’s death under the wheels of a cattle truck far more than its parents or children possibly do.I doubt it. One stylistic element that permeates is seeing an imaginary Paleo man, X, and his son. Supposedly these might be Foster and Tom in an earlier era. It has some artistic appeal, but I did not think it added much overall. All that said, the overall take here is that this is high-octane fuel for the brain, however valved-up ours may be. Foster raises many incredibly fascinating subjects from the origins of religion, language, our native capabilities to how global revolutions have molded us into the homo sap of the 21st century. This is a stunning wakeup call for any minds that might have drifted off into the intellectual somnolence of contemporary life. There are simply so many ideas bouncing off the walls in this book that one might fear that they could reach a critical mass and do some damage. It is worth the risk. If you care at all about understanding humanity, our place in the world, and how we got here, skipping Being a Human would be…well…inhuman. It is an absolute must-read. We try to learn the liturgy: the way to do things properly; the way to avoid offending the fastidious, prescriptive and vengeful guardians of the place. Everything matters. We watch the rain fall on one leaf, trace the course of the water under a stone, and then we go back to the leaf and watch the next drop. We try to know the stamens with the visual resolution of a bumblebee and the snail slime with the nose of a bankvole and the leaf pennants on the tree masts with the cold eyes of kites. Review posted – 9/17/21 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - 8/31/21 ----------Trade paperback - 8/9/22 This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! I received an ARE of Being a Human from Metropolitan Books in return for a modern era review. Thanks, Maia. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, and Twitter pages By my count this is Foster’s 39th book Foster’s bio on Wiki Charles Foster (born 1962) is an English writer, traveller, veterinarian, taxidermist, barrister and philosopher. He is known for his books and articles on Natural History, travel (particularly in Africa and the Middle East), theology, law and medical ethics. He is a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford. He says of his own books: 'Ultimately they are all presumptuous and unsuccessful attempts to answer the questions 'who or what are we?', and 'what on earth are we doing here?'Interviews -----The Guardian - Going underground: meet the man who lived as an animal - re Being a Beast by Simon Hattenston -----New Books Network - Defined by Relationship by Howard Burton – audio - 1h 30m Items of Interest from the author -----Emergence Magazine - Against Nature Writing - on language as a barrier to understanding -----Shortform - Charles Foster's Top Book Recommendations Items of Interest -----Wiki on Bear Grylls - a British adventurer – mentioned in Part 1 as an example of someone more interested in the technology of survival than the point of it (p 62 in my ARE) -----Wiki on Yggdrasil - mentioned in Part 1 – humorously (p 85) -----Wiki on the Upper Paleolithic -----Dartmouth Department of Music – a review of a book positing that Neanderthals used musicality in their communications Review Feature - The Singing Neanderthals: the Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body by Steven Mithen - Foster addresses this in this discussion of the origins of human language -----Wiki on Carlos Castaneda -----Discover Magazine - Paleomythic: How People Really Lived During the Stone Age By Marlene Zuk Like it says – an interesting read ...more |
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liked it
| I recognize the ways in which running is transforming me. Through it, I am inflicting violence on myself and my body, submerging myself in pain lik I recognize the ways in which running is transforming me. Through it, I am inflicting violence on myself and my body, submerging myself in pain like I did when I was working in the warehouse alongside my mother, so that I may control the turmoil within me. But unlike any other labor, running relieves me of the weight that I should become better than my parents, my people.Noé Alvarez was at the beginning of his adult life, but he had seen a few things. Growing up near Yakima, WA, at 17, he took a job in a fruit packaging plant where his mother had worked for decades, in order to bring a bit more income into the household. Even though he had worked in the fields and done other physical labor as a kid, it gave him a lot more appreciation for how hard her life had been for all those years and gave him also a feeling of pride in doing his job well. The area promotes itself as The Palm Springs of Washington. Uh, no. It is, however, the area from where Raymond Carver hails, and Carver has provided a less than Palm-Springs-like look at it in his fiction. Hard-scrabble would be a better description. The train tracks that demarcate the town into East and West are no longer representative of the division between poor and rich neighborhoods—only poor and slightly less poor…We still seem trapped in the cycles of Carver’s narratives, as if his words condemned us to a world of loneliness, tarnished relationships, and violence. Seen differently, his words urge youth like us to rewrite ourselves out of these sinkholes. To sprint out of them.His parents had urged him to get out, and it looks like he will. Alvarez is accepted to Whitman College, with a generous aid package. The Hispanic Academic Achievers Program helps out more, so he winds up with a free ride. Off to Walla Walla in 2002. [image] Alvarez running in the event – image from WBUR.ORG In April 2004, two years into his college experience, he hears a speaker on Peace and Dignity Journeys (PDJ), a North American run through indigenous communities, from Alaska to Panama, held every four years. Alvarez had done some running, but was hardly a seasoned long-distance runner. Struggling with the demands of college, and buying in to a negative stereotype of himself and Hispanics generally, he decides this is for him, even asking Whitman for some money to get him started on it. They fork some over, which seems pretty sweet of them. Gotta say, that if it had been my kid dropping out of a free-ride college deal after two years, I would have been less than excited. Why not wait until you get your degree and catch this train the next time through? Sounds like Noé’s parents felt similarly. The man giving the presentation, Pacquiao, warned him of the hardships, but presented it as an event that promoted unity among indigenous peoples. But ok, college was not going all that well for him, so maybe a break was called for. Like, every step of the way, college was a very difficult thing for me. And it happened to coincide then when I was 19 years old with the Peace and Dignity Journeys, a six-month-long run that's organized every four years. And so it kind of saved me. It came - it coincided perfectly. I said, I needed to get out. I couldn't face my family. This is an opportunity for me to kind of hit the restart button and go and figure myself out. - from the NPR interviewThis is how Noé Alvarez found his way to the PDJ, but it is not how the book opens. There are many people who participate in this megamarathon. In the opening, we get a peek at each of the main ones before the event, strobe-light flashes of where they were just before deciding to join, maybe what prompted them. We get a where-are-they-now at the end of the book, a nice book-end. There is also a discontinuity between the event and Alvarez writing about it. I definitely wasn't ready to tell a story at 19. It's a lifelong process to make meaning out of it. I talked to some of the runners and I checked in with them too. I said, "Look, this is what I remember about you, this time. Do you remember that?" They shared information with me that I had blocked out. Then I just got to writing them. I took it scene by scene, just getting it down and figuring it out later, not thinking about the bigger picture because there were so many components to it. Runner's story, my story, dad's story, mom's story. It's a day by day thing. That's how the run was. - from the Salon interviewAlvarez reports on his experiences on this massive run, how he personally endures (or not) the physical demands, his attempts to extract meaning and connection from the PDJ, and his struggle to forge a clearer sense of his identity. In the run, he is only nineteen years old, so there is plenty of identity left to construct. He also fills us in on the uplifting welcomes given the runners in some communities and the occasional hostility of others sharing the road, including being hit by rocks courtesy of passing motorists, and concerns like encountering a mountain lion while running solo in a remote location, or waking up with a back full of blisters, courtesy of some crickets, getting lost in Los Angeles or seeing his knees swell to the size of melons. Though the run was physically taxing on the body, Álvarez joked, “running is the easy part.” Getting along with flawed people with broken histories could be challenging under the best of circumstances. - from the WBUR interviewWe meet, again, the runners whom he joins on the torturous trek from Alaska to Panama. Not all will last for the entirety. One of the strong points of the book is the stories he hears while hanging around the equivalent of a campfire after each day of extreme running. This was a highlight. Interesting, but not so compelling was the dysfunction within the group. The people on the run did not exactly seem like the most welcoming sorts. It certainly works as a descriptive, but does not exactly make us feel all that supportive for many of the runners and managers in this enterprise. People are people, whatever their origin, so this is not a huge shock, but I guess I was hoping that among a group of people who were engaged in a six-month test of their endurance and commitment, it might have been a bit less like middle school with more booze, sex, and snottiness. On the other hand, I have been around positively-minded political people at various stages in my life, and while most are pretty nice, there always seem to be some who are just awful. So, probably, bad on me for having unreasonable expectations. [image] Alvarez today - image from NBC News There is a duality here. Alvarez wants to support and identify with his working-class family, while wanting to feel a connection to a wider world, maybe a chance to fulfill his parents’ wish for him to have a better life than they had had. I know, why can’t one manage both? But it seems that the author, now in his thirties, has made some sort of a divide between the two. I seek elsewhere the spiritual and philosophical truths that running provided me. But within myself I believe that these truths can be achieved without a college education. The world tells me that achievement has to look one way, but I struggle with that.I take serious issue here, as the author appears to be conflating university education with a search for philosophical truths. Sure, it serves that purpose for many people. But it is a meaningful tool that allows one, or at least helps one, to make a decent enough living in the real world that one can afford to continue such truth-seeking without having to scrounge for cash. And Alvarez had some post-college work that was doing some real social good. In a description of his more contemporary life, he is working at lower end jobs than he really needs to. One was as an overnight guard at a museum. Here I contend not only with the mental fatigue of museum silence, but the nervous reality that has haunted and pestered me all my life: that I will always be working class.No shite, Sherlock. Been there, done that. I have my own guard uniform tucked away as well, but unlike Noé, I never really doubted my class status, despite college and graduate school. Sure, some can get out, but for the vast majority, while we may swap collar colors, our relationship to real power remains where it began. And it is likely to remain that way for our children as well. It is called a class-based society, whether the slots we are born into are Indian castes, or striations in the increasingly ill-named American middle class. The clacking dress shoes over marble floors remind me that I am surrounded by people who know where they’re going in life. In these small spaces, even in the most trivial conversations, I pretend that I matter, that people value my insight into random matters of life, literature, and local events.I would not project any sort of peace or direction onto anyone based on the sounds their shoes make on a marble floor. I have worked with many such people, as has Alvarez, and they are as likely to be as unhappy, or as undirected, as anyone walking on softer rubber soles. And if that is not persuasive, a quick look at any decent newspaper coverage of things political or economic should disabuse one of such notions. And maybe some people do value what you have to say. You can be working class and still have something to contribute that is of value, beyond physical labor, if sweat-based work is not sufficient to offer the feelz you need. That this book exists is absolute proof of that. Speaking of which, some of Alvarez’s writing can be beautifully descriptive, while lyrically evocative. It is an ink wash of a world here in rainy