Customer Reviews

To Timbuktu

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(7)
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1 star:		(3)

 

 

I have read the book twice in the past year and enjoyed it both times. With 3 different storylines (doing the Niger River source to sea, a boyhood trip to Europe and Africa, and the history of European attempts to understand the Niger and visit Timbuktu) this book is a joy to read. You experience the trip and the mental thoughts that go through the author's head, as well as some of the philosophical issues that are encountered in the trip (guns, pregnant wives, etc). My recommendation: Buy it.

To Timbuktu combines the three things necessary for a great travel book: adventure, history, and humor. The central theme of the book is Jenkins search for the source of the Niger River, but that is merely the rack from which Jenkins explores issues such as friendship, humanity, and cultural differences. That said this book is not dense or slow. In fact it is an extremely quick read. Jenkins writing is sometimes boastful and sometimes self-effacing, but always efficient and entertaining.

Some people here have criticized the "machoism" in this book. Maybe I fail to understand, but if they have problems with him carrying a gun or dancing with "100 naked women", I submit that their criticisms are quibblesome. Carrying a gun may or may not be necessary, but it is beyond a minor part in the book. As for the naked women, my question is: Is it true? If so, why not write it. At heart though, these criticisms miss the greater part of the book which is the interaction between people (Jenkins w/ his fellow travelers, the travelers w/ their guide, previous explorers w/ the indigenous population). It is here where To Timbuktu shines.

If their criticism goes deeper then I believe that they fail to understand what travel literature is all about. It is about the quest. The quest to do something you are not quite sure that you can accomplish. The quest to learn about those different than you. If this is "machoism" I hope it lives in us all. To criticize it is to deny the validity of all grasps for greater knowledge about ourself and others. Maybe these people would rather read about my travels from refrigerator to couch to restroom to bed, but I don't think that would make a very interesting travelogue and, while it may be revealing about me, I doubt that it would tell us much about the diverse peoples of the world.

Getting off my soapbox, I can sum up, in short, by saying that this book turned me into a connoisseur of travel literature and I am thankful for the experience.

I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nigeria, 1963-65. Jenkin's adventure along the Niger (before it reaches Nigeria) reminds me very much of those two years. I was never as adventurous as Mr. Jenkins and friends, but the highs and lows of his trip echo my modest African travel. Nigeria is now a dangerous place to visit, and Jenkins fleetingly encounters similar West African threats. He finds a formerly prosperous town in decay, also a Nigeria problem. He also meets wonderful, helpful Africans, as I did. The book interleaves three stories: the struggles of early Europeans to reach Timbuktu; post-high-school adventures of Jenkins and friend Mike in Europe and North Africa; their recent trek to the Niger's headwaters and kayak trip along some of it. I would never attempt the trip Jenkins took, but I'm glad he did and told me about it. The color photos are great; I'd like more. I enjoyed To Timbuktu so much I re-read it immediately, something I've not done before. I recommended it to all my Peace Corps cronies and bought copies for friends. It may appeal most to "guys," because it is about our occasional need for adventure, and to people who've visited West Africa.

I found this book to be a carefully woven tale of the challenges of the Niger, past and present. Just how foreign the culture surrounding that legendary river is was revealing. Several questions as to the value of our influence in those areas of the world were raised, as was the notion that we really cannot understand others easily.I think Jenkins has a masterful command of the language and I appreciated a chance to increase my vocabulary by about 50 words. Since I am not the adventurous type, I was happy to sit by my fire and be transported to a remote village where the chieftain held court in an orange caftan and wingtips with no socks. This book made me get out my atlas and immerse myself in Africa. Thanks, Mark!

I've known people like Mark Jenkins and his buddy Mike Moe my whole life - so many in fact that I sometimes wondered what was wrong with me that kept me from "adventuring". For me, the beauty of the book was the ability of the author to articulate the basis for his choices, adventures, out-look on life. The conflict between the two sets of paddlers was the defining element of this book for me - many people ostensibly are headed in the same direction, but they do so with different goals in mind. If you have a friend that shares those goals, so much the better. Jenkins does a good job of explaining his motivations and goals and I never got the sense that he would second-guess mine. Hence, this is one adventure tale that I could read and not feel bad admitting to myself that it was something I would never do.

