Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

by PaulTheroux (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2002

  $4.18

  Safari in Swahili means a journey, typically a long one. In Dark Star Safari , Theroux's itinerary is African, from Cairo to Cape Town - down the Nile, through Sudan and Ethiopia, to Kenya, Uganda and beyond to South Africa. Journeying by train, boat and cattle truck, he passes through some of the most beautiful - and often life-threatening - landscapes on earth. This is travel as discovery, but it is in part a sentimental journey. Almost 40 years ago, Theroux first travelled in Africa as a teacher in the Malawi bush. Now he stops at his old school, sees former students and revisits his African friends. Seeing first-hand what has happened in Africa in those four decades of independence, Theroux is obsessively curious and wittily observant.

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $3.24

• New

  Paperback
  2003

  $14.01

  Dark Star Safari is Paul Theroux's now classic account of a journey from Cairo to Cape Town. Travelling 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. Praise for Paul Theroux: Theroux's work remains the standard by which other travel writing must be judged' Observer 'One needs energy to keep up with the extraordinary, productive restlessness of Paul Theroux ...[ He is] the most gifted, most prodigal writer of his generation . (Jonathan Raban). Always a terrific teller of tales and conjurer of exotic locales, he writes lean prose that lopes along at a compelling pace . (Sunday Times). Paul Theroux's books include Dark Star Safari, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Elephanta Suite, A Dead Hand, The Tao of Travel and The Lower River. The Mosquito Coast and Dr Slaughter have both been made into successful films. Paul Theroux divides his time between Cape Cod and the Hawaiian islands.