Customer Reviews

The Ship's Cat

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

 

 

In "Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons," Kurt Vonnegut includes an essay called "Biafra: A People Betrayed." He visited that breakaway state that saught independence from Nigeria in the 1960's. While there he encountered an idealist young man loading relief planes that defied Nigerian fighters to take food in to the surrounded Biafrans. He urged that young man to write his story. In "THE SHIP'S CAT," JOCK BRANDIS has done that, weaving fact and fiction together in a novel about an odd mix of people who came together in that idealistic but ultimately futile endeavor.

Especially when dealing with the desperate plight of the starving Biafrans, the novel can be simultaneously gripping and distressing. Brandis's powers of description are vivid, and his evocation of atmosphere almost tangible. But this is not just the story of an international tragedy. It becomes a suspenseful tale of adventure and misadventure, and the characters come alive. We follow his cast through the final desperate days of the relief flights into Biafra from the island of Sao Tome, to the improbable later reunion of the central characters in Canada many years later.

This is the first novel of what is to be a trilogy, and I await the further unfolding of this tale with interest.

Peter Reed University of Minnesota

Awesome book by a most talented and inspirational author (who developed an inexpensive peanut sheller in Africa). It is powerful story for adopted adolescents who don't know their biological parents.

This book is precious perhaps because it conveys what other books like Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse V have done so well. That is to describe the absurd and common manner in which rational human beings see fit to slaughter each other in remote corners of the world while many of us in the more well fed areas never take the time to notice. For those that have never been touched by the horrors of war consider yourself lucky, but take the time to leaf through this book and realize what takes place as the result of political complacency. This is a tale of those that refused to be complacent, a tale of determined bravery against insurmountable odds, that in the end were not surmounted. It is the story of a noble group of strangers who fought a war and lost, but found redemption.