1 comments about Desperate Voyage: A Novice Sails Alone from America to Australia.

1. Desperate Voyage takes the reader on a wonderful journey of discovery. This true life adventure takes place at the close of World War II and details the trials and tribulations of the author in his attempt to return to his wife in Austrailia. When he finds there is no transportation available, John decides to sail a small yacht the 8000 miles to Austrailia from Panama. Never mind that he has never sailed a boat before! His challenges are many and John learns many things the hard way. This book, which is hilarious at times and sad at times, keeps the reader always longing to turn the page and see what happens next.

2 comments about The Lost Island.

1. Van Cleef does an excellent job in his description of the joys of working with the French bureaucracy. It is a case of the bureaucrats defending their turf just to prove they can. This should be particularly poignant for anyone who has had the bad fortune of working within the system, of trying to do what can't be done because there is no bureaucrat willing to take the responsibility of saying "yes".
   
   Ample historical background is given for Amsterdam Island and Van Cleef provides an interesting memoir of what life is like for the government employees doing their tour of duty on the island. All inhabitants of the island are government employees. The great flaw in the book is the lack of photography. Any book dealing with the remote regions of the world, especially the southern Indian Ocean islands, should have photography. Photography is necessary to establish some idea in the reader's mind as to the environment of these islands. Jean-Paul Kauffmann's Arch of Kerguelen suffers from the same flaw. The reader has no idea of the desolation to be found in this region of the world. I would recommend Andre Migot's The Lonely South circa 1956 (the US edition is Thin Edge of the World but it lacks some of the text and photos of the original) for anyone interested in a good read on Kerguelen Island.



2. I liked the book!
   
   Excellent description of Amsterdam Island. The "sterile man" goes to fecund island motif meant nothing to me.
   
   Being a fan of Bovetoya, the two page mention of what really is the world's most isolated island was wrong. He dissed it because there is virtually no way to reach, and live on, that island.
   
   It was a good fun read and I finished it in two days. Reccomended for all armchair explorers who want to experience the southern seas vicariously!

No comments about Fodor's Australia 2009 (Fodor's Gold Guides).

No comments about Native State.

5 comments about Kangaroo Dreaming: An Australian Wildlife Odyssey.

1. Great armchair rideabout through the land down under! Witty and intelligent, Kanze has a knack for making one feel as if he and his wife were sitting in rockers in your den telling these tales. He is able to balance intelligence and knowledge with humor and candor of his own foibles. I want to go to Australia!



2. For one who has not been to Australia yet, reading about this wildlife journey has been great fun. The author gives his readers a real sense of the joy of discovery and excitement of the search. Along the way, he imparts a great amount of fascinating information about the countryside and the people encountered during their travels.

   I highly recommend Kanze's book for armchair travelers who have an interest in wildlife, or those who may be contemplating such an adventure for themselves. The view of Australia, its people, and its wildlife is extraordinary!




3. Ed Kanze's Kangaroo Dreaming should provide a healthy counterbalance to "Survivor II" with its kitschy evocation of aboriginal ceremony and the Australian landscape. In the popular show, the only genuine elements were the landscape of the outback itself and the glimpses of wildlife. In Kanze's clear-eyed view of the same landscape, the aborigines, like our Native Americans, displaying the "ugly and all-too-universal result of western mercantile culture mixing with a tribal society." The aborigines encountered near Alice Springs - unsmiling, clutching whiskey bottles - provide one of the human portraits that truly makes Kanze's book stand out among travelogues of natural history. But as always, Kanze's eye for flora and fauna predominates and his descriptive powers are masterful: "Suddenly, bubbles appeared in the water before me. I cocked my camera, switched on the flash, and held my breath. There - there -there - I was struck dumb by my good fortune. A black, rubbery bill wider than a duck's pushed through the surface immediately before me. It was followed by webbed feet, a hairy face with beady black eyes, and a furry brown body about the size of a muskrat's. I fiddled with the camera. The platypus was so close that my lens could not focus." The frame of Kanze's story is a nine-month, 25,000-mile odyssey he and his wife Debbie took around the rim of, and to the center of, Australia. (In fact, the author has used the sections of The Odyssey itself to parallel their journey.) Along the way they meet friendly and helpful nature enthusiasts - as well as characters they'd as soon never see again. For those of us who will visit "the America on the other side of the world" (Melville's phrase) only via the armchair, the Kanzes make irresistible, funny and erudite traveling companions.



4. I read this book just after having finished Bill Bryson's travel book on Australia, "In A Sunburned Country," and the contrast could not be more vivid. Bryson focused mainly on the cities, towns, and people of Australia, and I believe he only saw a few kangaroos in his entire sojourn there. Though he did cover some natural history, most of his work was focused on the human history and culture of Australia. Kanze on the other hand on his massive journey around Australia with his wife Debbie spent very little time in cities, trying to avoid urban areas for the most part, and saw a great deal of wildlife, including probably hundreds of kangaroos. In fact, the principal reason they flew to Australia, bought a car, and spent the better part of a year driving around the continent/country (including Tasmania) was to see a bewildering array of plants, animals, and natural landscapes in the "bush."

