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SELECT REVIEWS OF JRB CLIENT BOOKS
»W. Bruce Cameron
»Mark Obmascik
»Jennie Shortridge
»Dean King
»Alan Cutler, Ph.D.
»Doris A. Fuller & Natalie Fuller
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W. Bruce Cameron
How to Remodel a Man : Tips and Techniques on Accomplishing Something You Know Is Impossible but Want to Try Anyway
Author: W. Bruce Cameron
Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press (September 1, 2004)
ISBN: 031233317X
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Mark Obmascik
We are pleased to share the following praise for The Big Year:
The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession
ISBN: 0-7432-4545-8
Publication month: February 2004
Author: Mark Obmascik
Imprint: Free Press (272 pp.) / $25.00
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Good news! In the Book Sense Summer Paperback Picks for 2005,The Big Year by Mark Obmascik will be one of five titles promoted for the entire summer and will be included in special flyers that will go in the June monthly Red Box mailing to all stores.
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November 2004
Amazon.com picks #8 Best Outdoors & Nature Book of 2004 The Big Year by Mark Obmascik
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July 2004
Great news for Mark Obmascik’s bookThe Big Year:
It is No. 6 on the Science Best Seller list in the August 2004 issue of
Discover magazine!
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THE SUNDAY STAR-TIMES (Auckland, New Zealand)
April 18, 2004
Bird-brained activity
Reviewed by Iain Sharp
BIRD-WATCHERS are a peculiar bunch of people. I say this without malice because in a small, amateurish way I’m a bird-watcher myself. And in spite of its budget-blowing looniness, I’d love to take part in the annual contest known as the Big Year.
The aim is to spot the greatest number of avian species on the North American continent within a single calendar year. There’s no monetary reward. Indeed, the contestants are sure to end up seriously out of pocket as they travel thousands of kilometres in pursuit of their goal.
There are no referees either. They’re not needed. When not watching birds the contestants watch each other obsessively and howl wildly in protest at the slightest sign of fraud.
To be a serious contender, you need to notch up at least 700 species. The first 50 are easy. Even the first 100 or so aren’t too hard. Then you start running into the same bloody owls, geese and ducks again and again. Denver-based journalist Mark Obmascik follows the exploits of three champions who’ll risk anything to bump up their scores.
The book opens in a Denny’s fast-food restaurant in Arizona. Die-hard birder Sandy Komito has chosen to eat here not because he likes the way they do their ham and eggs but because great-tailed grackles and black vultures are rumoured to roost in the trees outside.
Before long he receives a tip-off that a Nutting’s flycatcher has been spotted in nearby Patagonia Lake State Park and off he roars. But about 30 rival ornithologists arrive before him, all armed with heavy-duty Leica, Zeiss, Swarovski or Kowa cameras to snap the nondescript little greyish-brown critter. “The bird had paparazzi,” Obmascik quips.
Later, we see the competitors braving freezing temperatures on Saint Lawrence Island in pursuit of puffins, fighting off swarms of mosquitoes as they paddle after flamingoes in the Everglades and hiring helicopters to scour the mountains of Nevada in quest of the rare Himalayan snowcock. Even if wildlife stories aren ‘t usually your thing, chances are you’ll be captivated by this well-written–and often hilarious–tale of raving eccentricity
Copyright 2004 Independent News Auckland Ltd.
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LOS ANGELES TIMES
April 13, 2004
When Bird Watchers Get Cutthroat
Bernadette Murphy, Special to The Times
The year Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were battling each other for the baseball single-season home run record, a competition of a different sort but with the same nail-biting tension was taking place across the continent. Each year on Jan. 1, those in the birding world infected with a spirit of obsessive rivalry embark on “The Big Year,” a race to see who can see the most breeds of birds in North America over the course of 365 days. In 1998, the year limned by Denver journalist Mark Obmascik in his riveting narrative, “The Big Year,” the competition, which dates to 1900, was the toughest ever, with three cutthroat birders wrangling for the lead.
There was Sandy Komito, a street-smart roofing contractor from the Bronx who had set the earlier Big Year record of 721 birds in 1987 and was prepared to spend most of his time and between $8,000 and $12,000 a month to hop last-minute flights to Alaska, Wisconsin, California, Oregon, New Mexico, Texas, British Columbia and wherever else rare birds had reportedly been seen; Al Levantin, a highly successful businessman who regularly took off from his mansion in Aspen, Colo., to track down avian species even though stalking the pelagic varieties over the ocean made him devastatingly seasick; and Greg Miller, a stout software engineer from New Jersey and the only competitor to somehow manage a full-time job during the contest, who maxed out six credit cards and took loans from his dying father to be a genuine contender.
