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Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town
 
 

Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town (Paperback)

by Paul Theroux (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
RRP: £9.99
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Frequently Bought Together

Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town + The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas + The Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of 'The Great Railway Bazaar'
Total RRP: £29.97
Price For All Three: £18.83

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Product details

  • Paperback: 512 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin; New Ed edition (7 Aug 2003)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0140281118
  • ISBN-13: 978-0140281118
  • Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.2 x 3.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 26,717 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories:

    #3 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > T > Theroux, Paul
    #14 in  Books > Fiction > World > African
    #83 in  Books > Travel & Holiday > Countries & Regions > Africa

Product Description

Product Description

Paul Theroux sets off for Cape Town from Cairo -- the hard way. 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.

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.

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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews

34 Reviews
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 (15)
4 star:
 (11)
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Average Customer Review
4.0 out of 5 stars (34 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Searching for misery ...., 10 Nov 2005
By D. Stevens (Vienna, Austria) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
I began this book on a trip to Uganda ... and finished it a month later when I returned to Africa on a trip to Ethiopia and South Africa. Paul captures Africa in ways that makes the book so enjoyable. I have already been to most of the countries he covered, and was amused at how well he captured the sights, smells and dynamics of the people and places. I look at Africa as Henderson The Rain King, in search for my inner self, and perhaps this is what I missed in Paul's book; he was only in search of a book to write.
I reached the end of the book also annoyed at his constant attacking of the "agents of virtue" only to find that in his last stretch he too became very much bothered with the constant nagging for change (and favours)....
To me it is obvious that he selected his experiences in a way to bring out the hardship he went through (which he chose to go through) and in places where he obviously stayed at a good hotel (as in Harare) he is silent on the matter, as if it wouldn't have been correct or might have set the wrong tone. I think in a way having been shot at in Northeastern Kenya provided him with a pedestal to elevate his quest as supernatural.
For Africa lovers definitely worth reading, for those that need to understand Africa there are books less biased.
Karibu
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29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars "Hoping for the picturesque, expecting misery...", 4 Jan 2006
By Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)   
Forty years after being a Peace Corps worker in Malawi and a teacher in Uganda, Paul Theroux returns to Africa and finds things changed--for the worse. Now approaching his sixtieth birthday and wanting to escape from cell phones, answering machines, the daily newspaper, and being "put on hold," he is determined to travel from Cairo to Cape Town. He believes that the continent "contain[s] many untold tales and some hope and comedy and sweetness, too," and that there is "more to Africa than misery and terror."

Traveling alone by cattle truck, "chicken bus," bush train, matatu, rental car, ferry, and even dugout canoe, he tries to blend in as much as possible, buying clothing at secondhand stalls in public markets, carrying only one small bag, and avoiding the tourist destinations. He is an observant and insightful writer, and his descriptions of his travails are so vivid the reader can experience them vicariously. His interviews with residents are perceptive and very revealing of the political and social climate of these places, and his character sketches of Sister Alexandra from Ethiopia (a nun who "has loved") and of two charming Ethiopian traders, a father and son, who take Theroux to the Kenyan border, are delightful.

For most of the countries of Africa, however, he has no kind words. Kenya is "one of the most corrupt...countries in Africa," everything in Kampala, Uganda, has changed for the worse, and in Tanzania "there was only decline--simple linear decrepitude, and in some villages collapse." At the U.S. embassy in Malawi, he finds an "overpaid, officious, disingenuous, blame-shifting...embassy hack" and, in pique, he wonders, "Had she, like me, been abused, terrified, stranded, harassed, cheated, bitten, flooded, insulted, exhausted, robbed, browbeaten, poisoned?"

Theroux has become curmudgeonly over time, and it is difficult to "travel with" a man who sees himself as a hero for making the trip at all, but who also refuses to give a half-eaten apple to a hungry child when she begs for it. He is very critical in his comments about other writers. He admires Rimbaud, who lived in Ethiopia in the 1880's, he visits Naguib Mahfouz in Egypt, and he spends his sixtieth birthday with Nadine Gordimer, an old friend. But Hemingway ("bent on proving his manhood"), Isak Dinesen ("a sentimental memoirist"), Kuki Gallman (a "mythomaniac of the present day"), and V.S. Naipaul ("an outsider who feels weak") are abruptly dismissed. When he ultimately refers to his own "safari-as-struggle," it is hard not compare his temporary and entirely voluntary struggles to those of the African people he meets along the way. "Being in Africa was like being on a dark star," he says. His book reflects this darkness. Mary Whipple

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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars It began in Africa..., 4 Nov 2003
By Matt Taylor (Telford, UK) - See all my reviews
Yet again Theroux does not disappoint in his most recent of travel writings. The first theroux book I read was 'The Great Railway Bazaar', and at first glance it is easy to misinterpret his style as being somewhat pompous and self-fulfilling. After reading closer however, I think it more accurate to see his words as deeply personal, a journey through not only a place that holds for him much familiarity, but a place for which Theroux harbours a great deal of emotion.

This book glistens with both the wonderful highs of human spirit, and also the desperate lows that come with a journey so arduous as the one he has undertaken here, both spiritually and physically.

It cannot be easy to shatter your own dreams and memories of a place that you hold so dearly in your heart, and yet at times theroux does just this in the book, with a frank earnesty that I find both refreshing and very touching.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys travel writing for a tale of a journey, and a taste of a place and of the trip itself. Theroux is still the master of his art, and to my mind all other travel works must first be judged by his.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A book of great wisdom
Paul Theroux is true adventurer! Whilst I found the start quite slow, the book soon gathered pace and this is not some bland travelogue but a real exploration into the hear and... Read more
Published 7 months ago by C. J. Howe

4.0 out of 5 stars Controversial view of Africa
I have read several Theroux travel books in the past and have always imagined him as a difficult man - easy to take offence, bad tempered and opinionated yet very intelligent and... Read more
Published 13 months ago by Tamara

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant
Too many reviewers here want a glowing travel brochure out of Theroux. Writing is his vocation, travelling is his muse. Read more
Published 20 months ago by C. Low

4.0 out of 5 stars 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... Read more
Published 20 months ago by Mr. J. F. Cotterill

5.0 out of 5 stars OUTSTANDING!
What a fantastic book. Will be loved by all readers and a complete must for fans of travel!
Published on 9 Feb 2008 by M. Godby

2.0 out of 5 stars Superficial and negative
I like the way Mr. Theroux writes. It flows well, and he is concrete and catchy in his choice of words. That is about all good I had to say about this travel book... Read more
Published on 21 Sep 2007 by Erik Cleves Kristensen

4.0 out of 5 stars Describes Africa as it is
I think Paul Theroux expected to find Africa had deteriorated since he last lived there in the 1960s and he is not wrong, so the book has a feeling of being a fait accompli before... Read more
Published on 9 Aug 2007 by Caterkiller

5.0 out of 5 stars emotional, raw and difficult to put down
this is an odd book. at first glance, it can be offputting to read - one can immediately see it wont be a "happy" book - he is travelling through some of the poorest countries in... Read more
Published on 21 Mar 2007 by A. Mcguinness

1.0 out of 5 stars nasty negative self-absorbsion
He doesn't have a good word to say about anyone except his literary heros/heroine.

He didn't enjoy the trip much, but seems to see himself as some sort of hero... Read more
Published on 6 Jan 2007 by James L

1.0 out of 5 stars disappointing
i read the book with growing dismay...the book talks the author's return to africa after many years...things are considerably worse than he left them, this is true... Read more
Published on 23 Mar 2006

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