   The author introduces the reader to a many animals, some familiar, many not. We meet a wide variety of kangaroos, including the "big four," the common wallaroo (known as the "euro" in Western Australia), the red kangaroo, the eastern grey, and the western grey, as well as the musky rat-kangaroo, most "primitive" of kangaroos, smaller than a housecat, distinct in that hops on four feet rather than two, carries nest material with its tail, and is the only kangaroo that raises two young at a time rather than the usual one . They encounter the sugar glider, a marsupial that is strikingly similar to the flying squirrel of North America, one that feeds on the excretions of sap-feeing insects and eucalyptus resin, something few marsupials can digest. A wide variety of parrots (the continent possesses fifty-six species) also amazes the Kanzes when they encountered them in virtually any setting, from rain forest to desert to the middle of large cities. They meet koalas several times, a strange animal that Kanze informs us actually for a time grew more common after English settlement, as Aborigine hunting of them declined as their own populations retreated before the Europeans, only to suffer in turn when koalas caught the fancy of London furriers. They run into the ubiquitous termite mounds of Queensland, thousands of which tower over the landscape up to eight feet in height, vital to the local ecology as they serve the function of earthworms, which are unable to survive the monsoonal inundations of the local landscape. Interestingly, we learn that at least some termite species build their mounds with their broad fronts parallel to the earth's magnetic poles, one end pointing to magnetic south, the other magnetic north, with the mounds thus situated to soak up morning and afternoon sunshine but only present a thin edge to the blistering midday sun. They meet the potentially dangerous cassowary, a huge flightless bird able to run thirty miles an hour, jump five feet into the air, and disembowel a man with the slash of a talon. Advised to hide and freeze should they encounter one in the forest, the Kanzes run into an overcurious youngster and its protective parent at one point, a situation that could have ended in disaster. Told that if one froze they might be missed, as their eyesight is poor, a comment that to me brought to mind "Jurassic Park," a thought the author apparently shared. Kanze roots around underwater with a snorkel and mask for the elusive Arafura file snake, not formerly described until 1980, a snake with unusually loose but rough skin that uses to grip slippery fish, a water snake that hunts, sleeps, breeds, and gives birth without leaving the water. Among the many other animals they meet and describe for the reader are the manatee-like dugong, honey possums (the only terrestrial mammal to subsist entirely on pollen and nectar), Tasmanian devils, the hated alien cane toad, a wide variety of native frogs, bowerbirds, bandicoots, platypuses, flying foxes, dingoes, echidnas (also know as spiny anteaters), lyrebirds, sunbirds, and a wide variety of reptiles including sea turtles, pythons, many poisonous snakes, goannas (among the largest lizards alive today, goanna being the Australian name for a monitor lizard, the name probably a corruption of "iguana"), and crocodiles (both freshwater and saltwater varieties).

   I learned a lot about Australian wildlife and landscapes and some about Australian history and culture and really enjoyed the book, but do offer a few small complaints. Kanze repeatedly compares his journey throughout Australia to that of Odysseus and his trials that were described in "The Odyssey." While sometimes the comparisons were apt and even mildly humorous, sometimes they seemed a bit forced and even slightly tedious, with occasional asides into Greek mythology that seemed out of place. Second, many times Kanze mentions taking pictures of a variety of animals throughout his journey, yet there is only the cover picture; nowhere are there are photographs in the book. I would have liked to have seen a few pictures at least of landscapes.

   Having said that though, this is a very good Australian travel and natural history book, one I would recommend.




5. Sometimes I don't realize I have a pet peeve until I read a book like Kangaroo Dreaming. In this case, I can't stand Kanze's decision to repeatedly and painfully compare his trip around Australia to the Odyssey. It is something that would have been fine to use once, but even with all the adventures and difficulties that he and his wife face are nothing like what Odysseus faces in his 10 year journey form Troy to Greece. Kanze didn't seem to trust the story of his trip to see as much Australian wildlife and wilderness as possible, which at least to American and even one that spend several months in Australia is much for interesting then being retold a fairly well known Greek Myth. He also includes much Emerson, but thankfully not to the point that it becomes distracting. I also felt that compared to other travel books, I didn't get much of a sense of himself and sometimes don't get much about his wife save when they argue or chase down another bird.
   Otherwise Kanze has obviously read what previous writers and explorers have written about Australia, which he includes where useful, as well as facts about the unique wildlife he and his wife encounters. So don't read it for a great travel book, read it as a piece of nature writing that happens to involve travel. I agree with other reviewers, why weren't a few photos included with this book? I would have loved even just a few to refer to as he describes a particular encounter.

