Customer Reviews

Tick Bite Fever

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No oxymoron that. Not in David Bennun's hands. A Brit whose family left England for Colonial Africa in his boyhood, Bennun's nature evidently never expatriated the stiff upper lip, the sharp eye for the contagiously absurd, or---and this may be Fever's greatest selling point, for it makes all the rest so possible---the palate for language as only the bellwether British wield it. Far from a pythonesque humor; you know: with simple silliness the Wont that you often wish Wouldn't? Bennun is drop-dead funny. And I don't laugh-out-loud easily. More than once, my chest having long since rounded the corner into some soundless seismic convulsing, I dropped the book on my faintly blue-feeling face from asphyxiating in bed. (The story of his Jack Russell terrier alone is worth humor's All Time list.) And I ask you: How often do any of us ever delve along a literary skill that wastes not a single sentence? You can count those masters of concise thoroughness on half the one hand you use to hold up a favorite book (or in my case, not). Bennun is as aerodynamic an author, in his own milieu, as the greatest I've ever seen: and if that makes him the Nabakov of Satire? then Vladimir--not David--it is. Damn near every utterance morphs into a garrulous gem, no sentence dispensable, most quip-laden and quotable, all culminating in chapters memorable to a one about the real Africa in David's openly unreal vantage, his own foibles always foremost, from a self-deprecating wit-in-progress. Myself?.....Never one to let the complete absense of company dampen a conversation, I'd often read things in the book over again immediately--aloud--just to share them with somebody---Anybody---me usually the handiest, splitting my own sides with disemboweling dependability. But, like the boy in the book, I too have a hard time learning my lessons. Why even now, from time to time, foolishly undeterred by my bedtime injuries I read on, headless, only to wind up again the very picture of casualty: a free arm broken over my eyes, elbow high, while alone beneath it my open mouth, wide as the search for affordable dentists, palsies off in porcine snorts, gaped like a gash so they tell me, the very wound of the proverbial Death From Laughing. So: don't say you haven't been warned........

Needless to say, David Bennun's book ends way too soon, which is to say, it ended at all, and, Endorphin-addiction being what it is, sent me hunting the world wide web for the guy when all else failed. Now I DID locate a superb skill-set-exemplary article he penned about ITN's anchor-siren Daljit Dhaliwal meeting her prime american fan David Letterman, on air, that may still be available on-line, but other than that for now, alas---rein plus. Nevertheless, Bennun here is a fever worth catching, but only if you can stand the symptoms. Happy breathing.......

I laughed and laughed, David Bennun really brings Africa back. He just knows people and the world you live in when you are there. I love Zambia and Kenya, and he just made it alive again. Thanks for the great read, and I won't sell mine!

This is a memoir of a childhood spent in several countries, but mostly in Kenya. I`m drawn to the memoirs of people who lived in Africa because it helps me to relive an important part of my life, now left behind and for which I have frequent bouts of homesickness. I was especially drawn to this book because the author lived [briefly] in Zambia and he had suffered from "Tick Bite Fever," both of which stirred memories for me.

He didn't stay long in Zambia but his reminiscences of Kenya still resonated for me and I found it a good read, highly entertaining and evocative. His sense of humor made the book all the more enjoyable and on several occasions caused me to laugh out loud, which is not something I do all that often when reading.
On the other hand, at times his frequent resort to hyperbole fell flat and was over-stretched: "... khaki-clad figures sneaking out of the school gate at a rate to rival Albanian asylum seekers making a dash for the Chunnel," being one example.

He also at times became somewhat bogged down in cataloguing every last detail of events that didn't really warrant such attention and left me flipping pages to skip to the next part of the story.

Nonetheless it was a good read. Surviving Africa is no mean achievement even if it is only due to random good luck. It is probably best survived by those who can find humor in the trials and tribulations that seem never ending ... at least in retrospect. One of his final comments, "I don't think I could go back now," definitely struck a chord. I found it very difficult to leave, I frequently feel a need to reconnect, and yet I agree that I don't think I could go ever really go back again.

I grow up in Kenya at the same time as the author and this book brought back so many memories and lots of laughs!