Komito’s plans for the year, as described by Obmascik, were typical of the three: “He expected to be away from home 270 of the next 365 days chasing winged creatures around the continent. There were ptarmigans to trail on the frozen spine of the Continental Divide in Colorado and hummingbirds to hunt in the heat of the Arizona desert. He would prowl the moonlight for owls in the North Woods of Minnesota and wade the beaches of South Florida at dawn for boobies. He planned to race after birds by boat in Nova Scotia, by bicycle in the Aleutian Islands and by helicopter in Nevada. Sleep was not a priority, but when it came, he would be tossing in the army bunks of Alaska and turning on the rolling waves of the Dry Tortugas.”
“The Big Year” combines the best of adventure tales, mystery writing and nature narratives, and even readers who are not birders will soon find themselves cheering the competitors on, bemoaning a wrong turn in the Florida Everglades, braving mountain lions and mosquitoes and slogging through alligator-infested swamps in search of the next bird. At one point, as Miller and Levantin work together in pursuit of an exceptionally difficult-to-find breed, the harrowing nature of their chase dawns on them. “Flying [in] a helicopter in the mountains during a snowstorm to see a Himalayan snowcock … ,” Obmascik reports, “was not what either man had ever envisioned for his newspaper obituary.” The winning result of that year’s race, 745 species (you’ll have to read the book to find out which man accomplished it), is the most impressive ever. Thanks to the strongest El Nino year on record and a pre-9/11 world in which the birders could easily catch last-minute flights, it is a record, the author tells us, that may never be broken.
Although Obmascik did not witness a single day of the Big Year and bases the book on extensive interviews, his descriptions of birds — and the humans who stalk them — are humorous and vivid. He describes the Baird’s sparrow, for example, as sounding “like song sparrows without a rasp, a Lauren Bacall who had never taken up cigarettes.” And of the birds seen on Attu, the westernmost island of the Aleutians, where these extreme birders spend an extended time, he writes that the “same drab brown birds that barely rated a wintertime yawn in Ohio were transformed into brilliant spring eye-catchers in Attu. Lapland longspurs stuck out with a gaudy yellow bill, black mask and rufous cape; snow buntings were a dramatic white-and-black. Alaska was the Honeymoon Hotel for birds, and everyone wore the finest breeding plumage.”
Along the way, Obmascik imparts fascinating information on bird identification, as well as the phenomenon of migration. We learn, for example, that at peak migration, as many as 45 million songbirds arrive in a single night along 300 miles of the Gulf Coast, from Corpus Christi, Texas, to Lake Charles, La. “That’s 150,000 birds per mile, or 15,000 per city block,” he writes.
Bursting with avian statistics, eagle-eyed details as well as the best and worst of the human species’ competitive nature, “The Big Year” is a compelling read for anyone who likes a good, feather-ruffling race. The book, in short, is a lark.
Copyright 2004 The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times
All Rights Reserved
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Great article above the fold, front page, in the Washington Post Sunday Style section, February 15, 2004:
For Birders, A Chance to Test Their Wings
By Libby Copeland
Birding is a cruel numbers game. Curse the wily whiskered auklet, the fickle fork-tailed flycatcher, whose elusiveness keeps the earnest birder from happiness. Think of all the exhausting hikes the birder must endure, the perilous helicopter rides, the strained neck, the crushed dreams. Think of the unfinished lists.
Birders love lists.
Almost all list the number of bird species they’ve seen in their lives. Many also track the ones they’ve seen in their state or county. Some keep lists of birds they have seen from their yards. A demented few keep lists of the birds they see on television, and get upset when, once again, the cry of a red-tailed hawk is dubbed over footage of a bald eagle. There’s a guy in Colorado who keeps a list of the number of different birds he’s seen on 15 years of trips to South America. (So far, he has 1,983.) To check off a rare bird, birders travel to dumpy islands and fetid dumpsters. They compete in contests like the World Series of Birding and the Great Texas Birding Classic. They study things like birding economics.
Every year, a few birders in the full plumage of their obsession enter something called the North American Big Year, a 365-day grueling Olympics of birding. (Birders are a proud people who disdain the passive term “bird-watching.”) At their own expense, these birders travel across the continental United States, Alaska and Canada, pursuing the 675 species native to the region, as well as non-native birds who get lost in migration. They memorize minute differences in wing markings. They often identify birds by their calls alone. The one who records the most birds gets nothing except the envy of fellow birders, which is plenty in the birding world.
