One Dry Season: In the Footsteps of Mary Kingsley

by Caroline Alexander Narrated by Lisette Lecat

Overview

With richly evocative images and wonderfully entertaining anecdotes, Caroline Alexander transports you to the dense interior of equatorial Gabon. In One Dry Season, she chronicles her adventures as she makes her way alone through dangerously primitive territory. When she first read of Victorian explorer Mary Kingsley's travels in the French colony of Gabon, Alexander knew she had to experience the present-day nation for herself. Soon she is retracing Kingsley's route¿struggling through tangled vines in humid rain forests, chugging up the churning OgoouE River in a packed steamer, and fending off gigantic cockroaches. The country she discovers is a challenging mixture of Africa's exotic past and its practical present. A splendid storyteller, Caroline Alexander introduces you to the colorful new friends she made along the trail including a shy mission nun, a half-mad French woman, and a village chief who treated her as an errant teenaged daughter. Lisette Lecat's expert narration brings out all the excitement of today's Africa.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In 1893 Mary Kingsley, then 30, ventured into what is now Gabon, West Africa, ``a region notorious for its deadly climate and diseases, its alarming wildlife, and its cannibals.'' The British wayfarer was enthralled and penned Travels in West Africa . This classic led American doctoral student and pentathlete Alexander to embark on a similar odyssey, retracing Kingsley's steps. Armed with Kingsley's book and maps, her own background research, and a store of determination, the author trekked through bamboo forests and villages of mud huts, encountering incurious natives and serene missionaries. Juxtaposing the colorful details of her days with the writings of a vast cast of explorers from a century before, Alexander weaves a verbal tapestry that tells of her deepening affection for the Gabonese and growing admiration for the exploits of her 19th-century forebear. In superimposing motorboats, hydrofoils and other modernisms upon Kingsley's less ``civilized'' adventure, Alexander may come up short in her desire to ``make contact with the past,'' but the record of her attempt will fascinate. (Jan.)

Library Journal

Kingsley's Travels in West Africa (1897) still makes wonderfully entertaining reading; she is a hard act to follow. Although travel to Africa has shed its exoticism, it still offers plenty of challenges, and Alexander found her share in equatorial Gabon, retracing the route up the Ogooue River taken by Kingsley nearly 100 years ago. Weaving a narrative pattern of ``then and now,'' Alexander evokes images of chugging river steamers packed with passengers, roads of red dust, pirogues paddled against the current, and more. As she travels in the footsteps of others, she reflects on the different faces of interpretive writing, selective recollection, and the disparity between fact and fiction. But ultimately this is Alexander's own story of discovery and can be read and enjoyed as such. She avoids the patronizing, exaggerated tone of much contemporary travel writing about Africa; she is sympathetic and gently self-effacing. Recommended for libraries developing travel literature collections and for Africana collections.--Janet L. Stanley, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, D.C

AUG/SEP 99 - AudioFile

ONE DRY SEASON is two extraordinary travel accounts in one. At the end of the nineteenth century, Mary Kingsley, a Victorian explorer, went to Gabon under the pretext of collecting fetishes and fish. A century later, Caroline Alexander, captivated by Kingsley's TRAVELS IN WEST AFRICA, retraced her steps, traveling riverine trade routes and dim bush paths into the country's forgotten interior. Lisette Lecat's elegant narration delivers the musical African names and French quotes with the ease of a native. Each of the widely varied characters is given perfect voice. Expect to be held captive for hours by this insightful adventure tale and masterful performance. C.R.R. © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170998739
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	09/21/2012
Edition description:	Unabridged

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