2 comments about Tick Bite Fever.

1. No oxymoron that. Not in David Bennun's hands. A Brit whose family left England for Colonial Africa in his boyhood, Bennun's nature evidently never expatriated the stiff upper lip, the sharp eye for the contagiously absurd, or---and this may be Fever's greatest selling point, for it makes all the rest so possible---the palate for language as only the bellwether British wield it. Far from a pythonesque humor; you know: with simple silliness the Wont that you often wish Wouldn't? Bennun is drop-dead funny. And I don't laugh-out-loud easily. More than once, my chest having long since rounded the corner into some soundless seismic convulsing, I dropped the book on my faintly blue-feeling face from asphyxiating in bed. (The story of his Jack Russell terrier alone is worth humor's All Time list.) And I ask you: How often do any of us ever delve along a literary skill that wastes not a single sentence? You can count those masters of concise thoroughness on half the one hand you use to hold up a favorite book (or in my case, not). Bennun is as aerodynamic an author, in his own milieu, as the greatest I've ever seen: and if that makes him the Nabakov of Satire? then Vladimir--not David--it is. Damn near every utterance morphs into a garrulous gem, no sentence dispensable, most quip-laden and quotable, all culminating in chapters memorable to a one about the real Africa in David's openly unreal vantage, his own foibles always foremost, from a self-deprecating wit-in-progress. Myself?.....Never one to let the complete absense of company dampen a conversation, I'd often read things in the book over again immediately--aloud--just to share them with somebody---Anybody---me usually the handiest, splitting my own sides with disemboweling dependability. But, like the boy in the book, I too have a hard time learning my lessons. Why even now, from time to time, foolishly undeterred by my bedtime injuries I read on, headless, only to wind up again the very picture of casualty: a free arm broken over my eyes, elbow high, while alone beneath it my open mouth, wide as the search for affordable dentists, palsies off in porcine snorts, gaped like a gash so they tell me, the very wound of the proverbial Death From Laughing. So: don't say you haven't been warned........
   
   Needless to say, David Bennun's book ends way too soon, which is to say, it ended at all, and, Endorphin-addiction being what it is, sent me hunting the world wide web for the guy when all else failed. Now I DID locate a superb skill-set-exemplary article he penned about ITN's anchor-siren Daljit Dhaliwal meeting her prime american fan David Letterman, on air, that may still be available on-line, but other than that for now, alas---rein plus. Nevertheless, Bennun here is a fever worth catching, but only if you can stand the symptoms. Happy breathing.......



2. I laughed and laughed, David Bennun really brings Africa back. He just knows people and the world you live in when you are there. I love Zambia and Kenya, and he just made it alive again. Thanks for the great read, and I won't sell mine!

No comments about Journey to the Jade Sea.

No comments about Kenya (Oxfam Country Profiles Series).

5 comments about The Ukimwi Road: From Kenya to Zimbabwe.

1. This book is a waste of time, a waste of space, and a waste of money. Demonstrates amazing ignorance about the places and people she visits, and arrogantly assumes the right to make judgements about things she clearly does not understand. People who've lived in the areas she bikes through, especially those who've done any work relating to AIDS or women's issues, have an involuntary gagging reflex whenever someone mentions this book.



2. A couple of years after reading The Ukimwe Road, which I found to be excellent reporting, I was surprised to find so many negative and emotional views posted here. I have repeatedly recommended this and other Murphy books to friends as good entertainment and the most unbiased sources of on-the-ground information in print. Where Dervla Murphy has gone, we can learn truth that is seldom found in more conventional sources.

   The picture she painted of the seriousness and extent of the AIDS problem in Africa was well supported by her first-hand (if anecdotal) evidence. Subsequent developments have shown that her alarming portrayal was accurate, and hers was in print *years* before the authorities began to recognise the scope of the problem. She did an excellent job of illustrating the wide range of psychological devices used to deny or minimise the problem.

   Her portrait of the plight of a well-informed woman who despaired of protecting herself against AIDS, saying "You just don't know what it means to be a woman in Africa" still haunts my memory.

   Official accounts, however alarming, have not yet caught up with Murphy's detailing of the cultural and social situations that have made the present disaster inevitable. Slowly and belatedly, news accounts are reflecting what she told us years ago. She can hardly be faulted for failing to suggest a solution, when any solution must involve massive cultural change: iconceivable to the locals as well as to western liberals.

   This is not a cheerful read, like some of her other books, but it may be one of her most important.

   Bias note: I have read and enjoyed almost all of Dervla Murphy's books, and bought a couple. I'll buy the rest for my permanent library when cheaper paperbacks appear. I do not share her political views (which I believe are far to the left of mine), but I do not find that this has made her observations any less valuable. She has my respect.




3. This is an unusually well-written and consistently interesting travel narrative. The author does come across as a tough old crow at times. (I can't imagine why she feels entitled to sneer at hikers who use the Lonely Planet guide.) But who else would have braved such an arduous journey in the first place? I can understand that her opinions about women's issues and the AIDS epidemic might be irritatingly opposed to yours. But isn't one of the points of traveling to meet people who aren't like ourselves?



