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Product Description
Product Description
Gerald Durrell, director and owner of Jersey Zoo, was internationally famous for his amusing books about collecting wild animals. The Overloaded Ark, his first, remains his funniest book. It describes an expedition to the remote territory of the Cameroons in West Africa, before independence.
'A delightful book . . . You can feel his bush-shirt sticking to his back . . . Bagging a monitor, smoking out a Pangolin (scaly anteater), celebrating the capture of the rare Angwantibo (small lemur), bird liming for Giant Kingfishers on the warm, milky waters of Lake Soden: he communicates every detail of his experiences with just the right degree of zest.' New Statesman
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book is about a business that, for the most part, no longer exists – the business of collecting animals for display in zoos. Wildlife conservation has changed a lot since then so the kind of expedition that Gerald Durrell and his companion, John, undertook in 1953, described in this book, just could not happen now.
Gerald describes how he and John spent several months in Cameroon collecting a variety of animals, birds and reptiles and some of the adventures they had, including the triumphs and disappointments. He acknowledges right at the beginning that the expedition may seem more exciting than it really was, because all the boring aspects have been omitted. Even so, there were enough exciting moments to fill this book.
He describes some of the local people, who he mostly got on well with – but of course he did have some problems and we are told about these. He describes some of the creatures he collected, and the disappointment when some died or escaped.
My favorite (both at school and now) was a chimpanzee that had already been domesticated. Gerald was asked to look after him before he could be shipped to London. This was no ordinary chimpanzee, as he not only enjoyed smoking cigarettes but was able to light his own using either matches or lighter, and also displayed other characteristics more normally associated with people than with chimpanzees. Always remember that this was 1953.
This is a highly entertaining book, which I first read at school, where it was compulsory reading - and it was the only such book that I enjoyed. I still enjoyed it when I read it again recently, after discovering (to my surprise) that it is still available.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
In this book, Gerald Durrell journeys to Eshobi and later goes to Bakebe. Since this is Durrell's first book, he obviously does not have the experience with writing which he displays well in his other books like "The Whispering Land" or " The Druken Forest". Although not as humourous as his other books, it does offer an interesting account of his journey and does introduce some interesting characters such as his two hunters Elias and Andriana. If you're a first-time reader of Durrell, don't start with this one, you may be disappointed with him and deprive yourself of reading some of his better books.
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