SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

The author raises more questions than he answers. James Stephenson’s memoir about the Hadzabe in Tanzania, one of the last tribes of hunter-gatherers, is fascinating, though not always in ways the author probably intended. As much about the 27-year-old author and the casual romanticism with which he plunges into life in another culture as it […]

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The search for dinosaur fossils amid sandstorms and desert heat is anything but dry in this lively story of the excavation in January, 2000, of a site in the western Egyptian desert, partially excavated by Ernst Stromer in 1911, but untouched since then. Nothdurft, a professional writer, working in concert with Josh Smith, the young paleontologist who was the team leader of the January, 2000, dig, tells the stories of both the 1911 and the 2000 excavations, along with the fossil discoveries made by each group. Stromer, a German aristocrat and meticulous paleontologist, found the fossils of four unique, 95-million-year-old dinosaurs in Bahariya in 1911, spent twenty years analyzing them, and then supervised the fossils’ installation at the Bavarian State College of Paleontology and Historical Geology in Munich. In April, 1944, everything was lost in the allied bombing of Munich.

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Setting his massive, almost 700-page novel in Sudan and neighboring Kenya, Philip Caputo details the extraordinary efforts of non-government organizations (NGOs) from around the world to bring aid into “no-go” zones, those zones declared so dangerous that the UN will not enter. Many of these agencies ferry aid through the use of bush pilots and small airlines from Kenya, which fly into Sudan and land on hidden, usually make-shift, landing strips, often dodging small-arms fire and enemy aircraft when they try to return home. The Muslim government of Sudan, located to the north in Khartoum, has long been at war with the oil-rich, largely Christian south, and atrocities occur on a regular basis—the abduction of children for children’s armies, the rape and enslavement of women, the maiming and mutilation of the healthy, the cutting off of food and water, and the theft of medical supplies to prevent disease. Lacking weapons and ammunition, the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) is no match for the heavily supplied army from Khartoum.The action is generated by characters who fly for Knight Air out of Kenya—Fitzhugh Martin, a mixed race Kenyan; Douglas Braithwaite, an American entrepreneur and pilot; and Wesley Dare, a Texas mercenary—along with their lovers, an Anglo-Kenyan philanthropist and a female Canadian pilot.

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Written in 1978, this is a murder mystery set near the South Pole in 1909, the same year as Shackleton’s first expedition and five years before the Endurance epic. A similar crew of explorer-scientists and sailors, with the same attitudes and prejudices that one finds in the literary record of the Endurance, perform similar tasks under similar conditions, with one big exception. Captain Eugene Stewart (sharing initials with Ernest Shackleton) must also investigate his own crew as he attempts to unmask the murderer of Victor Henneker, the expedition’s representative of the press, who intends to record the voyage for posterity. With the same care for historic details and period attitudes which one sees in some of Keneally’s later, prize-winning books, such as Confederates and Schindler’s List, Keneally reveals Henneker to be a blackmailer who holds damaging information about almost everyone in the crew.

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So daring and exotic are Erik Hazelhoff’s adventures and so strange are some of the coincidences, that if this were fiction, a reader might be excused for finding it “unrealistic.” Yet this is the story of a real Dutch citizen who has believed all his life in challenging fate, forging ahead, doing what he had to do, and not looking back. Unwilling to accept “impossibilities,” he has constantly challenged the status quo, often in wildly heroic actions. Seemingly fearless, he learned from his earliest childhood in Dutch Java that Fear dwelt in a Black Cave, but “you must defy him, and a pebble in your mouth will protect you.” Hazelhoff has spent his entire life with a pebble in his mouth, boldly marching past Black Caves which have swallowed lesser men.

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