Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

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These homeless people were living in the guest rooms and had cooking fires going on the balconies and had rigged up tends on the verandas. Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. Armchair travelers will wish the book went on twice as long -- and that is something, considering that the book runs more than 400 pages. He spends pages raking a missionary over the proverbial coals – using his own thorough knowledge of the Bible to continually punch holes in her arguments.

Brown hardback (gilt lettering to the spine, small nicks on the edges of the cover) in near fine condition, with Dj (small stain mark inside the edges of the back Dj cover, small creases and nicks on the edges of the Dj cover) in VGC.In this book, a lot more often than not, the situations he describes negatively are in fact pretty dire. A common thread across almost all of Africa is the many people he meets who have spent much of their lives in jail under oppressive regimes. Don't travel in crappy cars or eat bad food just so you can prove that you've "lived like an African. Theroux rides an old Chinese cultural revolution railway to Zambia, a gift to free people from South African imperialism.

It's a nation that thinks the rest of the world is obliged to support it, doesn't believe poverty exists elsewhere, and doesn't look towards the rich and politicians in its own country to help. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. Charities and aid programs seemed to turn African problems into permanent conditions that were bigger and messier. When his attention is grabbed -- by an issue, a landscape or some unfortunate fellow traveller -- Theroux is a hyena with a bone. Neither a sensationalistic reveler in the pain of others, nor a hopeless romantic, Theroux chronicles a journey through an Africa full of decay and beauty, fear and joy, misery and perseverance.Despite the euphoric title, Oceania as Theroux ( Riding the Iron Rooster ) experienced it was only occasionally a carefree paradise. Everyone else, donors and volunteers and bankers, however idealistic, were simply agents of subversion.

In some African countries it is international aid agencies that provide the most consistent source of employment. It takes an elderly British nurse who has spent most of her life in Africa, to put Theroux's naiveté into perspective. At a Russian resort on the Red Sea he can't rest or relax until he is on his own, far from the beaten track. In the travel-writing tradition that made Paul Theroux’s reputation, Dark Star Safari is a rich and insightful book whose itinerary is Africa, from Cairo to Cape Town: down the Nile, through Sudan and Ethiopia, to Kenya, Uganda, and ultimately to the tip of South Africa.We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. This, it may be argued, is itself a problem, creating a comprador class dependent on foreign patronage. For some unknown reason I assume that I'll garner some great knowledge form his books or be more amused than frustrated. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

And more than that: to treat the waiting as an opportunity to really listen to Africans - like the Ethiopian journalist thrown into prison by the Derg who translated the only available book, " Gone with the Wind," into Amharic, writing on the foil in his cigarette packs. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). He cites books like The Lords of Poverty and The Road to Hell, as well the opinions of many Africans (black and white) who confirm this bias (he may be right in this; I’m in no position to judge). In this maddening, exhilarating, frustrating and thoroughly entertaining journey through Africa, Theroux is at his bracing best. He's described some of his experiences, both in his early novels and in books such as Sir Vidia's Shadow (see our review).He takes in Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Writing of more recent events in the history of the region, Theroux describes the outcome of war between Eritrea and Ethiopia as "ending triumphantly for Eritrea". This was my first Theroux and, on finishing it, I couldn’t fully judge of the tone of a book that was written near what will likely be the end of his career, after a certain cynicism has taken root. Aid is a failure, he says, because "the only people dishing up the food and doling out the money are foreigners. There is a contempt for the entire African/ThirdWorld AID industry (whose representatives he sneeringly refers to as ‘agents of virtue’), those smug, insulated, liberal do-gooders riding about in their large, white Land Rovers, hanging around the fancy swimming pools of the luxury hotels, never mingling with the people they claim to help, not even willing to lend a hand to a stranded white man in need of a ride, spending wads of OPM (Other People’s Money) not simply in ways that are unhelpful, but in ways (Theroux believes) that are positively harmful.