Amazon.co.uk Review
Meeting head-hunters brandishing knives, pushing through mosquito-infested jungle where the leeches got inside his boots, having to build a bridge over a swollen river where the previous one had been swept away--David Attenborough won his spurs the hard way, as this riveting chronicle of his Papuan trip in 1964 makes clear. His goal was to film the mating ritual of the bird of paradise, and if possible to bring home a chick for the London zoo. And the obstacles in his way weren't only from nature: the Papuans killed the birds for their feathers whenever they could catch them, which made that dance even more elusive.
Attenborough turns his storytelling gifts to brilliant account, building up a vivid picture of this largely uncharted island. It may be far from a Garden of Eden, but the birds he found--over 50 different species--had plumage of almost unbelievable splendour. As did the chieftain he met, who was clad in a loin-cloth and wearing the sort of towering feather head-dress you normally only see in Victorian engravings. Eventually he did manage to film the dance, so the trip (organised jointly by the BBC and London Zoo) was a success.
This audio book is enlivened by many things besides formal narrative. Attenborough proves himself an accomplished actor as he switches from voice to voice to impersonate the friends he made along the way, and we also get the sound of Papuan ceremonial songs, and of the wonderful effect when the tribesmen mass in their hundreds for a general sing-sing. --Betty Tadman
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Amazon.co.uk Review
Known to millions around the world as the voice of Natural History, David Attenborough began his television career in the mid-1950s with a series of innovative wildlife programmes called Zoo Quest. Here, for the first time, he reads his adventures in Indonesia in search of the elusive Komodo dragon, a creature which at that time had never been captured on film. On the way innumerable obstacles--from a jeep with a mind of its own to perilous storms at sea--are overcome with a mixture of ingenuity, doggedness and good old- fashioned pluck. The dragon, when it finally appears, causes a sense of awe still audible in Attenborough's voice over40 years later as he describes his first encounter: "There, facing me, less than four yards away, crouched the dragon ... he was so close to us that I could distinguish every beady scale in his hoary black skin, which seemingly too large for him hung in long horizontal folds on his flanks and was puckered and wrinkled around his powerful neck." But what's most surprising and enjoyable here is Attenborough's delineation of the human actors in his drama: there are the friendly sulphur gatherers who risk their lives every day on the slopes of the volcano, and with whom Attenborough cheerfully sings; there's the boat crew who laugh dutifully at the Englishman's jokes, which he laboriously translates into Indonesian before delivering; there's faithful Sabrang, hunter and general factotum; and there's a shifty, piratical captain who admits whilst they are becalmed at sea that he has no idea how to find Komodo island. This is a colourful and often very funny narrative, a winning combination of natural history and vivid travel writing, which the author reads with a genuine sense of relish for the picaresque experiences of his youth. --Mark Walker
See all Product Description
(1 customer review)
(
