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Tales from the Torrid Zone: Travels in the Deep Tropics
 
 
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Tales from the Torrid Zone: Travels in the Deep Tropics [Kindle Edition]

Alexander Frater (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review) |
Digital List Price: £7.16 What's this?
Print List Price: £7.99
Kindle Price: £5.69 includes VAT* & free wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet
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Review

"Lyrical [and] moving. . . . Part memoir, part travel yarn, a hymn to the solar lands." --"The New York Times Book Review"
"Entertaining. . . . This world is literally teeming with natural wonders, local characters, and wild stories." --"The" "Boston Globe"
"A book to treasure on many levels. . . . Be prepared to be fascinated."
--"The Washington Times"
'Fascinating. . . . A diverting, loose-limbed tour of the earth's hot zones. . . . Mr Frater, a genial tour guide and a stylish writer, makes excellent company." --"The New York Times"

Review

"Lyrical [and] moving. . . . Part memoir, part travel yarn, a hymn to the solar lands." --"The New York Times Book Review"
"Entertaining. . . . This world is literally teeming with natural wonders, local characters, and wild stories." --"The" "Boston Globe"
"A book to treasure on many levels. . . . Be prepared to be fascinated."
--"The Washington Times"
'Fascinating. . . . A diverting, loose-limbed tour of the earth's hot zones. . . . Mr Frater, a genial tour guide and a stylish writer, makes excellent company." --"The New York Times"
See all Product Description

Product details

  • Format: Kindle Edition
  • File Size: 862 KB
  • Print Length: 200 pages
  • Publisher: Picador (25 Feb 2011)
  • Sold by: Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.
  • Language English
  • ASIN: B004PGM9I6
  • Text-to-Speech: Enabled
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #160,702 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

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More About the Author

Alexander Frater
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
27 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Another great read 2 Jun 2004
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
I am a keen reader of travel literature and have really enjoyed Frater's previous books, 'Beyond the Blue Horizon' and 'Chasing the Monsoon'. 'Tales from the Torrid Zone' is his best to date - an evocative account of his life and travels through different tropical regions. Sometimes you can feel the heat and colour of the tropics reaching for you from the page. I would recommend this to anyone with an interest in travel.
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Amazon.com:  9 reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Didn't like 26 May 2007
By Miran Ali - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Somehow this book simply didn't appeal to me. It meanders all over the place, with no dates so you're often left to guess the chronology. Occasional reminiscences about bygone missionaries, their wives, church bells and so on. Not a travel book by any means. Although to be fair, the parts about flying boats and tropical diseases were quite interesting. If you are interested in the South Pacific, I'd reccomend as light fare "The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific" by J. Maarten Troost and the best I've ever read "The Fatal Impact: The Invasion of the South Pacific, 1767-1840"
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
So Many Fascinating Stories ... But When Did They Happen? 9 April 2007
By Umm Lila - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
The structure of Frater's book is built around his birth to a missionary family in the South Pacific, the love of the tropics that never left him despite many years in rainy England, and his purchase of a new bell for the church founded by his grandfather. A long time travel writer for a British newspaper, Frater has many good stories to tell, and they surface in this book in strange ways; a moment in, say, Fiji, wil remind him of a previous moment, in Mozambique for example, which will remind him of yet another story. Although this is certainly a change from itinerary-based travel writing, I would have liked to at least have footnotes saying when exactly a set of events took place. I often had to re-read paragraphs and sections after I realized that he was in Vanuatu, reminiscing about someplace like Burma.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Very disappointed 3 Aug 2008
By Razvan Julian Petrescu - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
I bought this book on an impulse (the premise seemed intriguing) and I have to say I have not enjoyed it very much. I am on the last 20 pages now and it has been really hard going.

The problem is with how the book is structured. For some reason the author chose to combine various vignettes together and seemingly randomly group them in chapters. There is no flow of narrative, no characters to interest the reader, no feeling for the place where the author is at a particular moment, no context, no placement in time; most of the time we have no idea when is a particular scene taking place. Worse, at times I found myself not knowing where! The author would start a paragraph mentioning whatever fact about a place (say, Bali) then two sentences after that, in the same paragraph, he would mention something about a Carribbean island that had a thing in common with Bali, and for the rest of the chapter would keep talking about 'that' place; I found myself scratching my head wondering if he was in Bali or in the Carribbean, because it was not clear at all (to me). Also the people in his book are remarkably uni-dimensional, and there seems to be little difference between Melanesian John and American John, since no real descriptions or character studies are provided.

The author uses this gimmick to string paragraphs together repeatedly: he mentions something about some place, then the same thing about a different place, and this mechanism supposedly provides the passage from one place to another. While some may find this stream of conscioussness type of writing interesting, I quickly tired of it, and in hindsight it appears a 'cheap' way of connecting unrelated fragments and avoiding proper narrative. It does not give the book any kind of depth and I found myself not very interested in picking it up again because really there was nothing to return to.

It is too bad because there is a lot of material here. By comparison, Theroux's "Happy Isles of Oceania" is a masterpiece.

Take this one to the beach, leaf through it, but don't expect to be gripped.
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