Chiapas where we traverse steep highlands with heavy feet, mobbing about the clouds as if in some dream world that smells of firewood. Roads coil around remote Mayan villages that appear and disappear in the fog like ghost towns. The silhouettes of women hunching over the land can be seen in the clouds, working the land, and carrying bundles of firewood on their backs.And then it can sometimes be clunky, for which I blame editors more than Alvarez, unless, of course, things of this sort were raised and changes were overruled by the author. My eye sockets sink with exhaustion… Not likely. Maybe your eyes sink, or it feels like they are sinking, within the sockets, but I expect the sockets stayed exactly where they were. Another. When the rhythms of working-class life cut inside me like broken beer glass, I run. Maybe broken beer bottle glass? What is, actually, broken beer? This sort of thing should result in DMV-like points on one’s poetic license. One further concern. Much is made of the importance of this run to healing. It was never clear enough to me how exactly that worked. Maybe I was missing something. Always a possibility. But repeating what sounded to me like a mantra about how this was about healing and that was about healing without really explaining how, made me feel in need of some healing of my own. There are plenty of wrongs that have been foisted on indigenous people. How does this run help heal those lesions? It sounded to me like a line of political truism taken in, and repeated, by a new, young (19) adherent, who was fully on board, but who did not yet have a deep grasp of the content under the slogan. I am not saying there was not healing of some sort going on, just that it could have used a bit more explication. I did like, in Alvarez’s introductory remarks on the NCRL site, (linked in EXTRA STUFF), his piece about running as a form of connection and prayer. The road is a classic image of the journey of self-discovery. We expect our narrator to begin in one place, both physically and emotionally or psychologically, and end his road trip someplace else, both internally and externally. I am struck ultimately by how little this run actually seemed to impact the author’s life. There is an immediate result, though. He does return to school, completing his expected education and much more, doing work that is of obvious value in the world. Yet finds insufficient psychic reward in that. Surprisingly, he seems no closer to finding what he was looking for years after the event than he was before he joined. While Alvarez may have picked up a nice trove of tales to tell, it was not at all clear that there was enough growth here to write about, given where he is when he writes the story. Does Alvarez feel more connected to his indigenous brothers and sisters, the indigenous communities through which the run passed? Sure. But what does one do with that? Is this a purely personal effort? Does it lead him to look for ways to help support Native American communities, or groups, after the race was over? If so, it was not obvious. He seems shifted more to a generic desire to help poor people. It seemed a very personal journey, despite the initial rationale, and his initial enthusiasm for being included. Which leads one to consider whether this was the intent. He even admits it was a need for a personal restart that was a great motivator. Maybe not all journeys really take you somewhere. Intended or not, that was where this one dropped me off. But the run certainly helped Alvarez embrace who he was at one level, furthering his sense of connection with his family. ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 24, 2020
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May 24, 2020
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1948226197
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| May 07, 2019
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really liked it
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[image] Image from The Adventurists Many of the people I’ll meet on the steppe hold horses as sacred. There are more love songs about horses than a[image] Image from The Adventurists Many of the people I’ll meet on the steppe hold horses as sacred. There are more love songs about horses than about women in Mongolia—for example, ponies come last in races are sung commiseration songs because no one wants them to feel bad. Your horse is an extension of you. A Mongol without a horse is like a bird without wings—goes the proverb. Even horses’ skulls are sacred. They’re made into musical instruments, whose sounds comfort mourning souls.What has 25 legs and covers 1,000 kilometers? Why, the Mongol Derby, of course. Ring any bells? Ummm, me neither. Unless one is particularly attuned to the worlds of equestrian sports or extreme competitions we would be unlikely to have heard of it. Lara Prior-Palmer had heard of it, but had not paid much attention. The entry fee was exorbitant (about $13K US), which led her to expect that she would not be able to even think of attempting it until she was in her thirties, if then. A bored teen, a year out of high school, recently sacked from her au pair gig in Austria, her applications for other adventures producing a resounding silence, she was trolling about for her next thing, whatever might quell the inner buzz that grows louder and louder until it drowns out everything but a way forward, any way forward. She was looking on-line for something to quiet the din, when it reappeared. The passing London underground train shook the building as I leaned into the photograph—long-maned ponies streaming over green steppes, space poured wide and free—in Mongolia. The open-voweled sounds of the word matched the freedom of the country conjured in my mind. I couldn’t place Mongolia in history, nor could I place it on the map.She read on, learning that thirty riders had already signed up, that riders switch ponies every 40 Km, that the race was held in a Pony Express style that recalled Chingiss Khan’s postal system, and that it was deemed “the world’s longest and toughest horse race.” She clicked the box. [image] Lara Prior-Palmer - image from her Amazon page What are the things we might look for in a memoir of this sort? One would hope for a look at an exotic place from a perspective familiar to readers, presuming most readers to be Westerners. Given that it is a sports competition, we would hope for a look at the particulars of this race, what, if anything, sets it apart from other competitions? You’ve gotta figure that a 1,000 kilometer horse race would have to also be a journey of self-discovery, and there is at least some of that in here. Not to say that it was intended. The writing of this book began on the plane ride home to England from Ulaanbaatar, and was intended mostly as a large note-taking effort to better allow Lara to recall the event. Encouraged to expand her 25,000 words to book length by folks to whom she showed her writing, Prior-Palmer did just that, working on the manuscript, off and on, for about five years. It helps if the author can bring some talent, maybe an appreciation of beauty in her writing. [image] A Mongolian ger (yurt) - image from Phys.org Tough to get more exotic than Mongolia for most of us. And while you may be familiar with some of the weather the riders encounter, hot, cold, wind, hail, rain, you have probably not done so while engaged in a grueling horse race. Prior-Palmer fills us in on a host of local details. You will learn of the proper seating arrangements in a Mongolian ger (pronounced ‘gaire’), get a heads up on the proper behavior when encountering an ovoo, (a local shrine consisting of accumulated placed stones, and offerings), and marvel at car parts placed in trees to help gain the assistance of local deities in assuring that the subject vehicle remains in good working order. There are observations on Mongolian history and lore. One local historical figure was Molon Bagsh, an itinerant philosopher who supposedly predicted many of the wonders of the modern age from his perspective in the early 1900s. She offers a bit on the deep respect Mongolians have for their equine partners. One strand of Mongolian philosophy has it that my chest, not my brain, is the seat of my consciousness. It contains my heimori (wind-horse)—an inner creature whose power needs maintaining. When you rub a racehorse’s sweat into your forehead or ride a great, quick pony, you strengthen your heimori and improve your destiny.(You might want to towel off after that.) There are plenty more such, and they are delightful. The race itself occupies most of her consciousness. There is plenty of detail on how it is run, the accommodations, the horses, referred to here almost primarily as ponies. (BTW, to be a horse there is a height bar, 14.2 hands, or about four feet ten inches. Shorter than that, you are a pony. Mongolian equines tend to the shorter end of the bell curve.) The selection process. Which pony to choose? Based on what? Loving the ponies who were eager to fly, but having to cope with some which were far from enthusiastic. The relationships among the riders is pretty significant, particularly Lara’s relationship with an American rider, one Devan Horn, portrayed as a braggadocious Texan, certain that she will prevail. What begins as a bit of competitiveness becomes an all-consuming quest to see to it that this person is denied that victory. Her bonding, or not, with other riders, and non-riders (newspeople, veterinarians, race managers) is an ongoing subject. There are connections made or almost made during the race that highlight interpersonal challenges Lara must resolve, at least temporarily. It is difficult, and not at all necessary, to separate her coping with the race from her dealings with the locals. Riders often stay in the homes of residents, and Lara recalls some charming, as well as clueless interactions. [image] Ponies in waiting - image from The Adventurists Bear in mind that Lara was barely 19 years old when she undertook this adventure. Her age is certainly a factor in her degree of unpreparedness. While a good chunk of who we all are is well set by such an age, it takes plenty more years for the rest of the permanent us to form. What we see here is Lara as a work-in-progress. One element that manifests stronglyis the sort of stiff-upper-lip found in explorers and adventurers. I suppose we think of pain as associated with an event—an accident, for example. We don’t imagine it going on forever. I found no space for pain and its expression in daily life.She is also someone uncomfortable around public feelings. I shiver a little, relieved to be away from Clare. [a rider with whom Lara had spent some time during the competition] I find emotions contagious, swear I can catch them like flu. I’ve always been wary of upset and sickness. Aged seven, I dubbed people crybabies as though it were a life sentence and I winced in repulsion if someone missed school for sickness. I refused to let such a thing happen to me. Although later on I used sickness to save me from school, I still had no empathy for the unwell and the upset. Why would I try to imagine how Clare feels when I’m appalled she’s displayed the emotional hold the Derby has on her. Such is the strangeness of my selfishness.We get some background on family influences that fed her drive. Her Aunt Lucinda was an Olympian, having competed in equestrian events. Her favorite, no nonsense, phrase for just get on with it being “Crack On!” Her grandfather, a military general, was fond of “Just do it.” Firmed up for competition and adventure by such, she was much less able to cope with more emotional challenges. …my real fears aren’t the broken bones or the missing ponies. My real fears are long-term affairs like school, marriage, and jobs. Anything requiring a commitment longer than a ten-day race. Maybe because millions of people manage these commitments, they go unnoticed. Ordinary jobs and relationships—spread over humdrum time—are rarely thought of as brave or strong.And therein, among other such contemplations, is where we find some of the distance that Lara travels personally. Over the course of the book we see some development that maybe Lara herself does not quite perceive. Learning to see things from someone else’s perspective, learning to consider other ways to value things and actions. Her sense of not quite knowing who she is persists. It’s just I haven’t decided if I’m woodland-wild or fireside-tame, and probably never will. But she has certainly gained in building on the self-reflective muscle she finds inside. [image] Lara accepting a congratulatory call after her victory – Devan Horn in the background will have to wait for another chance-image from CNN A pointed element of self-realization is her change from seeing the race as an adventure, hoping mostly just to finish, to feeling the fire of competitiveness that was there all along, and not just to be able to stick it to Devan. There certainly must have been some part of Lara that chose a competitive adventure over the many others that the world offers. And she becomes more aware of that part of herself. She grew up in a culture that scorns overt ambition, and public presentations of self-confidence, so there was plenty of reason for her to suppress or hide her very real competitiveness. We read of sporting victories in the newspapers, but what about all we cannot see? It’s easy to forget the thudded moments of hopelessness involved