Customer Reviews

Something of Value

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3 star:		(1)
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I spent three of the most impressionable years of my live in Kenya in the early '70's as a State Department dependant. Even then, the Mau Mau uprising had a strong influence on day to day life in Kenya. Gun control laws were among the most strict in the world and for good reason. During my three years in Kenya I heard many stories from people who lived through the emergency. Most of these stories made Stephen King novels sound like childrens' tales. I could not count the times I've read both Uhuru and Something Of Value and each time they have taken me back in time to the Norfolk or New Stanley hotel. Everything about the book, from the safaris, to the uprising, are totally authentic. While this is not a "feel good" book, anyone who has a interest in East African history, or just wants to read on of the great books of this century MUST read this book. Even though this is a book of fiction, it should be required reading for anyone studying the history of Kenya. Make no mistake, most of the things written about in this book, no matter how disturbing, actually happened.

I first read this book as a teen ager in the 1960's, and I've probably read it eight or nine times since then. This book introduced me to Robert Ruark and started my life-long appreciation of his works. Something of Value examines clash of civilization between the British settlers and the Kikuyu natives in Kenya after WWII during what became the Mau Mau Rebellion. It examines the causes and consequences of the conflict and how it affected both sides. As I became older, I began to understand the motivations of the characters and their actions. With each rereading, the book changed. It was not only a safari adventure story, but it was also a snapshot of history, a study of human psychology, and a search for recognition and justice. I know I'm paraphrasing, but the opening Bantu proverb, "If you do away with the traditions of the past, then you must first replace them with Something of Value" definitely and perfectly describes the book. When Ruark wrote about the conflict, he examined how people on both sides were torn from what they knew and had cherished in the past and were thrown unprepared into the future. He examines foreign and unfamiliar ideology, how it affects us, and what its consequences are. Finally, despite the cruelty, blood, and horror in the book, he examines the nobility of human beings and what it means to us. This book has changed the way I view the world because I now can appreciate both the view of the fox and the hound. If great writing enables us to finds new and deeper meaning with each rereading, then "Something of Value" is great literature.

When it was first published in 1955 "Something of Value" was a novel right out of the headlines, set in contemporary Kenya during the time of the Mau Mau rebellion which were the last years of British colonial rule. Now it has aged into an historical novel. The largest part of the novel concerns two men, once childhood friends: Kimani, a Kenyan Kikuyu, and Peter, a British settler. They grow up together on a farm in the "white highlands", Kimani is the son of a farmhand, Peter the son of the owner. They imagine themselves working together as adults, as gunbearer and white hunter, guiding tourists on hunting safaris. Instead they become adversaries during the Mau Mau. Ruark tells a good story though the book is a bit long in places. Throughout the novel, the depictions of both African and British characters is remarkably balanced and fair. Ruark is one of the few white writers of the 1950s to provide a sympathetic and (apparently) informed view of African (particularly Kikuyu) culture. It is the clash of Kikuyu and British cultures, as British law is applied to traditional Kikuyu custom that is the impetus for Kimani to join the rebellion. It would be interesting to know if all of the novel's details of the Mau Mau oaths are accurate. The female characters are a bit one dimensional; this is a book about hunting, warfare, and the world as seen by men. Overall, a very good book, especially for anyone interested in Kenya and the end of colonialism. ("Something of Value" was made into a movie starring Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier.)

This book has something "magical" about it. It's an obscure book today, but it holds a special place in my heart and mind, and has so for nearly my entire life. I first read it in the late 1950's, when I was a young teenager. The adventure and graphic violence was probably shocking to me then, but the book inspired me to make reading about Africa and it's history a serious hobby back then.

I read the book the second time when I was an adult in my 30's. I found a tattered paperback edition in a used book store. It was just as exciting to me then as it was many years before. By then I had two daughters, and I told them of my "favorite book."

Last Christmas, my youngest daughter, who was then 19, gave me an ORIGINAL edition, which still had the paper jacket. When I opened the gift, tears welled up in my eyes. WHAT IS IT ABOUT THIS BOOK?

Ruark's style was wonderful, and his way of developing a story was terrific. Read this book.

I am absolutely thrilled and honored to write the first Amazon review of Something of Value, though a little amazed as well. Has this truly great, epic novel of Africa been so completely forgotten?

