incredible informative ( )

Theroux tells good stories about places he has been. ( )

Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar was my gateway book to travel literature. He continues to deliver and satisfy with Dark Star Safari.

Theroux travels by colonial era trains, broken down delivery trucks, dilapidated buses and overloaded mini van driven by crazed youths. He finds himself in what seems like the most desolate fly-blown, poverty stricken, slum in all of Africa only to be outdone by the next country.

Traveling at the time of his 60th birthday, he is robbed, stranded, shot at, harassed, a victim of food poisoning. Therox has a knack for meeting charactors along the way--aid workders, missionaries, fellow-writers, cab drivers and other travelers.

He is a curmudgeon, vain, highly insightful, an outstanding writer, provocative and judgmental. What makes him so appealing is that he is honest about these qualities. He does not hold back. He presents his trip and himself with the good, the bad and the ugly.




( )

Paul Theroux gives his reason for wanting to take an overland journey through Africa in the beginning of the book, “Being available at any time in the total accessible world seemed to me pure horror. It made me want to find a place that was not accessible at all: no phones, no fax machines, not even mail delivery, the wonderful old world of being out of touch. In other words, gone away….The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace. As Huck put it, lighting out for the territory.” He describes Africa as one of the last places on earth one can vanish into. Theroux had been a Peace Corps volunteer and teacher in Malawi and Uganda thirty years prior—he wanted to see how it had held up.

One of the reasons I like Theroux’s books so much is because I would never take the risks and journeys he does. But I like experiencing them through him. He reads during his trips—often books and long-dead authors connected with traveling through the region—if it be Mark Twain or Rousseau. And he usually has time to stop in and chat a bit with the regional celebrity author. I keep my Amazon wishlist close by to add to as I read. Theroux is no Rick Steves. He doesn’t travel in luxury nor or his writings to encourage you to follow in his steps. His trips are usually zen banality traveling on hot smelly buses or trains that always break down. These moments are punctuated with things like being shot at or illness. A frequent theme through the book is an African warning him away from the place he is about to go because, “bad people are there.”

He is not happy with what he finds on his journey. He was criticized after the book’s release for his contempt of Aid and Aid Workers and missionaries in Africa. Paul is a curmudgeon. But it is the chapters that he writes about his visits to the schools he taught in and you can feel his disappointment at the futility he sees. He visits the graves of the couple who founded the school and describes how their unkemptness would have disappointed the old orderly couple and so he weeds their grave himself. He also visits the school itself—aid promised was stolen, and the books had all been stolen and the school was falling down. He was disappointed to find that many of his fellow African teachers had sent their children elsewhere for education, but in some cases had encouraged their children to not come back but to stay in other countries.

If you are a real-life or an arm-chair adventurer and you love good travel writing and reading about literature then check out Theroux.
( )

Brilliant travel. Got a culture shocked just from reading it. ( )

Usual Paul Theroux fare: drama on the road (riding a cattle car from Ethiopia to Kenya, hassled by 'urchins' etc.!), chatting with locals, and denouncing "tourists" who like the game animals more than the people of Africa. This book is also a trip back in time to when he served in the Peace Corps. The nostalgia adds a new flavor. But things are not good in Africa --by any measure. Theroux suggests empowering Africans directly and then letting them be which may include allowing them to live at a bare subsistence level -- i.e., poor but happy. ( )

I just love Paul Theroux' books- have done three of his travelogues this year, including (in the wrong order) his second attempt on Africa in "Last Train to Zona Verde".
Naving spent time in Africa 35 years before- teaching, a member of the Peace Corps- the 60 year old author travels from Egypt to S Africa by bus, train and jeep. Avoiding sightseeing, and focussing on the real Africa, he talks with everyone he meets- the poor and struggling, and those running the country, white Aid workers, missionaries, fellow travellers, political prisoners.... Revisiting places from his youth, he assesses how far Africa has come in those decades of independence and self determination- there is a definite sense of things being Much Worse Now.
Perhaps the most lasting impression - and one which he discussed, too, in "Zona Verde" is the futile and self-seeking Relief industry. Likening it on more than one occasion, to Charles Dickens' Mrs Jellyby, with her fatuous notions on how to improve Their lives, he refers to splendid buildings erected by such agencies and abandoned by the locals, whose needs they don't meet. ; the uninvolved apathy of infantilized locals waiting for whites to come and make stuff happen...
I don't think anyone does travel writing so well; the complete cross section of voices creates a collage of experiences of life in Africa. ( )

I've never read Theroux before, because I don't really identify with his cynical worldview. Or perhaps, I just get enough of that already. He is very critical of others, and not in an insightful way. For example, throughout the book he criticizes people for being overly certain of their beliefs… Yet his own solid beliefs are themselves usually based on extremely flimsy evidence, like a book he once read or hearsay from a friend at a university. He spends a lot of time writing about development aid. I often agree with him, at least in part, but cringe at his weak arguments. Still, I like that he tries, and that he also includes some brief history sketches.

