Amazon.co.uk
Michael Palin's personality is a combination of some very disparate elements, many of them displayed at their most attractive in
Sahara. There's the friendly, avuncular manner; the easy-going charm that women find so attractive; and that vein of surrealistic, sardonic humour that is the legacy of his Monty Python days. All these characteristics combined to create the perfect host for the ambitious travel programmes with which he's latterly been associated. The shows (and the handsome companion books that invariably accompany them) avoid the sometimes over-serious approach of other presenters and show us some very exotic parts of the world filtered through Palin's very idiosyncratic vision. Audiences and readers can't get enough.
Sahara gives us the latest of his epic voyages, and this one possibly represents the most arduous challenge of his career: across the massive and unforgiving Sahara desert. In this beautifully produced volume (studded with some eye-catching colour photographs), we are taken on a unique journey, as Palin reveals the Sahara to us as something considerably more than endless sand dunes. Facet by facet, Michael Palin uncovers a colourful and eccentric panoply of cultures, with chequered histories that stretch back to the dawn of time. Beginning (and ending) in Gibraltar, we are taken from the fabled realms of the ancient Egyptians to the Islamic republics of the present day, as Palin conjures up a journey that alternates between gallows humour and often considerable discomfort. Most of us will never experience the teeming nightlife of Dakar or travel down the river Niger to the fabled city of Timbuktu. But Palin has done it for us, and this book (with or without the accompanying TV series) is a highly enjoyable way to relive that journey with him. --Barry Forshaw
--Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
From Publishers Weekly
Fifty years after he was given his first book, Tales from the Arabian Nights, consummate traveler and Monty Python founding member Palin trekked to Francophone Africa, believing that the Sahara embodies "the thin line between survival and destruction, the power to take life or to transform it." Fortunately for his readers, the Sahara seems to have transformed Palin (Around the World in 80 Days, Full Circle). This tie-in to the Bravo series airing in April consists of Palin's journal entries, full of his trademark self-deprecating humor (writing about the far-removed city of Djenne, which a British tour group nonetheless infiltrated, Palin confesses that "I know I shouldn't feel this way, but when I'm asked if I've ever been to Stoke-on-Trent all my romantic illusions of desert travel begin to wilt"). But Palin is also a piquant political observer (he notes that African women may be "by nature more direct, more open, more honest and considerably less submissive than their menfolk expect them to be"), and the Sahara's exoticism frequently inspires him to craft beautiful descriptions (the bizarre "battleship-grey" baobab trees "look like some prehistorical arboreal throwback, gnarled and twisted like old prize-fighters"). Readers looking for engaging, detailed insight to the Sahara will hit paydirt here, although newcomers to Palin's work may find themselves dismayed by his ubiquitous appearance in the photographs that dot nearly every page of this book. 175 color and b&w photos.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