in a journey, one’s deepest difficulties slowly made clear.In addition to coping with some inner parts of herself undergoing a bit of examination, Prior-Palmer suffered some of the misfortunes that were visited on other contestants: bruises, dehydration, being tossed from her mount, having to get help retrieving it, becoming ill on the (for her) six-day race. And then there were self-imposed problems, being unprepared in sundry ways, like not bringing a map, not getting the recommended vaccinations, never having ridden even a one-day race, let alone one that could last ten days, or not providing for some sanitary needs. There is some contemplative poetic writing in Prior-Palmer’s memoir. Particularly when she writes of her feeling of oneness with her ponies. For two and a half hours my focus is whole. He moves fluently, and I note the quiet warmth of his company. You make no eye contact when riding, but we’re in communication, working a shared form, like shoaling fish. Horses have always been siblings to me, pressing their noses against my back and breathing out winter breath, slowly trusting. From his silence and the morning I draw something, something like strength…Instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Everything in the hour is familiar. The pony hurries on beneath me, persuading his way into my heart. [image] Image from CNN A thread in the book consists of passages from The Tempest, one of the reading materials she brought with her, to illustrate this or that. The arrival of the storm-driven characters in Shakespeare’s final play, washed clean in a way, pops to mind as she is caught in downpour on the steppe. A passage in which Ariel sings about a sea change in the play connects with Lara feeling transformed while riding a pony she names The Lion. It is a lovely element, but still felt a bit forced. There was plenty going on without it. The book’s title is drawn from The Tempest as well, which seemed workshop-y and less than organic, at first, given that the “rough magic” referred to in the play has to do with the bard’s ability to present fiction as reality. But on further consideration, if we forget the Shakespearean bit for a moment, “Rough” certainly works as a description of the event, and “Magic” is certainly appropriate or the magical ending of the competition, and some of Lara’s perceptions. So, never mind. Since the race, Prior-Palmer, now 24, has been to University and worked on this book in fits and starts. She feels her experience gave her a better ability to consider alternate viewpoints. But she did not feel particularly changed by the race itself at the time. She remained very much who she was, an adventure-seeking, athletic, bright, articulate young woman with a world of possibilities ahead of her and a world-class achievement already in the bag. Review posted – May 31, 2019 Publication date -----May 7, 2019 - hardcover -----April 28, 2020 - Trade paperback ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 07, 2019
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May 14, 2019
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May 21, 2019
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Hardcover
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0345816773
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| 0345816773
| 3.88
| 5,566
| Jan 30, 2018
| Jan 30, 2018
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it was amazing
| The end of the road was always just out of sight. Cracked asphalt deepened into night beyond the reach of our headlamps, the thin beams swallowed The end of the road was always just out of sight. Cracked asphalt deepened into night beyond the reach of our headlamps, the thin beams swallowed by the blackness that receded before us no matter how fast we biked. Light was a kind of pavement thrown down in front of our wheels, and the road went on and on. If you ever reach the end, I remember thinking, I’ll fly off the rim of the world. I pedaled harder.Some lights shine brighter. The sky is full of stars, all with their distinct glow, color, and twinkle. But there can be no denying that, as breathtaking as are all the lights we can see after sunset, some call your attention at least a bit more. There are some on which you fixate. Kate Harris is one of those. She burns radiantly with obvious intellectual brilliance, which combines with a broad knowledge of science and humanities, glows with an impressive poetic gift for descriptive language, and is possessed of an incredible store of determination. [image] Lands of Lost Borders is Kate Harris’s telling of a bike trip she took with her from-pre-teen-years bff Melissa Yule. Nothing much, really, just a leisurely jaunt across the Silk Road. Be home in time for dinner, dear. Ten months and ten thousand biking kilometers later, they were. Actually, the journey was broken up into two trips, (so, back in time for lunch?) and took over a year in total. This book focuses on the longer chunk of their ride. I wanted to bike the Silk Road as an extension of my thesis at Oxford: to study how borders make and break what is wild in the world, from mountain ranges to people’s minds, and how science, or more specifically wilderness conservation, might bridge those divides.There is drive and then there is DRIVE!!! Most of us have it in modest quantities, sometimes in spikes, sometimes it barely registers. Mine has been of the spike sort. Finding, on occasion, a target, something that fills or I thought would fill a need, I found the wherewithal to make it happen. One, when I was still a teen, was tracking down a young lass I had seen at a frat party. Another was finding a study abroad program when I was tending to a broken heart, and was looking to heal somewhere far away, a third was plotting a cross country trip in an old Postal truck with a small group of peers. Not exactly riding the Silk Road, but maybe a small taste of the joys to be had when what has been dreamt of crosses the border into reality. Of course, once across that frontier, the new land in which one finds oneself may or may not be what one had imagined. But getting from here to there, setting and accomplishing a goal is a glorious experience. One that I expect all of us have had, to one degree or another. And hopefully one that we all nurture and renew at least somewhat through the course of our lives. There are some people, however, who set their sights slightly higher, sometimes beyond the bell curve, outside the box, off the beaten path. [image] Happiness is a red Hilleberg tent pitched among snowy mountains - Image from Harris’s FB pix The higher we climbed onto the Tibetan Plateau, the better I could breathe. I felt a strange lightness in my legs, an elation of sorts. Each revolution of the pedals took me closer to the stars than I’d ever propelled myself, not that I could see them by day, when the sky was blue and changeless but for a late-morning drift of clouds. The shadows they cast dappled the slopes of mountains like the bottom of a clear stream, so that climbing the pass felt like swimming up towards the surface of something, a threshold or a change of state. Earth to sky, China to Tibet.Harris writes of her early upbringing, hanging with her brothers, moving several times, particularly enjoying remote places. It did not take long for her to set her sights beyond the horizon, well, beyond the planet, actually. She had decided as a teen that she wanted to go to Mars, under the impression that all of her home planet had already been pretty much explored. She gained some notice from the Mars Society after she sent a letter to dozens of world leaders urging them to support a manned (womaned?) mission to the Red Planet. She went on a few Outward Bound adventures, and translated her particular gift for grant writing into third-party funding for projects of various sorts across the world. Toss in an early passion for biology as well. [image] Melissa Yule and Kate Harris - image from Explore-mag.com Harris and Yule had been teaming up for sundry adventures since they were classmates as pre-teens. Science fair projects eventually gave way to other pursuits. They ran in the NYC marathon, on a whim, according to their bios in CyclingSilk.com. Who does that? These two, apparently. They also biked across the USA in 2005 and rode bikes across Tibet and Xinjiang in 2006. (the earlier piece of the Silk Road trip.) I guess they were just getting warmed up. In 2011, three Masters degrees between them later, Harris’s from Oxford and MIT, they combined their endurance-athlete inclinations, a permanent desire for adventure, and an interest in protecting imperiled landscapes and ways of life to try to ride the entire Silk Road, or at least as much as was possible, beyond what they had already ridden. Some borders are real, though, defended by people with guns, and require one to set off in an unplanned direction. So, there were interludes that had them on trucks, buses, trains, and planes. Longing on a large scale,” says novelist Don DeLillo, “is what makes history.” And longing on a smaller scale is what sends explorers into the unknown, where the first thing they do, typically, is draw a map.There are passages throughout the book on nature conservation, and the irrelevance of political borders to biological realities, but I got the feeling that this was far secondary to the ecstasy of adventuring. It seemed to me that Kate’s prodigious talent at writing grant applications, and no doubt Mel’s as well, had secured necessary funding (a $10K grant, plus considerable other support) for their odyssey, but reporting on conservation along the ride, while constituting the labor required to justify the grant, was something less than a passion. ( I was smitten with wildness, and only incidentally with science.) Of course, it could be that Harris and Yule’s reports back to their sponsors on the more scientific details of the pair’s extended field trip was the channel for most of that material. This book focuses on the adventure of exploration and, remaining true to the title, a consideration of borders, literal and figurative. [image] From Harris’s Facebook pages The more I learned about the South Caucasus, with its closed borders and warring enclaves, the more the place seemed like a playground game of capture-the-flag turned vicious, all in the dubious name of nationalism. And yet political fortunes, while sometimes solid as brick, are finally only as strong as shared belief.Harris provides spot-by-spot descriptions of the places through which they travel. She notes the sorts of things you would expect, the landscape, the architecture, the weather, the physical conditions of the area, the traffic, the colors and textures, the friendliness (or not) of the locals and the pair’s interactions with them. The history of the places they traverse comes in for a bit of a look. The origins of the word “Tibet,” for example, a consideration of whether Marco Polo actually traveled as far as he claimed, and disappointment that his motivation was solely mercantile and not exploratory. One source of inspiration was an intrepid female explorer from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Fanny Bullock Workman, a mountaineer and explorer also fond of the bicycle. this particular stretch of salt and wind, nearly uninhabited and widely dismissed as a wasteland, is one of the most contested territories in Asia. Tibetan by cultural heritage, Indian by treaty claim, and Chinese by possession, the Aksai Chin is caught in this territorial tug-of-war owing to its strategic location between nations. It all began when China furtively build a road across it in 1957, the very dirt track we were on, roping like a slow-burning fuse for more than 1,600 kilometres over the emptiness of the plateau. India only clued in to Highway 219’s existence half a decade later, and their discovery detonated a war over the borderland.[image] image from NatureNeedsHalf.org She fills us in on some of the logistical challenges involved, the hurdles to be jumped in getting the correct papers to cross from here to there, the difficulty of communicating when there is no common language, the struggle to find food, water and shelter, replacements for lost or broken pieces of this or that. One surprise was the absence of any reports of serious sexual predation, although she does report on the need to move quickly at times to evade potential unpleasantness. There are several reports of wonderful, warm experiences, as locals take the pair under their wings for a meal and a warm place to sleep. They are even joined for a time by a stray dog, and are swarmed by a herd of Tibetan antelope. Anyone can recognize wildness on the Tibetan Plateau; the challenge is perceiving it in a roadside picnic area in Azerbaijan.Harris’s telling is not just the travelogue of seeing this, then that, but includes ongoing philosophical meanderings, about her own experiences and the wider human variety, about not only the political borders with which people must contend, but personal edges, where they begin and end, or don’t. Her intellectual explorations are bolstered by a rich trove of quotes from literary classics, both prose and poetry, and from some of the authors you would expect, like Thoreau and Muir, Wallace, Darwin, and Carl Sagan. But finally, it is Harris’s gift for language that elevates this book to Himalayan heights. Combining intellectual heft with an inquiring mind is amazing enough, but to be able to communicate both the inner and outer journeys with such sensitivity and beauty is a rare accomplishment indeed. After being on an achievement bender most of my life, the prospect of withdrawal, of doing anything without external approval, or better yet acclamation, kept me obediently between the lines I couldn’t even recognize as lines. Isn’t that the final, most forceful triumph of borders? They make us accept as real and substantial what we can’t actually see?