Customer Reviews

Living with Cannibals and Other Women's Adventures (Adventure Press)

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

 

 

Pairing well known adventuresses with lesser known heroines makes this book a great read for those with various levels of familiarity with the history of women explorers. Delightful anecdotes are coupled with high adventure which kept me saying, "I will just read one more story..." until I found myself half way through the book in one sitting. This is a great book to read to your daughter.

The picture on the cover and the title made me think that this was going to be "A short superficial collection of stories about women adventurers," and probably adventures that wouldn't be worth mentioning were the people male. I was pleasantly surprised. Common themes are, "Ms. X from a very early age indicated that she wanted to travel" and "After living a conventional, homemaker life, at age 30+ Ms. X started traveling." The stories are written so that that one can readily identify with the adventurers, perhaps precisely because up until the time they start traveling their lives are so similar to people like me who are not. Like a prior reviewer, once I started the book I was hooked.

This is a pretty quick read and very enjoyable. What I liked so much about this book is that while all these women have one thing in common -- adventure -- they all have their very own and very different approaches to it. From a single mom who takes her daughter through a foreign country, to women kayakers, to mountain climbers. All these women have found the one or two things they really loved (one lady loved India and also loved riding her bike so she rode her bike through India) and pursued it.

Basically this book teaches you to find your thing, be proud of what it is you like to do as an individual - and go for it.

I enjoy non-fiction that promotes further subject matter investigation. Here's an easy-to-read compilation about women adventurers (from past to present) who in the author's own words, "push the limits." Michele Slung provides just enough biographical information to whet our appetites. She also includes a helpful bibliography and interesting historical timeline to augment further reading. Even if the book doesn't inspire you to go that far, the short stories will certainly entertain anyone looking for a quick, easy read. Each chapter highlighting a different woman explorer is very short. I wondered why the author chose some of the women adventurers that she did, but it was still a good representation of those who "enter another world."

This book is a collection of short true stories of women travelers and adventurers. (Some are modern and some are from previous centuries.) Many threw convention to the side to follow their dreams. I enjoyed it!

The picture on the cover and the title made me think that this was going to be "A short superficial collection of stories about women adventurers," and probably adventures that wouldn't be worth mentioning were the people male. I was pleasantly surprised. Common themes are, "Ms. X from a very early age indicated that she wanted to travel" and "After living a conventional, homemaker life, at age 30+ Ms. X started traveling." The stories are written so that that one can readily identify with the adventurers, perhaps precisely because up until the time they start traveling their lives are so similar to people like me who are not. Like a prior reviewer, once I started the book I was hooked.

"Living with Cannibals" is such a promising title I had hoped for so much more than this book had. This book is comprised of multiple women's adventures. They are paired old and more recent for each type of adventure (artic, Africa, Etc). Each person is covered in about a dozen pages and includes photos (or etchings). It's not a bad book it's just really hard to make each of them sound that much different from one another in such a short space.

I love travel books: narratives of other people's travels, personal memoirs, biographies of travelers. I especially love travel memoirs by women and stories about world travelers and adventurers who lived prior to the twentieth century. I just knew I would love this book. I was wrong. It turned out to be one of very few books in my life that I started and then didn't finish. I almost made it to the end thanks to my sheer stubborness, but then the dullness of the superficial biographies finally did me in.

As another reviewer mentioned, the biographies are paired - one historical woman traveler/adventurer "matched" with a supposedly similar, modern day woman adventurer. Thus, pioneering aviator Amalia Earhart is paired with astronaut Shannon Lucid. World traveler and explorer Florence Baker (19th Century) is paired with modern adventurer and trailblazer Arlene Burns. I'm not sure why the author chose to organize the work this way, because it really doesn't enhance the stories any. The author pairs the women up, but she doesn't really relate them to each other. In many cases, the connection between the two selected women, other than the fact that they were bold and adventurous, eluded me.

But my main complaint is the way the author tells the stories. The book is obviously intended to be a brief overview of some remarkable women, but it still takes a real talent to be able to turn the lives and stories of Ida Pfeiffer, who traveled the world alone in the early 19th century, or Fanny Workman, Victorian mountain climber and mapper of the Himalayas, into boring, lifeless narratives. Slung manages to do that to the stories of every one of the women in this book. *Note to Slung - You can't liven up a dead story by ending dry sentences with exclamation marks!! We are not fooled by such obvious tactics!! These stories have all the excitement and drama of a Bio sketch from the Encyclopedia Britannica and (mis)using exclamation marks isn't going to change that!!

I kept thinking while I was reading this that I had inadvertently purchased a book intended for Young Readers. You know the type - bland, fact-riddled books that junior high students turn to when they have to write a a little essay paper about some famous person, and need to get enough facts from one place so they don't have to waste time doing actual research. It 'reads' like that kind of book - just the facts ma'am - lots of them, and don't over-excite the young people. Here's a typical excerpt - this one about rock climber Catherine Destivelle.

**"I forgot I was walking on a glacier", she says, amused now at the rather basic nature of her oversight, although the resulting fall into a crevasse wasn't funny at all: She'd broken her back.

Struggling out of the 115 foot-deep fissure with the help of a companion, she immediately returned to the climb, unaware, she states, of the severity of her injury. Soon however, expert medical diagnosis told a different story. Yet barely two months later, she was already up and moving again, as the mountains once again cast their spell over her.**

And there you have it - a life-threatening, 100 foot plus fall into a hole in a glacier, a dramatic struggle back up to the top, a rock climb with a broken back and what must have been a painful recovery, all watered down into 'and then this happened and then this'.

The good thing is the book does provide the names of what just have to be some very fascinating women, which should allow you to seek out more interesting material about their lives and adventures.

A short superficial collection of stories about women adventurers certainly not worth the price. Described as an "exciting volume"-perhaps only to those who enjoy watching grass grow.