Louis L Amour once wrote that "Adventure is where you find it". Mark Jenkins proves this theory in "To Timbuktu". Sharing the experiences of Mark and Mike through Africa gave me keen insight and changed my views on travel journals forever. He taught me that although adventure is usually synonymous with danger, it is truly about the unknown.

I read the book in about 3 days, enjoyed it ... especially the way Mark throws in some previous African explorer history. You won't get any social redeeming values from reading this book, but it is light, good reading to pass time!

_To Timbukutu_ by Mark Jenkins is an enjoyable and quick read, more adventure travel writing than anything though with some history and a little commentary woven through it. Essentially, the book is one main narrative interspersed with two other narratives. The heart of the book is the account of how the author and three of his friends reached the head of the Niger River in West Africa and were able to journey down its most dangerous sections in kayaks, starting where the river was barely large enough for their one-man boats, contending with rapids, waterfalls, debris in the water, wild currents, hippos, and crocodiles. This main narrative would break from time to time to follow one of two other narratives; either describing adventures the author and one of his friends on the current expedition had in Europe and mostly in Africa a number of years ago (fresh out of high school) or an account of the legion of (very unlucky) European explorers who tried to solve the questions of the source and even the direction the Niger River flowed as well as the location of the fabled city of Timbuktu.

I really liked Jenkin's writing style as he was quite descriptive and very witty. I loved how he described in his story of himself and his friend Mike, bored with Europe, when they both decided to go to Africa. "It was a word from the boundlessness of childhood. Big and deep as the sky." Or how he described that there were only certain times in your life when you can do certain things, such as to go out to see the world. If you waited too long to go, "the seeds of cynicism and fearfulness have already taken root and you shall be a loathsome traveler."

A good book, for once I don't have a lot to say about something I have read. While not action-movie standards of adventure, Jenkins did describe an interesting experience. While he didn't give as detailed a portrait of the lives of Africans as other books I have read, there were some very memorable scenes and people in this book. I liked reading about the many explorers who attempted the Niger and to reach Timbuktu, though I had read much of that before and in greater detail. I guess what I liked most was his writing style; his put-you-there descriptiveness of what he saw and experienced.

My Dad loved this book. For all the rivers he never paddled it surprised me. But after many years of carrying it from place to place I read it, and then I understood. It wasn't the water, the boats, or Timbuktu, it was simply the act of traveling.

We had traveled a lot together and when he didn't go I always made it a point to call him en route. From the Champe De Elysse, a mountain meadow in Yosemite, wherever I was we kept in touch. Mark Jenkins is a veteran traveler and his wife, like my Dad gets the touch via postcard. She knows he'll go, and that they will miss each other, but they made a deal and it works for them so he goes.

With descriptions that sometimes seem like poetry Mark draws us along on his trip to the mythical Timbuktu. But that's not the only trip we are on in this book. It is cleverly spliced with other trips from other times, some his, some from famous or almost famous others. The delight is to sift thru these ancillary tales and then drop back into the current tent, village, or boat.

Of course we have to have traveling companions and our group is like most, sometimes adversarial, but mostly content to go with the flow, when there is flow, and it's not too...well, you get the picture.

Amidst the companions come others to guide, to tote, to banter, to question. All showing up to play their part in the adventure. And like us all wishing it was them that was putting the boat together ready to sail off with the morning dew to places never seen by most but forever to be remembered by my Dad, Mark, his wife, and all those who helped and were touched along the way.

who chastise Jenkins for his "machismo" and affix to him the "Ugly American" label. In a genre literally *filled* with unself-critical machismo, with authors who suffer from bloated senses of their missions and themselves and with ordinary wanderings striving unsuccessfully toward the Epic, this book stands apart.

The author, while guilty of selfishness (which he criticizes himself for) and boyish stupidity (ditto) is hardly the testosterone-addled and unself-conscious dunderhead some have here made him out to be. He is, on the contrary, self-effacing, humorous, and humane (his praise for the people he meets and the people who aid him in his adventures is sincere, uncondescending). The book, moreover, is masterfully wrought: it is at once a chronicle of West Africa's colonizers (whose follies throw the author's own into relief), a first-person account of the explorer's lunacy in the late 20th century and an incredible portrait of a friendship (whose coda concludes the book and transforms an already successful travelogue into something altogether more moving than you expect upon opening its covers).