[image] image from NatureNeedsHalf.org I would not want you get through this review without at least a few roadblocks. I really wanted for each chapter to include a map of the travels contained therein. There is a map provide at the beginning, but chapter-by-chapter additions would have been most welcome. I would have liked a bit more science in the book, even if it added a fair number of pages to the total. A quibble. I wonder, though, if Harris was aware of the issues faced by Fanny Bullock Workman, who also wrote of her travels, having greater popular success with work that focused more on the travel than the scientific findings. Whether buttressed with dirt roads or red tape, barbed wire or bribes, the various walls of the world have one aspect in common: they all posture as righteous and necessary parts of the landscape.This is not your summer trip to Europe. You will not be familiar with most of the places these two riders visit. The larger entities, sure, country names, some mountain ranges, but most of the local place names will be unfamiliar. Part of the fun of reading this book is that it sends you off on a journey of discovery of your own, looking up this town, that river, or an unheard-of plain or valley. In this, the book very much succeeds in sparking a bit of the exploratory impulse in most readers. You may or may not want to schedule a trip to many of the places she notes, but you will definitely want to learn more about them. The true risks of travel are disappointment and transformation: the fear you’ll be the same person when you go home, and the fear you won’t. Then there’s the fear, particularly acute on roads in India, that you won’t make it home at all.[image] image from Explore Magazine – shot by Kate Harris It may be grueling, surprising, filled with up and downs, demoralizing, exhilarating, exciting, stunningly beautiful, and rich with landscape, exterior and interior. Lands of Lost Borders may not wear out your arms or legs, your back, or any other muscle group, (ok, maybe the muscles that control your eyes) but it will stimulate your mind, lift up your spirit, and stimulate your need to pedal through darkness into knowing. Lands of Lost Borders is a stunning literary memoir you will not soon forget. Exploration, more than anything, is like falling in love: the experience feels singular, unprecedented, and revolutionary, despite the fact that others have been there before. No one can fall in love for you, just as no one can bike the Silk Road or walk on the moon for you. The most powerful experiences aren’t amenable to maps. Review posted – April 6, 2018 Publication date – August 21, 2018 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages Melissa Yule’s Twitter page. Yule holds a Master’s degree in International Development from the University of Guelph. Her interests include community development and environmental science. Here is her profile on the CyclingSilk.com site. There is a lot of information available at Cycling Silk. I strongly advise you to check out the site. A brief (11:43) video of their trip In case you missed the link in the body of the review, it is worth checking out Fanny Bullock Workman, one of Harris’s heroes. The Golden Record – it was sent on the Voyager mission to let far-away civilizations know we are here. Harris talks about it a fair bit at one point in the book [image] What’s on it - image from Wiki The Harper Book Queen included a bit on this book in her TBR Tuesdays FB live broadcast from 8/21/18 - at 11:47 Interviews -----The Globe and Mail - In a tiny B.C. cabin, Kate Harris penned tales of travel along the Silk Road - by Marsha Lederman - 2/15/18 -----Explore Magazine - The Way of the Wolf: Lands of Lost Borders, With Author Kate Harris What was the hardest part of the journey?[image] The Harris Mansion - image from the Globe and Mail article 400 sq ft of paradise in Atlin, B.C. suits the author just fine. Not surprising that she is comfy in what most of us might consider roughing-it quarters. She is a descendant of William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame. Sorry, I could not help it. There were just so many quotes from the book that I wanted to use. But it was not possible to fit them all in. So off we go to EXTRA EXTRA STUFF right below here in Comment #1 ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 19, 2018
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Mar 29, 2018
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Mar 29, 2018
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Hardcover
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0062218298
| 9780062218292
| 0062218298
| 4.08
| 11,326
| Mar 04, 2014
| Mar 04, 2014
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it was amazing
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Astoria is a tale of two journeys. It is an adventure of the highest order, and with Peter Stark as your guide, it is one of the best non-fiction book
Astoria is a tale of two journeys. It is an adventure of the highest order, and with Peter Stark as your guide, it is one of the best non-fiction books you will read for a long time. In 1803, the Louisiana Purchase had brought the young United States all the land draining into the Mississippi (at least according to our side of the story). The President wanted to know all he could about what he had bought, particularly as there were still some disagreements going on over the breadth of the purchase. Thus the Lewis and Clarke Expedition, in 1804, and the later Red River Expedition and Pike Expedition provided Jefferson the information about this new land he needed to negotiate with France, and others. But what lay beyond? Opportunity, resources, and vast swaths of land. [image] Peter Stark - image taken from Random House In the early 1800s, John Jacob Astor was one of the richest men of his time. He had made a fortune trading North American furs in Europe, and had begun trading with China as well. What he had in mind was to take advantage of the fur resources of the Northwest and establish a triangle trade. Northwest furs to the Orient, porcelain from China to London and New York and other goods from there back to the Northwest. His aim was to monopolize trading on the Pacific Rim, at a time when Lewis and Clark had been across the country only a few years prior. He involved Jefferson, who also had a more global vision than other men of the day. The Northwest was unclaimed by westerners, (no thought was given, per usual, to the native people who were actually living there) and was considered available for the taking. For Astor it was to be a base for establishing a trade monopoly. Jefferson saw an opportunity to spread democracy to the west coast, and encouraged Astor. To accomplish his aim, it would be necessary for Astor to establish a base of operations. He decided on the area near the mouth of the Columbia River. He put together two groups of men to reach the spot, one to travel by sea the other to cross the continent by land. It is their adventures that form the bulk of the story, and what a story it is. Were this a novel, the dueling road trips would both be tales of self-discovery. This is a case where reality exceeds fiction. The character of many of the travelers is revealed in how they handle the extreme stresses to which they are subjected. Following the development, or revelation of their characters, for good or ill, is one of the great pleasures to be had in reading Astoria. The ship Astor sent was the Tonquin, a 290 ton bark. He selected as its captain the young (31) US Navy lieutenant Jonathan Thorn. Thorn had been a military hero, serving with distinction in the Barbary Wars, and Astor wanted someone who could fend off potential attacks. Our friends across the pond, engaged in a tiff with Napoleon, had taken to stopping vessels in international waters and shanghaiing sailors or passengers who were British subjects to fight the French. Rule Britannia was not being sung by the crews of American-flag ships. This aqueous stop-and-frisk imposition would be one of the causes of the War of 1812. [image] An engraving of the Tonquin at the entrance to the Columbia, from the Oregon historical Society While the captain was the right sort for dealing with a military crew and worked well within the rigid specifications of a military regimen, he was not so adept at controlling a crew that was not exactly military, and most of whom were not even American citizens. Also aboard were shareholders in Astor’s company, a dozen clerks, four tradesmen and a baker’s dozen rough and tumble voyageurs from what is now Canada. He also had a lot to learn about dealing with locals and trade negotiating. The ship was challenged to endure near continual onslaught, whether from the elements, a pursuing ship, or the captain’s personality. He got along so well with the crew that they took to speaking with each other in their native tongues, which Thorn did not speak. And more than once he intentionally set sail while tardy returnees were still on land. His rigidity made for a dark passage. And his sometimes cavalier attitude towards the survival of his own men is breathtaking. He might be charged with depraved indifference today. Along with a certain Captain Queeg, I was reminded of a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Consider here Thorn as the king (although Arthur seems quite a bit less rigid) and the castle residents as his crew. The Overland Party was led by Wilson Price Hunt, a young (27) businessman who had worked with fur-traders in St Louis. A polar opposite to Thorn, Hunt was someone who sought, above all else, to construct consensus. The Overland group did not exactly have a roadmap to their destination. The route they took followed in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark for a time, but they had to carve a new trail at a certain point, into completely unknown and not terribly welcoming territory. [image] Despite the term Overland, much of the Overland Party’s travel was done by water, on rivers. This is the sort of conveyance the Voyageurs were accustomed to paddling - image from the Canadian Encyclopedia Far too much of their river time was spent in water of this sort. [image] From the Susquehanna Chapter of the Wooden Canoe Heritage Association In a blog entry on Stark’s site, he writes The big Montreal freight canoes could be as long as 40 feet, yet made of lightweight birchbark, and capable of carrying three or four tons of supplies or furs, propelled by ten or twelve voyageurs.It is amazing how many times the Overland Party was assisted by Native Americans. But there were also plenty of locals who were not exactly happy to see them. How the Overland group interact with the natives they encounter is a significant element of the story. How they survived, (or didn’t) is the stuff of adventure yarns. How Hunt herded his pack of cats (and sometimes didn’t) is very impressive. This was definitely not a crew to belong to if you walked on four limbs. Resources became extremely scarce, and desperate measures had to be taken. There is even a hint that starving sojourners might have partaken of the special meat. Some characters stand out here. My favorite is Marie Dorian, a native woman who had married a Metis named Pierre. He dragged her along on the Overland trek, along with her two small (2 and 4 year old) children even thought she was pregnant at the time. Hers is a particularly poignant profile in courage and endurance. There are a few legendary names that folks in this tale encounter, including Sacagawea and Daniel Boone. The story is the thing here, and focus remains on the travails of the travelers. But there are also excellent, informative asides, relevant to the tale, about various and sundry things. One tells why sea otter pelts are so highly valued. Another looks into the societal composition of some native groups, looking at their sources of wealth and social organization. Consideration is given to how the locals react to newcomers, and why, citing past experiences. There is also ongoing consideration for the impact on the enterprise of potential and then kinetic British-US hostilities. We know today that the nation did indeed expand to the West Coast, but the details are plenty soft in your recollections, I will wager. It might not even be that you (or I) forgot, but that we never really knew. Astoria offers an excellent way to patch that gap. It will excite you in the process. This is real-life adventuring, life and death on the line, people you will admire and scoundrels who will make you hiss. What a fun read, and what an informative book! It may or may not be a far, far better read than you have ever had before, but I cannot urge you strongly enough to climb, trek, paddle, or sail to your nearest book-trading post. This journey to Astoria is very definitely a trip worth taking. PS – the volume I worked from was an ARE, so did not have all the materials expected to be in the final hardcover edition. Spaces were left for illustrations but I did not get to