The strength is that Theroux gets out there, off the beaten track. He describes it well. And, above all, he is not merely an observer, but he interacts with people along the way, and not just shallowly.

The main problem with this book is that it doesn't end. After Theroux gets to South Africa, he doesn't want to stop. And so the book doesn't stop. It just goes on and on, with no real purpose except to postpone the end. It gets very tedious, especially one very long scene in which he details every line of conversation with a misguided missionary straight out of "The Poisonwood Bible." She's an irritating person, and maybe deserves to be teased, but do we readers need to endure it, too?

> The whole point of my leaving was to escape this stuff, to be out of touch. The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace.

> I had gotten to Lower Egypt, and was heading south, in my usual traveling mood: hoping for the picturesque, expecting misery, braced for the appalling. Happiness was unthinkable, for although happiness is desirable, it is a banal subject for travel. Therefore, Africa seemed perfect for a long journey.

> "We like Americans. It was your government that did it, not you." This distinction between politics and people was to be made quite often by people I met on my trip. Africans in general disliked their governments so intensely, and saw them as so unrepresentative of themselves, that they were happy to give me the benefit of the doubt.

> Abdullah the taxi driver complained most of the way back through Omdurman and over the bridge. But I was smiling, vitalized by the talk and bewitched by the Nile, which was coursing from the heart of Africa, and by the sight of the moon shining on it, filling its surface with shattered oblongs of light in brilliant puddles.

> The other Ethiopian cash crop, high-grade coffee, also grown here in the hills around Harar, was in demand but negligible in profit compared to khat. This daze-producing bush was so highly prized in the nonboozing Emirates and the other states in the Persian Gulf that Dire Dawa’s airport was very busy with the comings and goings of small transport planes. For the greatest buzz, khat had to be fresh when it was chewed.

> They drove away, leaving me by the side of the road. That was to be fairly typical of my experience with aid workers in rural Africa: they were, in general, oafish self-dramatizing prigs, and often complete bastards.

> I said, "Sitaki kufa." I don’t want to die. He said in English, "They do not want your life, bwana. They want your shoes." Many times after that, in my meandering through Africa, I mumbled these words, an epitaph of underdevelopment, desperation in a single sentence.

> Here as elsewhere, I was the only muzungu traveler. The others didn’t take buses, feared Sudan and Ethiopia, stuck to selected routes, and traveled in groups to look at animals. As a rule, they stayed a great distance from the locals. Yet, though I was solitary, all I heard was karibu, karibu, welcome, welcome, and "Take more ugali?"

> Where are the Africans in all this? In my view, aid is a failure if in forty years of charity the only people still dishing up the food and doling out the money are foreigners. No Africans are involved—there is not even a concept of African volunteerism or labor-intensive projects. … The most imaginative solution Africans had to their plight was simply to leave—to bail out, escape, run, bolt—go to Britain or America and abandon their homelands. That was the lesson of the Kilimanjaro Express—half the African passengers on it were fleeing, intending to emigrate.

> I began to fantasize that the Africa I traveled through was often like a parallel universe, the dark star image in my mind, in which everyone existed as a sort of shadow counterpart of someone in the brighter world.

> Later, walking through Mzuzu to my hotel, I stopped in a bar to drink a beer, knowing that inevitably an African would join me, ask me for a drink, and tell me a story.

> That was my Malawi epiphany. Only Africans were capable of making a difference in Africa. Everyone else, donors and volunteers and bankers, however idealistic, were simply agents of subversion

> One of the epiphanies of my trip was the realization that where the mode of life had changed significantly in the Africa I had known, it had changed for the worse.

> When the dominant males are killed and their heads mounted, the male cubs stay in the pride and mate with their mothers and sisters, and "jigger the gene pool."

> "The flood was here," a man said as we passed a low-lying district of shacks outside the city. He saw that I had been gaping out the window. "The people were rehoused. New people have come hoping for a new flood, so that the government will find them houses." But the government would not have paid for that housing; it would have been funded by what an American chronicler of recent history in the country called "the Donors' Republic of Mozambique."

> Joseph Conrad once wrote, "Before the Congo I was a mere animal." I could say the same about my own experience of Africa. It made me curious again, and thinking about Africa once more I yearned to go back. I love the African bush—I missed it; but I hate African cities. ( )

I went into this book thinking it would be another "western man goes to Africa" tale told with Paul Theroux's signature style. Yes, that's what it was - but the layering of his experiences in the Peace Corp in Malawi during the 1960's adds to the modern material in wonderful ways. It's not just about travel, but also time travel. Theroux experiences the Africa of today (or well, the 1990's) where he finds progress retreating, contrasted not only against Africa's portrayal in the media (including the books of many of his contemporaries) but also his own history and personal connections.