In his new book, “The Big Year,” Mark Obmascik, a former Denver Post reporter, tells the story of 1998, the biggest Big Year ever, by reconstructing the journeys of three top birders. The winner saw a record-breaking 745 species, and spent about $100,000 doing it. Obmascik, who is on a book tour, was in town last week, eating breakfast at a restaurant near Union Station and marveling at the reaction he’d received from callers on a Philadelphia radio show.
“After a while it began to sound like an AA meeting,” Obmascik says. ” ‘Hi, my name is Julie. I’m a birder. I got up at dawn to go from Philly to a sewage lagoon in Baltimore to look at a Ross’s gull.’ “
Sewage ponds, it turns out, are excellent habitat for certain birds. “Rich with life,” Obmascik says. In the book, he writes with reverence of a Big Year competitor whose “secret weapon” is the years he spent working with chemicals and inadvertently ruining his own sense of smell. This allows the man to seek out a rare crow at a steaming landfill with relative ease. Such are the joys of birding.
Obmascik, 42, is himself a convert to birding, after writing occasionally about birds and birding for his paper. (He was also the lead writer on the Denver Post’s Columbine coverage, which won the Pulitzer Prize.) Back home in Denver, he takes his sons on birding expeditions. When he comes to Washington for his tour, he carries birding books, a scope and tripod, padding the metal legs with pipe insulation to cushion his shoulder. At Hains Point, he watches great black-backed gulls tearing apart fish as they drift along on ice floes.
But what really fascinates him are the hardest of the hard-core birders, mostly men, who travel countries and
What makes a man do a chicken tour? It is a question that Obmascik can never fully answer, though he points out how birding taps into a love of nature, intellectual prowess and most of all the competitive spirit. At High Island, Tex., a hot spot during spring migration, birders come from England, Germany and Japan, Obmascik says. The good ones don’t need to consult their field guides to name the avian travelers.
“Calling out a mistake at High Island during migration is like letting a grounder go between your legs during the World Series,” Obmascik says.
But there seems to be something more to it than competition, something that transforms birding from recreation to fixation. What is it?
“I asked these guys that a million different ways,” Obmascik says. “Finally I think one of them said, ‘Why’d you fall in love with your wife?’ “
Maybe it is that inexplicable. Maybe it is fate. Oddly, among those who adore chicken tours and landfill expeditions, a significant proportion seem to have been born with avian last names. Thus, there is the young man who used to edit the youth publication for the Colorado Springs-based American Birding Association, Ben Winger, and the president of the National Audubon Society, John Flicker. (The flicker, as any birder knows, is a kind of woodpecker). There’s the editor of American Birding’s newsletter, “Winging It,” whose name is Matt Pelikan.
“For me, birding is a way of understanding the world — it’s like a filter,” says Pelikan, who’s been birding for 40 of his 45 years. “I don’t see surroundings; I see bird habitats. That probably makes me sound like a wack job.”
Then there’s the professor who heads McGill University’s Avian Science and Conservation Centre, whose name is David Bird (not to be confused with the distinguished Virginia ornithologist Mitchell Byrd). Bird has always been into birds. Once, as a kid, he ruined his mother’s canasta party by releasing a flock of swallows in the house. Nowadays, he gives salacious talks at stops on the bird circuit, such as the swan festival and the turkey vulture festival, with titles like “How Birds Do It.”
“Cheating, necrophilia, homosexuality, rape — everything,” Bird says. “The birds are into some very serious sex, actually.”
The most sympathetic of Obmascik’s three subjects is Greg Miller, now 46, who lived in Lusby, Md., and worked as a computer programmer when he embarked on his Big Year. (He now lives in Sugarcreek, Ohio, and runs a bird-guiding business.) Broke and newly divorced, Miller worked 13-hour days so he could take long weekends and maxed out five credit cards to make his journey. For three days he subsisted on “Jif and Mister Salty,” he says. Halfway through, “I was burnt to a crispy critter,” but borrowed $5,000 from his dad to keep going.
Miller really likes lists. He has been known to list the birds he sees while driving along one road, then start a new list as the car turns onto a new road. After he returned from his Big Year, he developed leukemia, which has been in remission for 21/2 years now. While being treated with chemotherapy, he counted birds from his hospital window.
Today, he still has two more credit cards to pay off from his birding adventure, but no regrets.