see those. One thing I did see is that there is a very helpful Cast of Characters section at the front of the book, and another at the back called The Fate of the Astorians, which I thought was pretty cool. Published ----------Hardcover - March 4, 2014 ----------Trade paperback - February 10, 2015 Review first posted - December 8, 2013 This review is cross-posted on Coot’s Reviews =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal and FB pages Here is a link to the Wiki entry for the Tonquin – but if you have not yet read the book, be warned that there is very spoilerish info there. Although I expect the physique of this re-enactor might not match the bulkier torsos of actual voyageurs, this might give you an idea of what was considered proper attire for the proud paddlers [image] So there it is. I was wondering what had happened to that shirt. For more on voyageurs check out this piece from McGill University Astor could not have suspected that Astoria would become a familiar site in many films. Here is a list of a bunch. It includes The Goonies, Short Circuit, Kindergarten Cop, The Black Stallion and plenty more. John Day was a member of the Overland Party. He does run into a bit of trouble at the mouth of what was then the Mah-hah River, along the Columbia. It was later renamed for him. A geologically notable site through which that river wanders was also named for him. Day himself was never near there. I have had the pleasure and there are a few shots in my Northwest set on Flickr that offer a glimpse of the striking landscape. The National Park Service site for John Day NP is definitely worth a look Among the places the Overland Party encountered, one that held great hope for them was seeing one particular Mountain chain. The three mountains were hailed by the travelers, Wilson Price Hunt, weighted by his Yankee reserve and need for geographic grounding in this unmapped wilderness, called them the Pilot Knobs. The buoyant French-Canadian voyageurs called the as they saw them, the Trois Tetons,--“the three breasts.”It’s the voyageurs’ name, which has stuck for these mountains that tower above today’s Jackson Hole, Wyoming.[image] Grand indeed Also, that image I use as my GR avatar to spare you the crypt-worthy image of my ancient puss is from the Tetons as well. Today’s city of Astoria, Oregon has a nice site Sadly, while I have been to Astoria, and even visited its Astor Column, it was while my wife and I were in a bit of a rush, heading back to our temporary camp in Portland from a trip to the coast. Did not get there until far too late in the day to get any decent photographs. Then, assisted by considerable fog, we inadvertently took a scenic route that featured a seemingly endless series of blind turns, and was inhabited by large numbers of bulky four-legged creatures standing in the middle of the road and appearing only moments before impact…well, in my white-knuckled imagination, anyway. Having read the book, I would dearly love to return to Astoria, in daylight, and have much more of a clue than I had then what it was all about. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Dec 03, 2013
not set
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Dec 04, 2013
not set
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Dec 03, 2013
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Hardcover
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0061671835
| 9780061671838
| 0061671835
| 3.83
| 108
| Jan 30, 2010
| Feb 09, 2010
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really liked it
| …through the observations in Africa and Southeast Asia of scores of primatologists spawned by Fossey and Goodall, we have discovered great ape spec …through the observations in Africa and Southeast Asia of scores of primatologists spawned by Fossey and Goodall, we have discovered great ape species each have their separate character. The orangutans are introspective loners; gorillas laid back and largely undemonstrative; the bonobos gleeful hedonists; and chimpanzees the thugs, by far the most destructive and murderous… from the PrologueBut, to varying degrees, and for diverse reasons, they are all disappearing from the wild. [image] From the Universitad Pompeo Fabra in Barcelona The author wanted to see what he could of them in their native haunts while there was still the opportunity. He looks at gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans, the first three in Africa, the last in Borneo. What he finds is both fascinating and alarming. Paul Rafaele is a certified character. In 2007, he was interviewed by Peter Carlson for The Washington Post. Carlson characterized him as a professional adventurer, perhaps the last in a long line of popular writers who ventured into wild places and returned with electrifying tales of fearsome animals and strange humans.The last apes the Aussie adventurer reported on in book form were the naked variety, and he was looking into the predilection of some for feeding on their own. Not so much with our furrier cousins. [image] This image graces the inside rear flap of the book, and does as good a job as any of portraying the author Gorillas Diane Fossey made the world aware of gorillas, but not all of them. Turns out there are several sub-species. She specialized in the mountain variety, the largest of the four. There are eastern and western lowland varieties and the one you almost certainly never heard of, the Cross River gorillas, which are undoubtedly the most endangered of them all. Sorry, none from Skull Island or any other islands for that matter. [image] The best known gorilla of all time Raffaele interviews a host of field experts and fills us in on how gorillas live. We get a look at their family structure, group interaction, diet, child rearing, and the problem infants face should troop leadership change hands. We also learn that gorilla vocalization includes higher-pitched tonal calls, similar to humans humming and singing, favored by younger troop members. Can’t you damn kids keep it down? (toga, toga, Toga, Toga, TOga, TOga, TOGa, TOGa, TOGA, TOGA) Sometimes the musicality spreads. Raffaele quotes gorilla expert Amy Vedder: One individual would start a low rumbling sound, breathing in and out in a modulated tone. This might remain a solo performance, and last no more than a minute. Often, however, others would join, adding gender- and age-specific basses, baritones, tenors and sopranos in a mix. The result was a chorus of entwined melodies, rising and falling in a natural rhythm that might continue for several minutes; a gorilla Gregorian chant in a Virunga cathedral.Bet ya didn’t see that coming. We learn a bit about the differences among the subspecies. The Cross River offers the most unique experience of the four gorilla habitats. No, our furry friends are not punting back and forth across a waterway on bespoke rafts. Their particular brand of gorilla is named for the Cross River, where they live. It took greater effort for Raffaele to get to them than it did to reach any of the others. He was not exactly a kid when he headed out there, a trek that included significant life-threatening passages. It is particularly exciting to read of that leg of his adventure. The Cross River gorillas are the least interfered-with of any gorilla population. The animals are not at all habituated to humans, and their protectors want to keep it that way. The plusses and minuses of habituation to people come in for considerable discussion here, for all the species under review. All the gorilla sub-species face enormous challenges. Eliminate near-constant civil wars, locals setting traps by the thousands in gorilla habitat to catch bush meat of various sorts, corrupt officials selling off protected land for logging and making charcoal, and our cousins’ chances of surviving into the 22nd century would skyrocket. If wishes were horses, though, a lot of these folks would probably kill and eat them. The fear is quite real that someday in the 21st century, because of greed and corruption, when we think of gorillas in the mist, the only thing remaining will be the mist. Chimpanzees If Kong was the prototypical image many of us had of gorillas, there is a chimpanzee of comparable familiarity, although of much more modest dimensions. [image] Doctor Zira in Planet of the Apes (1968) No, but nice try. There was a much earlier representative of the species, one that remained in the public consciousness long after the films in which he appeared had become quaint. I speak, of course, of a matinee idol. [image] Why, Cheeta, of course, ever helpful, ever reliable, Jungle Man’s best friend The reality of chimpanzee life in the wild is not quite so comforting. Raffaele learns about how culture is transmitted from generation to generation, relative educability of male and female young, age-based mate preference by males (it is not what you might expect), their use of medicinal plants, including A. pluriseta, an abortifacient. They are also quite willing to form gangs and murder members of their own troop. They show a decided predilection for violence. Chimpanzees are clever, and use their intelligence for dark ends. Bonobos Bonobos are very similar to chimps in appearance, seeming to be a slightly smaller version. But there are significant differences between the species. Carston Knott, keeper of great apes at the Frankfurt zoo, told Raffaele, I tell new keepers that if you throw a screwdriver in with the gorillas, they wouldn’t notice it for weeks on end unless they sat on it. The chimpanzees would use it to destroy something within minutes, but the bonobos and orangutans, within thirty minutes, would figure out how to use it to unlock the cage door and escape.Considerable differences are noted here between chimps and bonobos, the latter being the closest ape to humans, DNA-wise. It is summed up nicely in one simple statement: Chimps are from Mars, bonobos are from Venus. Well, one aspect of their existence anyway Chimpanzee females come into heat for only a few days a month, and so competition for them among the males can be fierce, with the dominant male granting more mating rights to his allies. But bonobo females are receptive to the males for most of each month, and that means there is hardly any fighting by the males for their favors.The lively sex lives of bonobos is not restricted by age or gender. Monkey business is just fine for bonobos, whatever their age, with partners of both genders, with plenty of positional creativity being applied. Another element that differentiates bonobos from chimps is that bonding with mom persists for a lifetime. Chimpanzee maternal bonds are a lot more fragile. Unlike their larger ape cousins, bonobos do not kill other bonobos. Orangutans The orangutan is the largest arboreal creature on earth. Unlike their African cousins, orangutans are primarily solitary, slow moving creatures. They do not really need to get anywhere in a hurry. The orang habitat is under considerable assault, as the government clears large swaths of native forest in order to plant palm oil trees to satisfy a growing international demand. Raffaele picks up a bit of intel on the orang sex life. It includes oral. He spends some time looking at an operation in Borneo that aims at rehabbing orphaned orangs and returning them to the wild, paying particular attention to some serious problems with the program. One unusual feature about orangs is that there is dimorphism among males. The leader of the pack grows large and sprouts those facial flanges that look like rubber add-ons. Should the big guy slip on a banana peel and take a header, the vacuum will indeed be filled. And the successor will sprout the same extra bits. [image] Clyde’s seems an appropriate response to the eco-vandalism the Indonesian government is committing against the orangutans’ habitat Raffaele does take breaks from his extended nature travels to stop in at facilities doing relevant research in various parts of the world. These outings are quite interesting. He is not a fan of zoos, but does acknowledge that the finer institutions of that sort do offer real potential benefits to the species with which they work. He also has a riveting conversation with the head of a tribe whose members, he says, can transform themselves into gorillas and back again. Very Castaneda. You may or may not go ape for Among the Great Apes, but you will certainly want to hoot and holler for all that you will learn on this journey, and might even want to thump your chest a bit when you are done, thus letting those around you know just how big and powerful your brain has become. And as for the 800 pound gorilla in the room, it is probably two gorillas inside an over-sized gorilla suit. Real gorillas only grow to about four hundred pounds. It might not even do them much good were they to begin growing to double their natural size. The challenges all the great apes face are unrelenting and deadly. The long-term prospects for all the creatures addressed here are far from great. But you will learn a heck of a lot following Raffaele on his quest, or I’m a monkey’s uncle. Posted November 11, 2013 ============================EXTRA STUFF PR on Facebook PR on Twitter Interview with the Washington Post The Smithsonian page for Raffaele includes links to several articles he wrote for them over the years. The information reported in several of these was incorporated into the book Ok, I really tried to figure out how to get this image into the body of the review, but