Customer Reviews

The Eighth Continent: Life, Death and Discovery in the Lost World of Madagascar

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Tyson takes us along on an adventure-filled, wonderful trek through the rainforests of Madagascar. The discoveries of new animals are chronicled, breathlessly, as if you are a member of the team. This is one of those important books that will be on my "special" shelf for a long time to come.

The chapter "Search for the Pygmy Hippo" is bound to become a classic among cryptozoologists! This is a great book.

This book does what only the best narrative non-fiction can do, it takes us to places where we'll never go and fascinates us with tales of subjects that we never knew we cared about. Eighth Continent ranks alongside the best of John McPhee, and with other more recent work like Reflections in Bullough's Pond. You don't have to be interested in Madagascar to read this one for sheer pleasure.

This is a truly great book, very well written, well researched, and a joy to read. Tyson shows us a virtual continent that is largey unknown to the rest of the world, home to bizarre wildlife found nowhere else on earth and enigmas that still confound researchers. Tyson addresses many issues relating to Madagascar. Why are so many plants and animals unique to Madagascar? Why did they speciate so wildly? How did they get there to begin with? Describing in detail the extinct megafauna of Madagascar - giant lemurs, giant tortoises, pygmy hippos, and the mighty elephant bird - he addresses issues of how they lived, research relating to them, and how they became extinct - if all of them are indeed extinct, as some may still exist in unexplored corners of the giant island.

Tyson also addresses the history of the island, from its original settlement apparently around the time of Christ to the present day. The origin of the Malagasy people is still a mystery, and Tyson explores Indonesian, Africa, and Arabian (as well as later European) influxes and influences on the island, not only in terms of history and archeology but also religion, culture, society, psychology, and how the people of the island make a living. The Malagasy are a fascinating blend of Indonesian, African, and Arabian peoples, showing diverse traits from these cultures and providing a continual mystery to researchers.

Tyson closes the book with a detailed and comprehensive look at the effort to save the last wild areas of Madagascar. Showing how a new national park is working, he shows that much has been accomplished on the island, but much remains to be done, and the preservation effort is fraught with peril. If conservationists are to save the unique chameleons, geckos, tenrecs, lemurs, serpent eagles, and other wildlife of Madgascar, as well as its unqiue flora, Tyson shows how they must address basic issues of human dignity, the economy, land rights, and basic education as well.

A truly great book, a wonderful introduction to Madagascar that I just can't recommend highly enough!

I can't more heartily recommend this book if you have even a smidgeon of interest or curiosity in Madagascar! No nature writer has yet compiled so much information into such a readable format. The author tends to veer off his researcher accounts into side topics with regularity, all the while skillfully relating them and never failing to lead us back into his main subject. The way he weaves the history and culture of the Malagasy people into his narratives is clever and accurate. If you are considering a personal visit to what is truly the last 'Lost World' on our planet, absorbing the information in this superb work is the single best way that I can suggest to prepare for the experience!

I'm a huge Madagascar fan and finiding books on one of my favorite places is a rare treat for me - this book is no exception. It's written wonderfully and has useful factual information. Before travelling here, I would suggest that you find all the information you can and this book is one of about 3 that I could say are appropriate for this.

I hate to disagree with the majority of the reviews, but I only found this book "okay." It's worth reading but it's not to rave about. The best parts deal with the Malagsy people, culture and history. The descriptions of the animals, plants, and ecosystems are weak. There are few photos and those are not highly informative or high quality. I recommend sections of David Quamman's book, Song of the Dodo, which has a much stronger biological bent to it.

I have come away from this book with a strong desire to visit Madagascar and a good understanding of the country's wonders and challenges. In a very entertaining style recounting his travels and sharing tales of the island's lore, Peter Tyson gives us an overview of both the Malagasy people and fauna ( and somtimes flora ) and how they relate in light of its conservation issues. He also outlines the limited knowledge that exists as to how this unique island has come to be so different from anywhere else on Earth, opening the scope for unlimited wonder and whetting a thirst to find out more. A great starting point for an interest in Madagascar and a thoroughly enjoyable read.
I would recommend reading Mike Eveleigh's, Maverick in Madagascar, after this.