Scattered throughout the book is also the making of a great reading list as Theroux notes texts he finds relevant to his history or current experiences. ( )

I received this book as a gift and therefore felt obliged to read it; I've read other books by Theroux so I was looking forward to it. If you want a book that is non-fiction and as depressing as could be - this is it. He writes of his travels from the northern part of Africa to the south - all overland. The people he meets are fascinating, and his descriptions are marvelous, but the stories of how horrible Africa is are truly depressing. The abuses heaped upon natives by the British and French colonialists are nothing compared to the abuses heaped upon them by the current leaders, and the amount of graft and government theft is amazing in how boldly and how ruthlessly it is done. A continent that is among the richest in natural resources suffers worse than ever because of corrupt officials who take the money offered by Not-for-Profits, NGO's and do-good organizations and use it to enrich themselves while millions suffer and starve. This is a book that leaves you feeling that there is absolutely no hope for Africa. At nearly 500 pages, it was a struggle to get through. If you want an accurate and unvarnished view of Africa, and don't mind mind feel depressed every time you pick up the book - this one is for you. ( )

Paul Theroux passed through Ethiopia on his travels from Cairo to Capetown, a trip described in “Dark Star Safari” (2002). He actually got on the train from Addis Ababa to Dire Dawa, the section now closed, and visited Harar, before turning south again, only to travel almost straight to the Kenyan border. A rather short stay in Ethiopia, therefore, not really worth the effort, but one can hardly expect otherwise, on such a mega-journey. I am never really captured by Paul Theroux, he writes nicely, meets lots of people, is well-read, but somehow never really gets me hooked. Matter of taste, probably.

This travelogue through Africa had a good blend of observation, personal reflections and interpretation. ( )

In Dark Star Safari, Paul Theroux documents his trek by train, boat, car and foot from Cairo to Capetown. I read it as part of Reading Globally's Africa segment in February.

Theroux visits the countries of Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambibique and South Africa. Rather than a travelogue, the book is more a story of Theroux's personal journey, hitching rides on decrepit steamers on Lake Victoria, escaping the murderous 'shifta' on the Bandit Road in northern Kenya, and other adventures, as he revisits his past (he spent many years in Africa as a young man), and muses on how much Africa has changed, usually for the worse in his opinion. He mourns that beautiful Thikka has become 'a congested maze of improvised houses and streets thick with lurking kids and traffic and an odor of decrepitude.'

Some of his colleagues from his time in Africa have risen to positions of power, including Apolo Nsibambi, prime minister of Uganda, and he is able to visit with them. Many of these former colleagues decry the fact that young, educated Africans often choose to leave Africa. I found the abandonment of Africa by its educated children to be a recurring theme in some of the African literature I read or read about on Reading Globally.

Theroux visited the Peace Corps school he helped establish as a young man, and found it a shambles, with broken windows, dirty floors, and empty library shelves. He is very critical of most aid efforts in Africa, comparing them to the efforts of Mrs. Jelleby in Bleak House. He comes across many foreign aid workers who seem clueless about their function in Africa and what, if anything, they are accomplishing, as they crisscross the countryside in their brand new, white SUVs. (He is particularly curmudgeonly about these aid workers because they are frequently reluctant to pick him up as a hitchhiker).

Theroux also describes an evening at a literary salon in Cairo with Naguib Mahouz, a side trip to Harar, Ethiopia, where Rimbaud forsook civilization and poetry and became a trader in arms and elephant tusks, and numerous other diversions.

At times, it was difficult to keep the countries and towns separate, since they share so many of the same problems and geographically they can be similar, as they morph into one another. The various tribal peoples, although living in physical proximity with each other, seem for the most part to remain suspicious of each other. ( )

32 of 75 for 2015. I'll admit it. I love Paul Theroux's travel books. I especially love the train books, and at least part of Dark Star Safari involves train travel, but also bus travel and even riding in the back of a truck travel. As he says, it's overland from Cairo to Cape Town, with all the exoticism that implies. I have no desire to visit Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe--well maybe Victoria Falls--but even so, Theroux makes me just a little bit jealous of the adventures he has while crossing Africa north to south. He brings the people and the places to life in my imagination, and has me practically itching to start reading Nadine Gordimer. As this was an Audible.com download, I listened to it in my car as I was out exploring western Montana. Yes! Listening to travel lit while traveling. Heaven in my book. Highly recommended! ( )

I enjoyed his grumpy old man perspective descriptions (I thought he was rather funny - both laughing with and at him). The many 17 year olds I know who read this though for an English class did not really appreciate him, however (and no, I'm not their English teacher).

