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| Author: Dean King |
Hailed as a masterpiece of
historical adventure, this enthralling narrative recounts
the experiences of twelve American sailors who were shipwrecked
off the coast of Africa in 1815, captured by desert nomads,
sold into slavery, and subjected to a hellish journey
through the bone-dry heart of the Sahara. The ordeal
of these men-who found themselves tested by barbarism,
murder, starvation, death, dehydration, and hostile tribes
that roamed the desert on camelback-is made indelibly
vivid in this gripping account of survival, courage,
and brotherhood.
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From Publishers Weekly
When the American cargo ship Commerce ran aground on the northwestern shores
of Africa in 1815 along with its crew of 12 Connecticut-based sailors,
the misfortunes that befell them came fast and hard, from enslavement
to reality-bending bouts of dehydration. King's aggressively researched
account of the crew's once-famous ordeal reads like historical fiction,
with unbelievable stories of the seamen's endurance of heat stroke, starvation
and cruelty by their Saharan slavers. King (Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed),
who went to Africa and, on camel and foot, retraced parts of the sailors'
journey, succeeds brilliantly at making the now familiar sandscape seem
as imposing and new as it must have been to the sailors. Every dromedary
step thuds out from the pages with its punishing awkwardness, and each
drop of brackish found water reprieves and tortures with its perpetual
insufficiency. King's leisurely prose style rounds out the drama with
well-parceled-out bits of context, such as the haggling barter culture
of the Saharan nomadic Arabs and the geological history of Western Africa's
coastline. Zahara (King's use of older and/or phonetic spellings helps
evoke the foreignness of the time and place) impresses with its pacing,
thoroughness and empathy for the plight of a dozen sailors heaved smack-hard
into an unknown tribalism. By the time the surviving crew members make
it back to their side of civilization, reader and protagonist alike are
challenged by new ways of understanding culture clash, slavery and the
place of Islam in the social fabric of desert-dwelling peoples. Maps,
illus.
© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. |
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$14.95 (softcover)
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