Madagascar in my mind has always been one those wild exotic places. This book does a very good job of introducing the place and providing insights into wildlife, culture, orgins, and a possible plan for the future of conservation in Madagascar. It reads well and doesn't bog down very often. The chapters about the herps of Madagascar were my favorite, but I am biased towards herps. The conservation issues are presented in a balanced way, and the opposing opinions about the success or failure of the Community development/national park conservation plans are pretty well explained. I recommend this book to anybody wanting to learn more about Madagascar, it is a great introduction would be a worthwhile read if you wanted to travel to Madagascar and be more than just a bumbling tourist.

Madagascar is like Australia in some ways - a sort of zoological attic, filled with animals the rest of the world forgot about or never met. Tyson has probed the fauna of this island for many years, and his doscoveries, adventures, and insights make for a most informative book. Some of the most interesting passages deal with his inquiries into animals reported by some of the indigenous people but not yet confirmed by science. Tyson doesn't take all the animal stories he hears at face value, but he doesn't discount them, either. He believes we have more to learn about the creatures of this island - and we must learn it quickly. Development and other pressures are eroding the island's biodiversity at a frightening rate. Tyson conveys that urgency along with the wonder of this unique and special place.

About 15 years ago, I had a conversation with a Malagasy soil scientist, who told me, in an even tone, that his countrymen were destroying their watershed by extending rice cultivation into the forests. I forget his exact words, but they were a version of a statement I have often quoted from Harry Hopkins: "People don't eat in the long run, they eat every day."

It sounded as if the island was being set up for a demographic collapse similar to the one that affected Ireland in the 19th century, and the concern about preserving an island watershed resonated as well, since I, too, live on an island with a watershed that is deteriorating. But I did not rush out to help the Malagasy save themselves from themselves, nor even make any effort to learn more about their situation. They are, after all, as Neville Chamberlain said about the Czechs, a distant people of whom we know nothing.

Besides, at that time Peter Tyson had not published his excellent "The Eighth Continent," which while formally a report about conservation studies by westerners in Madagascar is practically a very long encyclopedia article about the island.

A magazine writer with a taste for hiking, Tyson made a number of visits to field research projects in the `90s, each lasting at least long enough to do some observation on his own. These reports are woven deftly into reports from earlier travelers concerning the anthropology, political history, natural history, economic activity etc. of the island over the past couple of hundred years. There is some material about earlier times, though sketchy, as the Malagasy did not write until Christian missionaries reduced their language to paper less than 200 years ago.

Since they were in contact by -- and partly descendants of -- Arabs, this illiteracy is surprising, but then, most things about Madagascar are surprising. It had the world's largest birds and all the lemurs.

One of the surprising things about this book is how little there is in it about lemurs, the charismatic animal group of the island today. It is a meaty volume nevertheless, as much for what it does not say as for what it does.

For example, in travels all over the island, Tyson never reports encountering a policeman, and virtually no representative of central government of any kind in the rural areas. The place is so poor as to be effectively ungoverned; even if the government had any interest, it has no resources.

Tyson finds the people attractive and kind, though wary, although their history is extremely violent, and given the lack of any order-making authority, appears to be very violent still.

A cover blurb from Discover magazine describes the book as "part field report, part travelogue," but this does not really capture its range. It does read like a travelogue of the better sort. I am mistrustful of travelogue writers, having found that all that I have checked up on are liars, but the only obvious error that I found in the whole book was a reference to the "heady scent of blossoming bougainvillea."

The first 90 percent of the volume is expositional in tone, but there is bite in the final pages, in which Tyson exposes the entire conservationist project -- with which he obviously has deep sympathy -- to a searching critique. This is fair-minded of him and so unexpected given the tone of most green literature of the past decade ("The Eighth Continent" just makes it into this dismal decade, having been published in 2000).

Tyson says some have called Madagascar an eighth continent because it is so big (as big as Texas, or, as we have recently learned to think of these things, as Afghanistan), and because of its long isolation it possesses (or once possessed) a true continent's worth of characteristic plants and animals. Nevertheless, it is still an island and still subject to the harsh constraints of island biogeography. Should the people of Texas or Afghanistan eat themselves out of house and home, they can retreat to Oklahoma or Iran. The Malagasy have no place to go.