Remarkable Baobab [Hardcover]

Thomas Pakenham (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 4, 2004

Standing tall on the sunburnt plains of Africa and Australia, like great living giants, baobabs may be the oldest life forms on the planet, and many of the specimens still standing today have been around for at least 2000 years. For centuries, the tree has provided food, medicine, shelter, places of refuge and worship and even served as prisons and tombs. Long before Africa was opened up by European explorers, the news of the baobab had astonished the world of science, due to its stupendous size (twice the girth of any tree in Europe), its bizarre appearance (more like a pumpkin than a tree) and its extraordinary soft, pith-like wood. Today, the baobab continues to baffle scientists. Nothing seems certain about the tree except that mythology comes to it naturally. The countless superstitions and myths that surround these 'gnarled upside-down giants' are as strange and intriguing as the appearance of the trees themselves. In this book Thomas Pakenham recounts his personal encounters with the different species of baobabs of Africa and Australia in his own inimitable style, as well as describing trees which have migrated to other lands. He tells of the myths and legends as well as the history - stranger than fiction - of many of the trees and their chances of survival.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'Welcome to the strange world of the baobab tree, the subject of Thomas Pakenham's excellent new book... truly outstanding photographs... All involved deserve credit for this original book.' -- James Fleming THE SPECTATOR

About the Author

As well as the author and photographer of bestselling books on trees, Thomas Pakenham is the author of the critically acclaimed THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA which won the W.H. Smith Award and the Alan Paton Award. He is also the author of THE BOER WAR, THE MOUNTAINS OF RASSELAS and THE YEAR OF LIBERTY. He lives in County Westmeath, Ireland and is chairman of the Irish Tree Society. He plants trees both for profit and ornament.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; First edition. edition (November 4, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0297843737
• ISBN-13: 978-0297843733
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,348,333 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nice, January 20, 2005

By 

P. van Rijckevorsel (The Netherlands) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Remarkable Baobab (Hardcover)

This book will make a really splendid gift to anyone who loves trees. A well-printed book with really lovely pictures, it presents some of the most famous trees belonging to the genus /Adansonia/, focusing on trees as "trunks with branches". The text is well-written, and makes for a light read. Noticeable weak points are that the author's wife is in quite a few photographs although she does not take a particular good picture and that the author adopts /Adansonia_gibbosa/ as the name of the Australian baobab, instead of the better known (and now protected) /Adansonia_gregorii/ (without even explaining why he does this).

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thomas Pakenham, The Remarkable Baobab (2004), May 24, 2005

By 

Samuel P. Menefee "Samuel Pyeatt Menefee" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Remarkable Baobab (Hardcover)

In his introduction, Pakenham notes, "[h]ere's a book bursting with ripe baobabs .... It's a personal book like its predecessors. I have scoured the world for baobabs with shapely limbs and unusual characters" (at p. 8). Here's the reality. Of the eight species of baobab, Pakenham has only seen five (missing three in Madagascar because "one of my family was ill and I was on borrowed time" (at p. 30; see also p. 8). That trip was made back in 2001, suggesting that Pakenham may have a different concept of "scouring" than the rest of us. Nor are any pictures of the three missing species offered, although a large number of the photographs in this book come from Corbis (see p. 142), with one illustrating a baobab in the Comoros (at pp. [122]-[23]), an archipelago that Pakenham does not appear to have visited, while another picture prominently features a non-baobab (at pp. [122]-[23]). This volume appears to be an offshoot of the author's Remarkable Trees of the World (2002), although there is evidence that Pakenham has incorporated materials from recent trips to St. Croix (see p. 127) and South Africa (see pp. 14, 97, 134). Why did he not return to Madagascar when this meant leaving almost 40% of the world's baobab species uncovered?

The photographs of baobabs included in the book will mesmerize most readers; the trees are worthy subjects, and between his own photos, Corbis, Kew, and his British publisher, Pakenham has put together a wonderful collection of pictures. Those of us who have seen baobabs - my own first experience was in the Mozambique bush - find them unforgettable, and this excitement has been conveyed to potential readers. Fewer, though, will find all of Pakenham's chatty comments attractive. His description of his companion at Leydsdorp (apparently his wife- see the photograph at p. 94) as a "slip of a girl" (at p. 97), for example, seems a bit too much.

The author does, however, have the gift of a light touch, and is able to convey a mass of information about the trees to his readers. Several facts were new and interesting to me although I researched the topic over a quarter of as century ago at Yale. These included the pods' appearance in Cairo markets in the 16th century (at p.13) and the 15th and 16th century graffiti found by Adanson on baobabs in Senegal in the 1750's (at p. 55). Herbert Basedow, who investigated a baobab in Australia in 1916, found bleached bones and a skull with a bullet hole (at p. 117), but Pakenham has no reference to the explorer in his bibliography (at p. 137; the information may come from Pat Lowe's The Boab Tree (1998), which is listed). Equally interesting is the probable importation of the tree to the Caribbean by black slaves (see pp. 127-28) and the legend that a hollow in the tree, opening at the full moon, would lead children back to Africa (at p. 131). The "upside-down" nature of the tree is explained in several stories (see p. 14)- a version not given by Pakenham states that the Creator replanted the tree in disgust, with its roots sticking out, after it had complained several times about its surroundings and had been duly replanted. The author does a good job of describing both the baobab's utility to native cultures and the uses to which it has been put by colonists. Not only can one pound a nail into the trunk without a hammer (see p. 13), but I can personally testify that a sharp twig can pierce the trunk. It is unfortunate that the distribution of species given (at p. 139) is not accompanied by a map.

In sum, The Remarkable Baobab is a flawed, but ultimately fascinating, discussion of one of the world's arboreal wonders. One can but hope that other works will appear which deal more thoroughly with this genus.

Samuel Pyeatt Menefee

4.0 out of 5 stars a totally bodacious tree !, October 21, 2009

By 

Robert S. Newman "Bob Newman" (Marblehead, Massachusetts USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Remarkable Baobab (Hardcover)

I've seen baobabs in Madagascar, the Comoros, and Tanzania. They're impressive trees that leave a lasting impression on a wondering foreigner. I am not surprised that Thomas Pakenham found them fascinating and seems to have travelled around to various parts of the world to photograph them. You can learn
a fair bit about these amazing trees from the resulting book, but I think the lasting impression will be from the photographs, which are wonderful--both the full ones and the zoomed-in ones. It seems to me that there are other books, perhaps neither so light nor so easy to read, which would give far more botanical, historical or anthropological information. The present volume would rank more as a coffee table book or as an introduction to a very interesting and visually-fascinating subject. I believe that THE REMARKABLE BAOBAB was written in somewhat of a hurry since a number of pieces of information occur several times. No matter, if you have any sense of marvel or whimsy, you can't help but enjoy Pakenham's work.