Enjoyable but heavy going in places, will try again one day as listening to others i'm sure i must have missed something ( )

Much like The Kingdom by the Sea, I thoroughly enjoyed this unusual travelouge of an overland trip from Cairo to Cape Town. I like the random twists and turns that the trip takes and his reflections on what has changed in Africa since he lived there in the Peace Corps in the 60's. Aid workers and Safari enthusiats come in for most of his scorn and the ones he meets completely deserve it. More in my series of "I'm reading something I like!".

Theroux goes off the deep end a few times with this in his callous name-calling of anyone who doesn't conform to his worldview. I still like and appreciate him quite a bit, but am I detecting a touch of senility in his writing? Once is fine, twice okay, three times bearable, but his harping on themes like the NGOs and their white SUVs or the big game tourists was a bit over the top. Futile and senile perhaps. Obviously though, I still liked the book. ( )

He writes well but he comes across as an unpleasant, self-righteous old man, the type of man I don't like to meet when I travel. It's interesting that he was so critical of the tourists that go to Africa to see wildlife and have the butler prepare them a bath in a luxury resort, and at the end he does the same, travelling in a luxury train with a butler and staying at a very expensive game resort. I suppose he thought he deserved it and the others didn't. The whole trip looked to me like a late mid-life crisis. I particularly disliked the way he commented on young women (there's no fool like an old fool...) and I found what he said about women's behavior in game reserves absolute sexist nonsense. I was looking forward to reach the end of the book to hear his views on Mozambique and South Africa but that was also a disappointment. I give it 3 stars for the writing, which I enjoyed but I think is wasted in such a person. ( )

I enjoyed this book even though it was an irritatingly prejudiced view of Africa, a snapshot in time reflecting Theroux's experience 40 years ago and again recently. He'd already made up his mind about Africa and its peoples before his safari, and the limited view his travels offered confirmed his preconceived ideas. His superficial and uninformed take on South Africa gave me similar regard (or disregard) for his opinions on the rest of the continent.

I listened to the audiobook (shouldn't have). The reader's voice was dreary and pessimistic, his pronunciations of place names were inaccurate, he used the same obscure, unrecognizable accent for all local people whether Somalians or Zimbabweans, and all white people sounded Scottish, except the Boere whom he portrayed as cretins (presumably reflecting his opinion). He clearly took the stance of the author. Ah well...... ( )

so i've also read the old patagonian express and in sir vidia's shadow, both by paul theroux. and yet, i just keep coming back for more, as if the next one will be better. it's time to tell myself to snap out of it, because my goodness. what a curmudgeon!

to be fair, i liked this one slightly better than either of the others. he's still self-centered - this is much more a book about him traveling, than it is about where he's traveling - but the observations that he does make are keen. i don't agree with him on lots of points (aid workers in africa, for one), but his arguments are well-reasoned. i haven't been to africa myself; i don't have his more layered perspective. we'll just leave it at that.

( )

I so enjoy Theroux's writing, but this one goes beyond curmudgeonly. Read it for the descriptions of landscape and people, but ignore the opinions (as, at 7:47 in the audiobook, he appears to advocate for letting children starve rather than providing aid).

As a reader, Thoroux makes you feel damned if you do, damned if you don't. Damned if you visit Africa, damned if you don't. Damned if you try to be helpful, damned if you don't. But definitely damned if you fly somewhere rather than take a bus. Damned if you look at "attractions" (unless you're Theroux). Damned if you generalize (unless you're Theroux). Damned if you're a white tourist, though non-white tourists seem to figure very little. Damned if you spoil his tourist experience by being in his way, asking questions, taking risks, or not taking risks. The impact of AIDS on national development is minimized. Everything was better when he was younger.

The audiobook reader adds a pompous, sarcastic element to Theroux's already generally snide pontification. The print version may give less tonal offense.

I may decide only to read older Theroux and his novels. This was rather tedious.











( )

A must-read for any visitor to Africa or for those just obsessed by it. ( )

Theroux is a kind of travel writing rock star, and he's great to read; besides that he's completely mad, having complete disdain for his own safety or comfort. Dark Star Safari shows Theroux to be occasionally brilliant, a quite jaded idealist, an aggressive travler, cynical, a harsh critic of 'development', the New Left, expats and non-profits. ( )

Interesting travelogue as we goes over land, with all the difficulties and insights that kind of travel brings, from Cairo to Cape Town. At times there was a little too much Paul Theroux in his musings, but overall the book does a great job of bringing the real Africa to life. The perspective he brings in comparing Africa today to what it was like 40 years ago is very helpful. The cynicism seems earned in what he sees. A few areas he wears his own set of blinkers, but with the length of the book and the intimacy we gain with him through his travels, these are put out there honestly like everything else. Recommended, as a source of life in Africa and a great reading list for further experience. ( )