4 comments about The Singing Line: Tracking the Australian Adventures of My Intrepid Victorian Ancestors.

1. An interesting effort by a distant, if not vague relation to an historically insignificant figure, albeit one from whom myths form with their customary accuracy. What bits of research and experience are fairly presented are harmed, in my view to no benefit, by gratuitous asides regarding her apparently long-suffering companion, family and (soon to be former?) friends. One must wonder what would have been the book had the author not worked for a newspaper, which one might suspect arranged its serialization gratis. The photos beg for the book guillotine.



2. I was fortunate enough to have the chance to live in Melbourne Australia for more than three years. I have experienced large parts of the journey Alice and her husband undertake in their quest to better understand her ancestor's experiences in creating the first telegraph line across Australia.

   I found the book to be very Alice Thomson-centric. She seems to glorify all aspects of her journey while continually placing Charles Todd higher and higher upon his pedestal. I was hoping she would rekindle some of my own memories of the Australia outback. However, Ms. Thomson invariably spends paragraph after paragraph describing her husband's illness or her own tiny adventures driving the Land Cruiser or walking around Coober Pedy. Her descriptions of the local towns and environs is terse, quick, and dull. I do not recommend this book to anyone except Alice Thomson and her immediate family.




3. I bought this book because I am interested in the early explorers and travellers in to the Australian hinterland and because I was about to travel to some of the same areas the author had visited. I found the bits about Todd, the man who came to Australia to look at the stars and ended up connecting Australia to the outside world by a telegraph wire, quite interesting. Although I thought perhaps Alice Thomson was a bit confused as to whether the story was about Alice Todd (the great grandmother for whom she was named) or Charles Todd who laid the line. And I could see where she was coming from in trying to relate the story of her own travels with her husband in the same area and the Todds adventures. But again I'm not sure she pulled it off exactly. By exaggerating her own hardships, she underplayed the genuine difficulties the Todds endured and both stories lost credibility - for me, anyway. But what I really disliked about this book was its horrid comments about Australians and the way they live, in these so-called remote areas. She makes it sound as though one hour out of Adelaide she was alone in the world with people almost unrecognisable as human beings. Spare us the "don't come the raw prawn", "strewth cobber" cliches (which are always only used by the English, anyway). And I hope she feels ashamed at the way she treated people who went out of their way to help her, for a few cheap laughs. In great frustration (it was so nearly a good book) I eventually threw it on the campfire, unfinished, at Lake Eyre, halfway along the Singing Line.



4. This was truly an amazing book. The author involves you in the very foundations that build up the Australian telegraph system - you become part of the history as she takes you through the life of her great-great-grandmother and grandfather. It reveals, once again, how many people gave up so much so that we can have a secure foundation in our society. Well worth owning.

No comments about Charles Darwin in Australia.

1 comments about Journeys to the Past: Travels in New Guinea, Madagascar, and the Northern Territory of Australia.

1. David Attenborough's book JOURNEYS TO THE PAST is aptly named. Reading it is an enthralling trek back in time. He headed expeditions to New Guinea, Madagascar, etc. when sections of these huge islands were still largely primitive (between 1954 and 1964).
   
   He is not only a daring naturalist and adventurer, but a first-rate writer. He transforms what could be dry documentary coverage (of his quests for surviving ancient rituals and exotic fauna) into vivid and often gripping narrative. For example, his chapter on the land divers of Pentecost, who perform in a kind of Olympian sky-jumping ceremony, is the most fascinating account of a bizaare tribal ritual that I have ever read. It makes our modern "extreme" sports seem utterly tame by comparison. Attenborough's chapter "Cargo Cult" is a shocking and enlightening glimpse of the affects of the European culture invasion in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Figi and New Caledonia. This book has my highest recommendation.

2 comments about The Best Tracks on Guam.

1. For those who like to get out and see their surroundings, this book is ideal. Dave describes how to get to pretty much everything worth seeing on Guam. Be forewarned though, this book isn't for sissies looking for easily accessible locations. Each hike or 'trek' is rated by level of difficulty, with the most difficult be exactly that. Just because the author managed to get there, don't assume you can. The pictures are great and nicely depict each hike. Some instructions are vague, but if you do the hike, you will understand why. Guam is jungle and sometimes there just aren't any good landmarks. Included GPS coordinates are usefull for those who truly prepared. This book is a must for the outdoors type who visit Guam.



2. The man is a legend on Guam - he is "The Ultimate Paramount Boonie Stomping Leader of all time".
   
   If you are planning a trip to Guam, get this book! We lived there for three years and the guide is the bible of Boonie Stomping. Five star rating...

No comments about The National Parks and Other Wild Places of New Zealand (National Parks and Other Wild Places...).