I just could not force it in. So, in a fit of self-indulgence, I am dropping it down here. Any look at a book about apes, and yes I know this is not supposed to be an ape, but a Homo Sap predecessor, seems incomplete without it. [image] If you do not recognize this, you may have more evolving to do April 26, 2016 - Just came across this sad news piece by Rachel Nuwer in the NY Times about some simian cousins - New Gorilla Survey Supports Fears of Extinction Within Decade September 10, 2016 - An interesting piece in the NY Times about bonobo girl-power - In the Bonobo World, Female Camaraderie Prevails by Natalie Angier November 8, 2016 - A video item in the NY Times reports on research showing similarities between human and bonobo vision - The Aging Eyes of Bonobos December, 2016 - National Geographic Magazine - Inside the Private Lives of Orangutans - By Mel White - Photographs and Videos by Tim Laman - Pretty interesting stuff [image] A Sumatran orang branching out - from the article September 2017 - National Geographic Magazine - The Gorillas Dian Fossey Saved Are Facing New Challenges - By Elizabeth Royte October 2017 - National Geographic Magazine - How Jane Goodall Changed What We Know About Chimps - by Tony Gerber [image] Flint was the first infant born at Gombe after Jane arrived. With him she had a great opportunity to study chimp development—and to have physical contact, which is no longer deemed appropriate with chimps in the wild. - photograph by Hugo can Lawick – Image and description from article above October 24, 2017 - Wild and Captive Chimpanzees Share Personality Traits With Humans - by Karen Weintraub November 2, 2017 - NY Times - New Orangutan Species Could Be the Most Endangered Great Ape - by Joe Cochrane [image] An orangutan from the Batang Toru region of the island of Sumatra in Indonesia, which researchers say is a distinct, third species of great apes. Credit Tim Laman Text and image from the NY Times article above November 4, 2017 - NY Times - Smuggled, Beaten and Drugged:The Illicit Global Ape Trade – by Jeffrey Gentleman [image] A female bonobo feeding fruit to her baby at Lola Ya Bonobo. Since 2005, United Nations investigators say, tens of thousands of apes have been trafficked or killed. - Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times Image and text from above NYT article April 27, 2018 - NY Times - Stand up and pay attention. Researchers may have found a clue in a particular population of chimps that helps explain how humans began to walk upright - Hints of Human Evolution in Chimpanzees That Endure a Savanna’s Heat - by Carl Zimmer [image] Early hominins might have used some of the strategies documented in Fongoli chipmanzees, like staying near water. Humans have skin glands that let us sweat much more than chimpanzees, and the origin of our upright posture might have been an adaptation to stay cooler.CreditFrans Lanting/lanting.com - Image and text from above article ...more |
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0061802549
| 9780061802546
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In reading Jungleland, I was reminded of the tale of the blind men who all describe an entirely different thing based on touching various parts of an
In reading Jungleland, I was reminded of the tale of the blind men who all describe an entirely different thing based on touching various parts of an elephant. There are significant elements there, and one can appreciate each, and somehow still not get a sense of the whole. Jungleland is the tale of Wall Street Journal writer Christopher Stewart, on a quest. He had come across information about a remarkable American, Thomas Morde, who, in 1940, had discovered a long-lost city in the jungles of Honduras, The White City. Of course documentation of this was somewhat incomplete. We do not know if that is because Morde’s tale was a fabrication, because the information was consciously withheld for some unknown reason, or maybe the real info was simply mislaid in the 70 years since Morde’s discovery. There is a gross similarity here to the 2009 book. The Lost City of Z. Stewart and Z’s author, David Grann, are both Brooklynites, with Stewart probably the more experienced adventurer/outdoorsman of the pair. They both follow the incomplete trail of explorers of an earlier time. In Grann’s case 1926. In Stewart’s 1940. Their explorer inspirations both had met bad ends. The explorers whose trail Grann was trying to follow in Z vanished, and were presumed to have met a grim fate in the darkest Amazon. Morde, the historical adventurer of Jungleland, met an early end of a different sort, post exploration, but maybe related to it. The similarities are enough so that one could easily have titled this book the Lost City of W. (no, not that W) Stewart decided to trace Morde’s steps and rediscover this lost Jewel of the Patuca. He offers informative descriptions of a place most of the world had long forgotten, and that is before heading up river. Local color includes not only howler monkeys, brilliantly plumed birds and unpleasant critters known as bullet ants, but the most dangerous snake on earth, the Fer de lance, a fast hemorrhagic death in a lovely compact package, clouds of unpleasant flying creatures, and the joys of foot rot from walking in water for weeks on end. In addition to the native hazards of a natural bent, there are their human counterparts. Among the folks living upriver, some are remnants of an ancient people, maybe descendants of the civilization that built the White City. Others are westerners, hiding out for reasons good and ill, some treasure hunters, the odd drug mule, and, of course, a lovely dose of local pirate. We hear tales of encroaching ranchers and farmers and learn something about how they go about dealing with residents who may object to their presence. The locals have varying amounts of intel about the vanished city. Some is useful. Some is not. The adventurers find promising indications, shards of civilization. Some ruins are indeed found. Is The Lost City of the Monkey God the White City or is the latter somewhere deeper into the jungle? Wondering if and when is part of the fun of reading Jungleland. Stewart alternates between telling the story of his travels and those of Thomas Morde. He had dug up what he could on Morde, which was a fair bit. The guy had been a real Indy sort, an adventurer with a military background and an exciting career as a spy waiting for him. The tale of Morde’s career after his Lost City adventures is a fascinating adventure all on its own. The alternating tales format worked well, offering points of similarity and divergence in these remote places, across the seventy year gap. Both Stewart and Morde were accompanied by people who had a bit more familiarity with the land. They both faced physical challenges, and both had to cope with the ever-present concern that it might all just be a wild quetzalcoatl chase. There are observations made that have implications beyond the story at hand. From the 1940 tale: The American banana companies—Standard Fruit, based in La Ceiba and New Orleans, and United Fruit, out of Boston and Tela—had inserted themselves into this political void, and very little happened without their knowledge. They behaved like drug cartels that happened to sell fruit. The companies had muscled their way into most of Central America, with the help of the region’s cruelest dictators, and were notorious for their blood-soaked labor fights.This historical aspect was most welcome, as was learning of Morde’s life after he finished exploring. So we have a book with a considerable collection of promising elements. Add to them the author’s very accessible style and you have a very easy and informative read. And yet, somehow, the whole did not seem to add up to the sum of its impressive parts. It never elevated to the level of, say, that other Lost City book, to which it bears a strong resemblance. I wish I could identify precisely what glue it is that, by it’s absence, fails to bind the parts together into a cohesive whole. But I lack the expertise to define the missing element. It was like walking into a room where several pictures hang, knowing that something has changed, but not knowing quite what. Maybe they have been rearranged. Maybe one has been replaced. It may well be that for you the book will work completely. There is a lot of craft and talent on display, and enough information to make the journey worth your time. And I do love to read work by my fellow Brooklynites. But Jungleland, while an interesting adventure, remained for me an unfulfilled quest. Pub. date for the trade paper version was January 7, 2014 ...more |
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4.24
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140004622X
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| 140004622X
| 3.54
| 1,147
| Jan 01, 2004
| Jun 08, 2004
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Crown journeys is a series of fourteen books that match well known writers with places they know a little something about. The authors have to do thei
Crown journeys is a series of fourteen books that match well known writers with places they know a little something about. The authors have to do their sightseeing on foot, but I presume they can do their writing any way they please. Cahill is a successful travel writer who lives in a small town just north of Yellowstone National Park. [image] Not Snow The personal appeal here was that I had just returned from a first visit to Yellowstone and was eager to compare notes. It is always fun to see in print references to locations you know, whether they are familiar sights or streets in places one has lived or places one might have visited. (Even more so for sights on film, but for GR we stick with books). Did the author see what we saw, feel what we felt, spot something we missed? I expect this is a manifestation of some underlying communal need to compare notes on common experiences. Oh, you saw such and such? Me too! The more common use for such a book is as a resource for people planning a visit. Around 3 million people a year visit the park and most would benefit from a quick tour through Cahill’s book. [image] Steamy Cahill divides the book into three parts. First, he focuses on day hikes. He makes liberal use of road pull-outs. We are not talking survivalist back-country trekking here, but the sort of short hikes even a motionally challenged sort like me can manage. He looks at some of the commonly viewed destinations, such as the Norris Basin, Old Faithful, Artist Paint Pots, the Monument Geyser Basin, and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, among others, offering a sometimes scatological appreciation for places that demand that sort of perspective, and an appreciation for the more sublime natural wonders. [image] The Savage Beauty of Yellowstone He offers some history. It is true that initial descriptions of the place were met with skepticism. Yeah, sure, thousands of geysers. I believe that. Having taken some photos in the park of formations that look more like Star Trek sets than Terran locations, I can understand how disbelief might have seemed a reasonable reaction. And Cahill provides information that was news to me. I did not know that Yellowstone has the largest petrified forest in the world [image] Part two tells of some well-led back-country hikes. There was very intriguing material in here. I was most taken with tales of seeing a moonbow, that is, a rainbow seen at night with moonlight instead of sunlight, causing a remarkable arch. Also, he communicates well what it might be like to see places that remain largely unseen by people, in areas where one can get a visceral sense of what the place must have been like before the current stampede of humanity (there were Native Americans who lived in what is now the park, before they were driven out) . He makes frequent note of the presence of bears, grizzlies in particular, and reminds his readers that Yellowstone is still a very wild place, where unpleasant things can happen to the careless. He offers some history and the usual Darwin Award tales and cautions about ways not to deal with the local megafauna. [image] The Buffalo Hunters - Yellowstone - 2010 - what shooting bison looks like today - the group scattered rather quickly once that bad boy clambered into the parking lot Part three is Cahill’s list of recommended readings for anyone planning a visit. I almost wish I had not already been, so I could head out to my local bookstore and add to the family Yellowstone collection. [image] Tim Cahill - image from Mother Jones I have only small gripes with this small book. Specifying when he was in each of the areas he visited would have helped. An exception, in talking about the Lamar Valley, Cahill specifies that winter is the time to see it. (I had just seen it in late summer/early autumn and his description made me envious). But the book needed some more specificity on when he was where. [image] Hello, Gawjus This short book is purely a supplemental item. Get some real guides if you are planning a visit. But Lost in My Own Backyard will prove a useful addition to your planning materials. It does not hurt that Cahill will make you laugh out loud on occasion or that he has captured some essence of the Yellowstone experience. PS - You can click on the above images to see them a bit larger. =============================EXTRA STUFF National Geographic is doing a long-term series, The Power of Parks. on National Parks domestic and international. This includes major coverage of Yellowstone. The following piece was part of the May 2016 National Geographic magazine - All three parts are by David Quammen - Learning to Let the Wild Be Wild in Yellowstone. The following images and descriptive text are from the individual article parts. [image] The colors of Grand Prismatic Spring come from thermophiles: microbes that thrive in scalding water. The green is chlorophyll they use to absorb sunlight. - Photo by Michael Nichols Here is part 2 of the National Geographic series on Yellowstone - The Yellowstone We Don't See: A Struggle of Life and Death. [image] Notoriously elusive, cougars vary their range in response to their prey, mostly elk and deer. In winter they favor the shallow snow in the northern reaches of Yellowstone. This cougar was caught on the prowl by a camera trap set behind an elk rack on a cliff. - Photograph by Drew Rush with the NATIONAL PARK SERVICE Here is part 3 of the National Geographic series on Yellowstone - Yellowstone's Future Hangs on a Question: Who Owns the West?. [image] Bison and elk share winter ranges in Greater Yellowstone—these are in the National Elk Refuge near Jackson, Wyoming. Both can carry brucellosis, a threat to cattle. But elk are prized as game, whereas thousands of Yellowstone bison have been slaughtered in Montana because some consider them a menace. - Photograph by Charlie Hamilton James Also from the same issue, Booming Tourism Becomes a Stress Test for Yellowstone By Todd Wilkinson [image] Wildlife sightings often stop traffic at Yellowstone National Park. - photograph by Michael Nichols If you did not catch the link in the body of the review, Smithsonian Magazine's January/February 2021 issue has an outstanding article on who lived in Yellowstone before it was a National Park - The Lost History of Yellowstone - by Richard Grant ...more |
