Unfailingly interesting and downright refreshing: travel-writing for true adventurers as well armchair ones.
British journalist Marozzi debuts with a glib, often self-deprecating account of his three-month, 1,150-mile camel trek across the Libyan Sahara Desert.
The now-33-year-old author was reporting in the Philippines when he started planning his impractical journey. Six years previously, Marozzi had accompanied his father on a visit to the Libyan capital city of Tripoli and could not put the sights, smells, and sounds from that trip out of his mind. While there he had visited a rare English-language bookstore and purchased an account of an early-19th-century British desert expedition into the Libyan Sahara. Reading the high-spirited tale back in London, Marozzi relates, “I felt the pull of the desert and started to dream of a similar journey by camel.” The fantasy did not become a reality until, in 1999, his long-time friend, a Dorset farmer who liked to travel, agreed to make the journey. “Neither of us knew the first thing about desert travel,” the author confesses. So they read books and interviewed desert veterans, while Marozzi studied Arabic with a tutor. “Although one of the expressions he recommended for use in Libya helped put us under hotel arrest for a week,” the author remarks, “another had the benefit of saving us several hundred dollars when procuring a desert guide in Tmissah.” The account of the journey itself is as gripping as it is funny. Even with lots of advance study and the employment of experienced guides, it’s hard work riding camels through a desert that is blazingly hot by day and freezing cold at night, parched in most places but wet at oases, and unforgiving at every time and place. (It can be dangerous, too.) Along the sandy route, Marozzi works in material on Libyan history as well as current politics, with Gaddafi receiving dozens of mentions.
Unfailingly interesting and downright refreshing: travel-writing for true adventurers as well armchair ones.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-00-653117-2
Page Count: 354
Publisher: HarperCollins UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
Not only the definitive life, but a tour de force by a master.
One of history’s most prolific inventors receives his due from one of the world’s greatest biographers.
Pulitzer and National Book Award winner Morris (This Living Hand and Other Essays, 2012, etc.), who died this year, agrees that Thomas Edison (1847-1931) almost certainly said, “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” and few readers of this outstanding biography will doubt that he was the quintessential workaholic. Raised in a middle-class Michigan family, Edison displayed an obsessive entrepreneurial spirit from childhood. As an adolescent, he ran a thriving business selling food and newspapers on a local railroad. Learning Morse code, he spent the Civil War as a telegrapher, impressing colleagues with his speed and superiors with his ability to improve the equipment. In 1870, he opened his own shop to produce inventions to order. By 1876, he had money to build a large laboratory in New Jersey, possibly the world’s first industrial research facility. Never a loner, Edison hired talented people to assist him. The dazzling results included the first commercially successful light bulb for which, Morris reminds readers, he invented the entire system: dynamo, wires, transformers, connections, and switches. Critics proclaim that Edison’s innovations (motion pictures, fluoroscope, rechargeable batteries, mimeograph, etc.) were merely improvements on others’ work, but this is mostly a matter of sour grapes. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone was a clunky, short-range device until it added Edison’s carbon microphone. And his phonograph flabbergasted everyone. Humans had been making images long before Daguerre, but no one had ever reproduced sound. Morris rivetingly describes the personalities, business details, and practical uses of Edison’s inventions as well as the massive technical details of years of research and trial and error for both his triumphs and his failures. For no obvious reason, the author writes in reverse chronological order, beginning in 1920, with each of the seven following chapters backtracking a decade. It may not satisfy all readers, but it works.
Not only the definitive life, but a tour de force by a master.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9311-0
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
A book that describes what kangaroos do and offers unusually beautiful pictures of them doing it. One old male bending forward while scratching his back looks like nothing else found in nature- -except maybe a curmudgeonly old baseball manager with arthritis in the late innings of another losing game (in fact, baseball players would appear to be the only animals who scratch themselves as much as kangaroos do—bellies, underarms, Iwago captures every permutation of scratching). At other times, they look preternaturally graceful and serene. Some of Iwago's (Mitsuaki Iwago's Whales, not reviewed) photographic compositions flirt with anthropomorphism and slyly play to our urge to see ourselves in the animals. But kangaroos are so singular that there's always something about the cant of a head or the drape of a limb that makes you think you flatter yourself that there is any kinship. They remain wondrously different.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8118-0785-1
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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