4. Since 1964 Irish writer Murphy has been traveling the world by foot and bicycle and writing about her experiences. An outspoken loner, drawn to the more remote parts of the globe, her beautiful but rugged experiences fascinate and educate the armchair traveler - without inspiring similar ambitions.

   As a 60th birthday present to herself, Murphy undertakes a 3,000 mile journey through Eastern and Southern Africa on her Dawes Ascent mountain-bike, "the cyclist's equivalent of a Rolls-Royce," named Lear. The trip was a "self-described unwinding therapy.....a carefree ramble through some of the least hot areas of sub-Saharan Africa."

   But "carefree" it is not, though nothing - not heat, torrential rains, hunger, illness, hostility or impassable roads - can stop her.

   Murphy is greeted in Nairobi by drought and a mothers' hunger strike which rapidly degenerates into a riot when paramilitary troops arrive to disperse the women. Leaving the city as quickly as she can, Murphy contemplates the contrast between Western luxuries and construction projects alongside the shanty towns and hungry children.

   From her first stop in a dusty village for a Tusker beer, AIDS predominates and a pattern is set which endures thoughout the lands and cultures she passes through during the coming months. By day she enjoys the solitude and scenery of rural Africa; by night she is embroiled in local discussions of politics and Western incursions and AIDS, often dodging individual pleas for help in getting to the land of opportunity - the West.

   Ukimwi is Swahili for AIDS. In Africa, wherever she goes, it surrounds her. Some blame Western conspiracies and medical experiments; missionaries preach behavioral changes and deny condom distribution; men say they cannot survive without a variety of female partners; wives say their husbands refuse condoms; prositutes say they would have no business if they insisted on condom use.

   Everywhere Murphy meets widows, orphans and more orphans.

   She at first resists the pull of AIDS. For her this is a pleasure journey and she can do nothing to slow the epidemic. But it has become part of the fabric of culture, threatening traditional family life, taking the most productive and leaving behind the old and the young to fend for themselves.

   In addition to the scourge of AIDS, Murphy finds much of Africa suffering from economic collapse, spurred in large part by misguided Western "development projects" that destroyed the local agrarian economy, often displacing the people and departing, leaving behind devastation and tribal strife.

   She meets hospitality and hostility, and takes what comes; be it a bedbug, mosquito-infested tourist hotel, or an earthen floor, or a spontaneously offered bed in a local home. She sets out at dawn hardly knowing whether to expect a corrugated wartorn road or spectacular mountain scenery or a beguiling path that ends in a swamp (through which she is guided by a silent tribal elder). She pushes Lear up rutted mountain tracks and hurtles down, marveling at the African cyclists she meets everywhere - man cycling, two children on the cross bar, wife behind holding baby and toddler, and a heavy load balanced over all.

   With a cast-iron stomach, she eats and drinks whatever is available (which is generally awful), especially enjoys her beer, cycles through bronchitis and is finally felled by malaria. Even that she comes to regard as fitting - ending her journey in Zimbabwe where "Blacks had been subjugated as nowhere else in British Africa." Murphy concludes that Westerners ought to get out of Africa once and for all - that Western systems have not "taken" and have only undermined traditional culture.

   Whether you come to agree with her or not, her harrowing, thrilling, eye-opening and heartbreaking journey will stay with you when other travels are long forgotten.




5. i wanted to recommend this book to a friend who is about to travel to tanzania, so i came to check the author murphy's name and the spelling of "ukimwi" again. i'll second the reviewer who was surprised at the negative reviews. i read murphy's book while i was a tourist on safari in tanzania (which i also recommend if you can afford it). murphy's book was an interesting balance to my touristic experience. i wouldn't say it give me an ultimate insight into the "real" africa, but it was an important read for me then and now. it prepared me to have some conversations with tanzanians that i wouldn't otherwise have had. it allowed me, among other things, to know what i was seeing when i passed a small building in dar es salaam that read "ukimwi." it helped put in perspective what it means for a nation to be able to spend $2 per capita total on health care costs (at least when i was there). it made me able to make some of my own observations -- say that the gross national product of burundi was approximately the same as the market capitalization of most u.s. microcap stocks -- and form my own conclusions. so i didn't find murphy overly judgmental. i seem to remember her giving opinions, but mostly i felt as though i was given a complex picture. i'd highly recommend it. other recs re: africa very generally: basil davidson's *the black man's burden,* any novel or film by sembene ousmane, naipaul's *a bend in the river,* the french film *lemumba,* and of course plenty of other excellent african novelists and playwrights. o, and the epic *sundiata.*

3 comments about Mara-Serengeti: A Photographer's Paradise.