Robert Ruark was sometimes called "the poor man's Hemingway," but that's just because he wrote about Africa without lapsing into the pseudo-intellectual vagueness that leaves so many of Papa's readers (come on, admit it) wondering what the devil he was talking about. While Hemingway was boozing in Cuba and writing about fish, and ten years before Capote invented "fictional journalism," Ruark was writing about life, death and sheer bloody terror in East Africa, and leaving nobody in any doubt about it. When you get to the end of Something of Value, you won't be scratching your head, pondering philosophic conundrums. You'll be wiping your brow with a shaking hand, just bloody glad you weren't there.

To oblivious, Eisenhower-era Americans, Africa was Tarzan and King Solomon's Mines. (Several local members on the crew of John Ford's Mogambo, filmed during the uprising, were later arrested as Mau Mau. Imagine if Clark Gable, Ava Gardner or Grace Kelly had been hacked to death in their tents.) Robert Ruark -- ex-reporter and big-game hunter, just arrived for his second African safari -- was the right man in the right place at the right time to pen a one-of-a-kind tale of Africa, brilliantly simple in concept, brilliantly stunning in execution. Two men -- one white, one black, raised as brothers in colonial Kenya -- are caught up, as are their peoples, in the Terror: a vicious, bloody uprising that degenerates into a slogging war of racial extermination. Savage mutilations. Horrific blood rituals. Incest. Cannibalism. Bloody-handed atrocities committed on both sides. Ruark not only doesn't sugarcoat it, he documents it. (He drew on actual events for several scenes and characters.) Something of Value, its sweeping scope and universal theme spattered with Manson-level depravity and violence, must have hacked white-bread, Peyton Place America's skull open like a bloody machete aimed right at the face.

Published in April 1955, the novel was an instant, massive bestseller, with more than a million copies ultimately sold in over ten languages. It spawned a predictably mediocre movie starring Rock Hudson, Sidney Poitier and the lovely and perfectly cast Dana Wynter. With its simplistic politics, sanitized violence and utterly stupid ending, the film is a poor black & white shadow of the full Technicolor, Cinemascope-sized novel. Blunt as a club, sharp as a saw-backed bush knife, this book drags us readers by the hair, kicking and screaming, out of our comfortable sleep and into the African night.

Though it doesn't make him wrong, Ruark's take on the downfall of empire has been overridden by the modern, politically correct view of colonialism, which assumes that everyone in Africa is now better off because they aren't white-ruled. Anybody who wrote this book today would almost certainly be vilified as a racist (watch for subsequent reviews; I give myself a better than 50-50 chance of catching the same flak, just for praising it), which is probably why Something of Value has been largely forgotten. Thing is, Mau Mau set the pattern for every subsequent African uprising. This sort of racial, intertribal violence is still going on right now, in Zimbabwe, the Congo, Sudan, and a slew of other sub-Saharan countries, and we all try hard to forget about that, too. Something of Value is Africa's War and Peace. It's Kenya's Sand Pebbles. And if you read one novel about the African Question, this is the one. (Well, after mine, that is.)

-- Don Hollway, author of DANGEROUS GAME (ISBN 0741429497)

The late Robert Ruark was mainly noted for his magazine articles and his writing on big game hunting, primarily in Africa, but was more than capable of turning out a "keep you up late reading it" novel such as this one. "Something of Value" takes place in Kenya in the days of the Mau-Mau rebellion and shows that tragic conflict from both sides. Ruark shows the mistakes the British had made in "civilzing" the largest native tribe in Kenya, the Kikyuyu, taking their customs away and replacing them with nothing they could relate to and how this lack of "something of value" allowed the Mau-Mau to grow until it consisted of 90% of the male Kikyuyu population. It is, in many ways, an old, old story of culture clash, but seldom is the story told so powerfully. This is Ruark the novelist at his best and should not be missed by anyone interested in Africa or for that matter, anyone interested in great writing.....

This book definitely lives up to its billing. It tells the harrowing story of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya during the 1950s. The writing is superb. A very difficult book to put down.

I first read this book when a neighbor loaned it to me in 1972. I had difficulty in returning it! This not only made me Robert Ruark fan, it caused me to begin a collection of his first editions. It is a gripping story of a part of our planet that may never find peace. It is also a tremendous piece of writing, the like of which comes along only every few years. Ruark traveled in Africa during this challenging period and as a news correspondent, held pre-eminent qualifications to write the story. I have re-read it several times since John loaned it to me. Along with another borrowed book, Shackleford's story of Anarctica, I could start and end my library!

The Africa described by Ruark in his late 50s novel is disappearing fast. But the problems Ð especially black-on-black hatred and violence Ð remain.

As an African I recommend this work most heartily to readers around the world. And it's a ripping good yarn to boot

This classic is worth the read. It's the best historical fiction I have read in a long time.