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Oct 28, 2010
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Oct 29, 2010
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Oct 28, 2010
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0767928849
| 9780767928847
| 0767928849
| 4.03
| 10,826
| Sep 14, 2010
| Sep 14, 2010
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really liked it
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Size matters to Toronto-born Susan Casey, wave size that is. She is interested in the big kahunas of wave-dom, rogues, freaks, giants or monsters that
Size matters to Toronto-born Susan Casey, wave size that is. She is interested in the big kahunas of wave-dom, rogues, freaks, giants or monsters that rise a hundred feet or more above the surrounding water. Think The Perfect Storm. Then think bigger. Scientists once dismissed the notion of waves that big, but science has started to turn what were believed to be tall tales into accepted truth. In 1933 a serene officer on the USS Ramapo measured one such rogue at 112 feet! Even the enormous (see, I didn’t say titanic) cargo carriers of today are no match for such fury. Current models of oceanic wave generation have not been up to the task of predicting when and where these big guys might emerge. Given how much material is transported across the ocean there is considerable interest in improving our wave prediction capabilities. Add to that the impact of global warming, which is expected to increase the volatility of the seas, and the need to understand the mechanics of the briny deep becomes critical. Casey alternates between looking at the science and history of waves and the surfer royalty who travel the world in search of the biggest, scariest monster waves to ride. She talks with the people who know huge waves best, in both scientific and surfing communities. It must have been really tough for Casey to hang out with all those gorgeous, energetic, fit, scantily clothed men, but she made that sacrifice and offers a close up view of the high-end surfer culture. In particular she focuses on Laird Hamilton, the Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and Babe Ruth of the sport, trailing after him and his cohorts as they seek out that perfect ride, succeeding, failing, wiping out and telling tales of how they got all those nifty scars. Of course, one might wonder how an outsider, even one with a publishing resume like Casey’s, which includes The Devil’s Teeth, a best seller about great white sharks, could gain such intimate access to the surfers’ world. Cash helps. Hamilton was paid to ease Casey’s way into this [primarily] boys’ club. So while Hamilton no doubt deserves all the accolades that come his way for his professional achievements, one must always wonder what might have been left out. [see http://www.quillandquire.com/blog/ind...] Nevertheless, Casey joins Hamilton and many other top names in surfing as they drop in at the major surf meccas of Hawaii, surf in Tahiti, California and Mexico and even catch some monster waves a hundred miles out at sea. Going rogue for real. It makes for gripping reading. The scientific chapters are less personal but more informative. Casey relates some chilling history of tsunamis, both the regular and mega varieties, including one puppy that topped out at 1,740 feet in Lituya Bay in Alaska in 1958. The results on the ground were impressive. That two people in a boat survived this may be more impressive. She visits Lloyds of London to find out just how big an issue losses at or because of the sea might be. She hears from crew members about a voyage on the oceanic research ship Discovery, an outing that included getting battered by multiple hundred-footers coming at the ship from many directions, and she reports on a conference where the biggest brains in the wave business gather to discuss their work. There is surprising information here on how some waves act more like light than matter. And there is a nifty bit of info on just how Britain came to be an island. Casey offers a less than lovely look at the future through the eyes of Bill McGuire, a world expert on global geophysical events, or as he likes to call them, “Gee-Gees.” He has acquired nicknames like Disasterman and the Prophet of Doom. In the disaster movie of your choice, McGuire is the guy who would be dragged away from his child’s graduation to advise the president, or the PM, as this Englishman works in London. By offering such different perspectives, Casey has succeeded in teaching us a lot about an important subject while at the same time providing an exciting, entertaining read. Dude, this is one wave you really want to catch. ...more |
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Oct 07, 2010
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0385486804
| 9780385486804
| 0385486804
| 4.01
| 1,103,118
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| Feb 01, 1997
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0385488181
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| 4.03
| 23,732
| 1990
| May 19, 1997
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really liked it
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Before the recognition he received for Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer was a serious outdoors type, writing about other serious outdoors
Before the recognition he received for Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer was a serious outdoors type, writing about other serious outdoors types. In this collection of essays, Krakauer relates several stories of his personal adventures, one about a youthful, and maybe foolish venture to a particularly difficult climb in Alaska, another about his attempt at Eiger. And these are quite good. But I most enjoy Krakauer when he writes about the Damon-Runyon-esque characters who inhabit the world of extreme adventuring. [image] John Krakauer - image fr0m his Facebook pages For example, in Gill, he writes of John Gill, the world’s foremost practitioner of “bouldering” (think fly on ceiling) as someone who might really levitate. Two drunken brothers manage to have a crack at a surprising number of major climbs despite their disinclination to organization and sobriety in The Burgess Boys. Chamonix is a town in France Krakauer calls the “death sport capital of the world.” The story features a bar in which large screens entertain the crowd with diverse scenes of death and near death. It is laugh-out-loud funny when Krakauer illuminates the sundry ethnic conflicts, with particular attention paid to the creative insults each enjoy using on the other. It called to mind Python-like Frenchmen launching diseased animals at their English foes while calling out “come back here so we can taunt you some more.” While most of us are not likely to have a go at Eiger’s north face, work as bush pilots, try surviving hurricane force winds with temperatures so cold as to defy imagination while huddled in a torn tent or dubious ice cave at twenty-something thousand feet, it is a wonderful thing to have some crazy person who lives in that world to report to the rest of us what goes on there. Eiger Dreams is a fast, entertaining and informative read. Review first posted in 2010 ...more |
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Aug 2010
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Aug 11, 2010
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0060932619
| 9780060932619
| 0060932619
| 3.99
| 385
| Oct 01, 1997
| Mar 24, 1999
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[image] Caroline Alexander (hoping for her nail polish would dry faster) - image from Florida State University news When Ernest Shackleton sailed his s [image] Caroline Alexander (hoping for her nail polish would dry faster) - image from Florida State University news When Ernest Shackleton sailed his ship Endurance to the Antarctic, there was more on board than merely men, stores and a dream. There was Mrs Chippy, actually a male cat. Mrs. Chippy’s Last Expedition is a feline-level view of that unfortunate journey, at least the first, less horrifying part. And it is charming. Our family is fond of cats. We share our home with many at present, among which was Madison (now passed on). I often referred to her as my four-legged wife (as opposed to my two-legged variety, and of course my eight-legged ex) as she spent most of my sleeping time curled up against me. The others have very distinct personalities of their own, but they are all loved and appreciated. So, we look kindly on things cat-ish. Thus the appeal of Mrs Chippy. We get to see many members of the crew through his eyes. The book is set up as Chippy’s memoir, complete with footnotes. The author captures the timbre of an alpha feline. Having once had one who functioned as a union rep for the household cat population, I know what that looks like. There is a combination of arrogance, curiosity, playfulness, love and an abiding appreciation for food to such creatures and it has been captured quite well here. But Chippy is merely the ploy. The real story is in the details of life aboard one of the most famous of all nautical voyages. One learns about the ship’s routine, what tasks needed to be done, a little of the personalities of the crew, and some detail on the on-board experience during the time the ship was stranded in the middle of an Antarctic ice field. The author offers a fair bit of humor as well, best expressed when Chippy is commenting on how awful the sled dogs can be, and in how he goes out of his way to torment them. This is not compelling reading, by any stretch, but is informative and entertaining. My only gripe is that the story ends too soon. The great drama of this expedition was Shackleton’s heroic effort to sail north in a small boat to get help for the left-behind (no, not in a rapture way) crew. I would have liked Chippy’s view there, either with Shackleton or with those stranded at the bottom of the world. ============================EXTRA STUFF Alexander is a serious scholar, not just an author of children’s books, having written two NY Times bestsellers, The Bounty, an examination of the myth surrounding that ship, and, more germane to Mrs Chippy, The Endurance, the story of Shackleton’s attempt to cross Antarctica on foot, and many others. She published a new translation of The Iliad in 2015 .She is also an award-winning producer and director of feature-length documentaries. You can find out more about her here. ...more |
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Aug 07, 2010
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080505507X
| 9780805055078
| 080505507X
| 3.92
| 66
| 1996
| Sep 15, 1997
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it was amazing