1. Mara-Serengeti captures the essence of living in the Mara-Serengeti region in a way that you would not experience in a dozen safaris to Africa. The images of predators, prey, wildlife migrations, and the Masai bring you close up during moments of blazing color in the sky and dramatic action in the grasslands. The images are improved by thoughtful essays that draw on the photographers' many years of experience with these subjects.

   The animal photographs are mostly grouped by subject and include lions, leopards, zebras, wart hogs, impalas, cheetahs, wildebeest, hyenas, crocodiles, vultures, and wild dogs. The subjects are usually of animal families, migration, killing, and eating in often symbolic settings for these activities. The Masai images come at the book's end, sort of completing the evolutionary progression of the food chain.

   You probably have heard of the Serengeti. It's a vast grassland in Tanzania, and is now protected as the Serengeti National Park there. The Masai Mara National Reserve is in neighboring Kenya, and the two lands are connected geographically, if not politically. A map in the book will display all of this for you. This site is the area where humans probably first walked the face of the Earth, and the dwindling of these remarkable spaces marks the potential for us to lose our ability to visualize our roots.

   The name, Serengeti, in Masai means "land of endless space." The closest we have to this habitat in the United States that I have seen is the brief enclosure in the wild animal park that the San Diego zoo maintains near Escondido, California.

   The action photographs impressed me the most. These show predators literally flying and spinning in the air just before they land while the terrorized prey wheels desperately away. The action is captured almost like a key play in a sporting event. That's pretty typical of the photography here. The images emphasize action and perspectives that you do not yet have, and this book will add wonderfully to your sense of the special nature of the grasslands of Africa.

   After you have finished expanding your vision of natural selection, I suggest that you think about the ways that our lives are enhanced by understanding our origins and how our lives are not. How can we draw inspiration from nature and stand in our most meaningful role?

   Look for what few have seen . . . always! Truth will emerge from your trial.




2. Having been to this area of Africa three times, twice in the Masi Mara and once to the Serengeti this book brings me back over and over again to this heaven on earth. The combination of drawings, photographs, and writing of Jonathan and Angela Scott are outstanding. This is my all time favorite book. The love these authors feel for this area and the animals and people who live there comes through on every page. For anyone who has the slightest interest in wild animals, ecology, photography, art, travel or Africa this book is a must have. Awesome!



3. This book was more than I had hoped for. The moments captured are extrordinary, some of the best photos of African Wildlife I have ever seen. I haven't read the text yet, but the captions by the photos are very informative and contain little interesting tidbits I didn't know. I have a lot of coffee table books and this is definitely a favorite.

2 comments about An African Experience: Wildlife Art and Adventure in Kenya.

1. I bought this book as a present for my parents after they took a safari to Kenya. They love this book! It sits on their coffee table and they encourage all who stop by to view it. The story of the author/artists life is remarkable. The beautiful artwork which accompanies the tales of living in Kenya are so life like it's amazing.



2. I love this book and will treasure it. I hated coming to the end of it and hope to get a copy of his second book - Great Cats - and read of more of his adventures as he travels around the world . Apart from the animals, I think his painting of trees, bushes, grassland and dust is superb. So sad that it was a buffalo that ended his life.

2 comments about Kenya Travel Map (Globetrotter Travel Map).

1. The map was useful but out of date. Some of the dirt roads had been paved and the "paved" roads required an inflatable cushion to survive. Suggest anyone going on safari fly between points where possible.



2. I cancelled this map because it couldn't be delivered before we went to Kenya.

1 comments about Waterproof Kenya Map by ITMB (International Travel Maps).

1. The map of Kenya is certainly waterproof, but does not show as much detail as I would like for traveling in Kenya

3 comments about Deadly Safari.

1. i loved this book. loved it! the characters are alive, the backdrop is breathtaking, the plot is gripping. every detail is well-thought-out and the storyline rushes along, plausible and probable. Jazz Jasper is a small-time independent safari guide struggling to keep her fledgling operation afloat and her clients safe and happy. I love the irony of the background - the beautiful, brutal African wilderness, but the threat from civilized man is greater as a murderer threatens Jazz and her entire tour group.



2. Finding a new female mystery writer is always a treat for me. Karin McQuillan's novel, Deadly Safari has put me on to a new source of reading entertainment. Deadly Safari takes the reader to the wilds of the African Jungle where Jazz Jasper has thrown caution and common sense to the wind to run a Safari tour company. Her adventures paint a believable picture of that magnificent envirnoment with all the sights, sounds and smells completely intact. I particularly liked the action sequences and the interactions between the characters. The mystery is engaging and keeps the reader very much involved. What a great first novel. May there be many more.



3. I'm in the middle of second of this series. I was especially drawn in by the vivid descriptions of Africa and the independent and spunky lead character. Jazz Jasper is an expatriate American trying to launch a tour business in Africa. A friend helps her to land a tour for an advertising firm scouting locations for a commercial campaign. A cast of assorted characters set out on their journey. Murder ensues. There is a nice Law and Order type twist at the end.

No comments about A Tent With a View: An Intimate African Experience.