The Remarkable Baobab [Hardcover]

Thomas Pakenham (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 25, 2004

STANDING TALL on the sunburned plains of Africa and Australia, baobabs may be the oldest life forms on the planet. Many of the specimens still standing today have been around for well over two thousand years. Tremendous in size and bizarre in appearance, they have provided food, medicine, and places of refuge and worship to countless peoples, even serving as prisons and tombs on occasion. Long before European explorers opened up the African continent, the news of these "gnarled upside-down giants" had astonished the world of science and stoked the imagination of naturalists everywhere. Thomas Pakenham chronicles his personal encounters with the baobabs of Africa, Australia, Madagascar, and America and shares the countless superstitions and myths, as well as the often-strange history, that surround these enigmatic trees. With 60 color images and 144 pages with color throughout, "The Remarkable Baobab will be a great, and reasonably priced, gift book for the Christmas season.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 142 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (October 25, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393059898
• ISBN-13: 978-0393059892
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,181,542 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.