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Rule 1 - absolutely nothing in Southeast Asia is free Rule 2 - nothing is as it seems Rule 3 - nothing ever goes as planned Rule 4 - there are no coincid Rule 1 - absolutely nothing in Southeast Asia is free Rule 2 - nothing is as it seems Rule 3 - nothing ever goes as planned Rule 4 - there are no coincidences Cox is a journalist in search of an interview with the biggest heroine dealer in the world, Khun Sa, who rules a large swath of Shan State in northeast Burma, the core of the Golden Triangle of lore. This is fascinating stuff, offering a you-are-there look at some of the most remote, unexplored territory on the planet. You will learn much here, including some not so nice genocidal activities, perpetrated against ethnic minorities in the area. That was news to me. You will pick up a bit of Burmese history. One such item is about how the Kuomintang was sustained in northern Burma by the USA as a thorn in China's side. But they needed income, so became international drug producers and dealers, and after the war on China lost any appeal, the drug business remained. There is some history offered re the infamous Thai sex trade, about headhunters, and about Burmese campaign against the Karen ethnic minority. There is a very colorful cast of characters here Barry Flynn - professional adventurer and former tv actor Bo Gritz - a guy who mounts expeditions to rescue long lost POWs and MIAs USDA Catherine Palmer - aka Dragon Lady Khun Sa - biggest heroin dealer in the world. Commander of a private army The telling is part Heart of Darkness, part Woody Allen. And just what do you bring as a gift to a man who has gazillions of dollars and his own military? That section had a very Bananas feel to it. Chasing the Dragon is a fun and informative read. It will make you laugh out loud, teach you things you never knew and make us all realize that we do not know as much about our planet as we might have thought. ...more |
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Mar 2010
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May 19, 2010
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0385513534
| 9780385513531
| 0385513534
| 3.89
| 97,633
| Feb 24, 2009
| Feb 24, 2009
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it was amazing
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Be careful when you pick this book up. You won’t want to put it down. In 1925, Percy Harrison Fawcett, armed with information only he had unearthed, a
Be careful when you pick this book up. You won’t want to put it down. In 1925, Percy Harrison Fawcett, armed with information only he had unearthed, accompanied by his son, his son’s best friend and a small company of bearers and support personnel, headed off into the Amazonian wilderness in search of a large, ancient, fabled city, the City of Z. Fawcett, his son, Jack, and Jack’s friend, Raleigh, were never seen again. There were many attempts by later explorers of varying levels of expertise to find Fawcett, or at least to learn definitively of his fate. Professional writer David Grann joins that horde, armed with little or no experience as an outdoorsman and having his athletic prowess honed by years as a subway-riding resident of Brooklyn. Not, perhaps, the likeliest starting point. He sets out on a strenuous enterprise in an attempt to explain this 80 year old mystery. [image] David Grann While Grann’s book is non-fiction, it reads like an H. Rider Haggard action adventure novel. You will feel palpable excitement as Grann digs up first one then another then another clue as to where Fawcett might have wound up. He follows research directions ignored or unsuspected by prior investigators, to great advantage. I won’t spoil the ending by telling what he does or does not find. That is almost beside the point. [image] A still from the film It is the journey that counts here, and part of that journey is the window Grann offers on a part of the history of exploration, the sort of people who were drawn to it, their reasons, their personalities, the effect of their quests (or obsessions, depending) on their careers, families and on the body of human knowledge. We learn also of competing theories about the potential for the Amazon to support a large, urban population. Grann shows, as well, the challenges, the horrors of trying to traverse one of the most unwelcoming areas on earth. This is a very entertaining, very informative and very engaging journey. The Film was released in the USA - 4/14/17 - sadly, it is a sure cure for insomnia =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages New York Times: January 14, 2012 - Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to Amazon’s Lost World ...more |
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Jun 11, 2009
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Jun 11, 2009
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0061560944
| 9780061560941
| 0061560944
| 4.01
| 326
| Jun 01, 2009
| Jun 16, 2009
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The Last of his Kind is an eminently readable bio of a remarkable character. Not only was Bradford Washington arguably the greatest mountaineer of his
The Last of his Kind is an eminently readable bio of a remarkable character. Not only was Bradford Washington arguably the greatest mountaineer of his age, a man who bagged more than a fistful of firsts and who revolutionized climbing techniques, he was an accomplished nature photographer, whose work shooting mountains from an open-door airplane remains the best of its sort. In addition, he was asked to take over a sclerotic natural history museum and transformed it into the Boston Museum of Science. We see Washington from tyke-hood to his final days, nearly a century later. His is an interesting story, filled with adventure, daring challenges, and the petty personal politics that seems to beset all people at the highest and most modest levels of accomplishment. [image] Bradford Washburn Roberts had a personal reason for writing about Washington. The elder statesman of American mountaineering was a friend and mentor to the author. The result of this was access to a wealth of personal documents. Roberts’ friendship included that of Washington’s wife, and her memory and insights pervade the work. So it came as a surprise that in reading about this unknown (to me) person, who, as a character, had so much to offer, I felt as if I was watching him from afar. There is a distance in the writing that I found perplexing. Maybe I was unconsciously comparing this book with the vastly superior Lindbergh by A. Scott Berg. In that book I felt the characters come alive. Here they lay relatively flat. Also, as someone with no particular interest in mountaineering, I did not feel wholeheartedly engaged in the excitement of crashing through barriers in the world of mountain climbing. I have nothing against it. It is just not my particular cup of tea. For any with an interest in mountaineering, this book should certainly help sustain the interest and encourage you to learn more about its history. But even if you have a little interest in mountain-climbing per se, The Last of His Kind is still a good, engaging, and interesting read, just not an outstanding one. =============================EXTRA STUFF The author on FB A nice profile of the author ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Mar 2009
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Apr 05, 2009
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Hardcover
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0425170411
| 9780425170410
| 0425170411
| 3.96
| 5,599
| Sep 21, 1998
| Sep 01, 1999
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it was amazing
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[image] A. Scott Berg - Image from his site The book is well-deserving of its Pulitzer. Lindbergh was one of the most interesting people of the 20th ce [image] A. Scott Berg - Image from his site The book is well-deserving of its Pulitzer. Lindbergh was one of the most interesting people of the 20th century and this book gives us a fly-on-the-wall look at many critical parts of his life, the heroics of his early aviation triumphs, the horror of the kidnapping of his child, his elevation and victimization by the press. I learned much that I did not know about Lindbergh, for instance that he helped design an early artificial heart, that he applied his aviation expertise to revolutionize archaeology and that he operated as a spy for the USA while on visits to Germany and to the USSR. There is much more in this large volume. And there is much time allocated to his wife Ann, a fascinating person in her own right. A great read, not only full of information, but engaging and enjoyable. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter, Instagram, and FB pages ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Feb 2009
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Jan 27, 2009
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Paperback
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my rating |
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3.80
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really liked it
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Apr 05, 2022
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Apr 06, 2022
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3.22
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really liked it
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Sep 18, 2021
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Sep 18, 2021
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3.59
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it was amazing
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Sep 13, 2021
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Jun 30, 2021
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3.50
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liked it
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Jun 03, 2020
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May 24, 2020
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3.67
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really liked it
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May 14, 2019
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May 21, 2019
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3.88
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it was amazing
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Mar 29, 2018
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Mar 29, 2018
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4.08
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it was amazing
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Dec 04, 2013
not set
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Dec 03, 2013
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3.83
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really liked it
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Nov 06, 2013
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Nov 03, 2013
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3.36
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liked it
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Oct 10, 2012
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Oct 08, 2012
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3.84
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liked it
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Aug 2011
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Jul 07, 2011
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4.24
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it was amazing
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not set
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Feb 24, 2011
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3.54
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really liked it
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Oct 29, 2010
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Oct 28, 2010
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4.03
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really liked it
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Oct 2010
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Oct 07, 2010
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4.01
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it was amazing
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not set
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Aug 14, 2010
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4.03
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really liked it
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Aug 2010
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Aug 11, 2010
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3.99
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liked it
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Aug 2010
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Aug 07, 2010
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3.92
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it was amazing
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Mar 2010
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May 19, 2010
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3.89
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it was amazing
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Jun 11, 2009
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Jun 11, 2009
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4.01
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liked it
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Mar 2009
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Apr 05, 2009
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3.96
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it was amazing
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Feb 2009
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Jan 27, 2009
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