Product Description

Paul Theroux sets off for Cape Town from Cairo - the hard way. Traveling across bush and desert, down rivers and across lakes, and through country after country, Theroux visits some of the most beautiful landscapes on earth, and some of the most dangerous. It is a journey of discovery and of rediscovery - of the unknown and the unexpected, but also of people and places he knew as a young and optimistic teacher forty years before. Safari in Swahili simply means 'journey', and this is the ultimate safari. It is Theroux in his element - a trip where chance encounter is everything, where departure and arrival times are an irrelevance, and where contentment can be found balancing on the top of a truck in the middle of nowhere.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17075 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Review
This is an unashamedly sentimental journey. In his 20s, young Paul Theroux was a teacher and Peace Corp volunteer in Africa. 40 years later, he goes in search of this lost youth. The book works to an old-fashioned formula, retracing the great treks of an earlier age of exploration - the feted Cairo to Cape overland route. The sensibilities are often old-fashioned, too. No chapter escapes curmudgeonly comments about how new-fangled inventions have ruined primitive places, from mobile phones to 'the way the Internet and our age of information have destroyed the pleasure of discovery in travel'. But if the feelings are from a former era, Theroux is initially keen to be seen as younger than his years. 'I was so self-conscious of my age that I often asked Africans to guess how old I was, hoping - perhaps knowing in advance - they would give me a low figure,' he writes. The answers ranged from 40-something all the way to 52 - still gratifyingly way too low. Hoping to find the spiritual secret to everlasting youth, he wends his way down to Uganda and the school where he been so happy teaching four decades earlier. But the more shadows of his past he revisited, the more he began to see the strength of his present. Africa became, he writes, 'an adventure in rejuvenation'. 'I now knew: The old are not as frail as you think.... They are full of ideas, hidden powers, even sexual energy. Don't be fooled by the thin hair and the battered features and the scepticism. The older traveller knows it best: in our hearts we are youthful... for we have come to know that the years have made us more powerful and certainly streetwise.' Towards the end of his journey, he wrote in his diary, 'I do not want to be young again. I am happy being what I am.' As a travel book, Dark Star Safari excels. As an autobiography about growing old, it soars. Review by Dea Birkett (Kirkus UK)

Synopsis
Paul Theroux sets off for Cape Town from Cairo - the hard way. Traveling across bush and desert, down rivers and across lakes, and through country after country, Theroux visits some of the most beautiful landscapes on earth, and some of the most dangerous. It is a journey of discovery and of rediscovery - of the unknown and the unexpected, but also of people and places he knew as a young and optimistic teacher forty years before. Safari in Swahili simply means 'journey', and this is the ultimate safari. It is Theroux in his element - a trip where chance encounter is everything, where departure and arrival times are an irrelevance, and where contentment can be found balancing on the top of a truck in the middle of nowhere.

About the Author
Paul Theroux is the author of many bestselling books, both fiction and non-fiction. His travel books include THE GREAT RAILWAY BAZAAR, THE PILLARS OF HERCULES and FRESH-AIR FIEND. His latest book, THE STRANGER AT THE PALAZZO D'ORO, is published byHamish Hamilton in June 2003. He divides his time between Cape Cod and Hawaii.

Customer Reviews

Brilliant
Too many reviewers here want a glowing travel brochure out of Theroux. Writing is his vocation, travelling is his muse. Travelling is a way to comment on the human condition as he experiences it, and on his own condition, as he experiences it. It doesn't matter how many people have a good time in Africa, or a bad time in Africa - Theroux has his own devil driving him in his own strange directions, and what he produces are travel books only in the most minimal sense. In the larger sense they are works of literature in which travel plays a part.

I love the complexity of his writing, his honesty in recording moods, enthusiasms, fears, vanities, moments of ill-temper, generosity, meanness. Reviewers point out moments of 'hypocrisy', or 'meanness', or curmudgeonly outbursts, as if he was too stupid to read his own text. Theroux is a writer. He wants you to see that.

I don't seek any kind of objective truth about Africa. I wouldn't believe anyone who purveyed it. What I do find is a writer using his craft to create complex and absorbing works of literature, using travel as a starting point for a succession of events, meetings, conversations, anecdotes, situations, literary digressions, bits of obscure history, polemic, and unlikely destinations.

Dark Star Safari is clever, it is brave, it is fun, it is dark, it is complex. It isn't a coincidence Theroux read Conrad a dozen times as he progressed from north to south. Please don't make the mistake of imagining this book is a variation on 'what I did on my hols'.

Cheer up mate it's only Africa
Some things bother me about this book. Firstly, the way he criticises anyone not 'doing Africa' his way, his conceited contempt of anyone holidaying in Africa (a good source of revenue for various African countries) when he himself is an outsider; a tourist. We can't all take a year off work for an all-expenses paid trip down Africa Mr Theroux. His criticism and I have to say over-dramatic account of African cities; I've lived in Nairobi and Kampala and felt perfectly safe if you're sensible and know where to go. Venturing out after dark (unlike Theroux) has never once been a problem for me and my friend (who's lived there most of his life). But he has to sell books. The book's tone was at times depressing and although most countries in sub-saharan Africa have problems many are stable, welcoming and enjoyable for foreigners to visit. The biggest problem I found was with his tone with anything concearned with improving Africa, true it often isn't easy and although his pleasure of seeing subsistance farming doesn't equate to "let's keep them in their place" it did seem apathetic and left me wondering if Mr Theroux simply desires a return to an Africa of 1840 without hospitals, education, propects and security. And 'yes' there is all these things to be found in modern-day Africa, he neglected to mention the sucessful Ugandan-run businesses, schools, infustructure and tourist industries I found in 2006. Things aren't always run perfectly but this is Africa and shouldn't be compared to catching a tube from Hype Park Corner, I'm sure he knows this. But he has to sell books. Finally, his criticism of Aid agencies was upheld in many areas but found his discussion one-sided offering no real solutions, should we stop giving Aid, stop trying to make an impact due to the governing of a predetory elite? It left me asking the question "so what do we do then?" and he supplied no real answers, not that it's his job of course; he is a writer and a very good one at that; he gets 4 out of 5, but like this review he should try to occassionally focus on the positive.

OUTSTANDING!
What a fantastic book. Will be loved by all readers and a complete must for fans of travel!