“My dream year,” he calls it.
Alas, there may never be a year like 1998 again. Obmascik ticks off several reasons, including what he calls the strongest fluctuations of the warm El Niño current off Ecuador, which spawned storms that blew many birds off course and into the scope range of North American birders.
Which doesn’t mean that birders will stop doing their Big Years, their county lists, their state lists, their long drives. There will always be the lure of the beautiful and the rare.
Bill Maynard, who plans birding conventions for American Birding, spent 15 years trying to see 700 birds in North America. He finally succeeded three years ago. He draws the line, though, at certain types of lists. Counting birds you see while waiting in airports, for example.
“I have a friend who does that,” Maynard allows. “Kind of obsessive.”
Birders often seem consumed by their passion, but Maynard, for one, has other hobbies. He also collects stamps.
Stamps with birds on them.
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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
December 1, 2003
In one of the wackiest competitions around, every year hundreds of obsessed bird watchers participate in a contest known as the North American Big Year. Hoping to be the one to spot the most species during the course of the year, each birder spends 365 days racing around the continental U.S. and Canada compiling lists of birds, all for the glory of being recognized by the American Birding Association as the Big Year birding champion of North America. In this entertaining book, Obmascik, a journalist with the Denver Post, tells the stories of the three top contenders in the 1998 American Big Year: a wisecracking industrial roofing contractor from New Jersey who aims to break his previous record and win for a second time; a suave corporate chief executive from Colorado; and a 225-pound nuclear power plant software engineer from Maryland. Obmascik bases his story on post-competition interviews but writes so well that it sounds as if he had been there every step of the way. In a freewheeling style that moves around as fast as his subjects, the author follows each of the three birding fanatics as they travel thousands of miles in search of such hard-to-find species as the crested myna, the pink-footed goose and the fork-tailed flycatcher, spending thousands of dollars and braving rain, sleet, snowstorms, swamps, deserts, mosquitoes and garbage dumps in their attempts to outdo each other. By not revealing the outcome until the end of the book, Obmascik keeps the reader guessing in this fun account of a whirlwind pursuit of birding fame. (Feb.)
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KIRKUS REVIEWS
November 15, 2003
Bemused appreciation from Denver Post reporter Obmascik of a year-long quest to eyeball or hear as many bird breeds as possible in the US and Canada.
The Big Year was 1998, the protagonists were Sandy Komito, a roofing contractor from New Jersey; Al Levantin, a well-heeled businessman; and Greg Miller, a software jock for a nuclear power plant. As enjoyably chronicled by Obmascik, all three went to punishing lengths to tally the highest number of bird species encountered for the year. It was a bit like The Great Race, except that here there would be no fraud or deceit: witnesses would be good, photos even better, but trust was imperative; there would even be instances of “honor among top birders: if one asked for help, the other provided it.” Pocketbooks would be stretched, as would the limits of physical endurance, in mad dashes for vagrants, accidentals, and true freaks made public by rare-bird alerts. Sometimes a good sighting was just a matter of being in the right place, or of reaping the bounty served by El Nino, and chasing birds via air travel was certainly easier in those pre-9/11 days. The author, a bit of a birder himself, knows how to wring joy out of this birding bender; he vividly conveys the delight in identifying a white-throated robin, a clay-colored robin, a rufous-backed robin, a chachalacas (“that sounded as if Ethel Merman had swallowed a rusty trombone”), a yellow rail (“the Greta Garbo of the bird world”), or “the green microburst of energy called Xantus’s hummingbird.” Obmascik will light a tinderbox of bird lust in unsuspecting readers who have never given a thought to “Le Conte’s thrasher, a notoriously elusive soil-digger of the saltbush desert.
You’ll gladly add this one to your own list—of surprisingly good books. (Film rights to Dreamworks, with Red Hour Films.)
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Dean King
SKELETONS ON THE ZAHARA: A True Story of Survival
ISBN 0-316-83514-5
Author: Dean King
Little, Brown, $24.95 (368p)
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More good news on the best-selling paperback edition of Skeletons on the Zahara by Dean H. King:
New York Times Extended Bestseller List for Sunday, May 22, 2005:
SKELETON ON THE ZAHARA, King, Trade Paperback Non-Fiction, #18
Book Sense National Bestsellers:
SKELETON ON THE ZAHARA, King, Trade Paperback Non-Fiction, #13
SEBA (Southeast Booksellers Association) Bestsellers:
SKELETONS ON THE ZAHARA, King, Trade Paperback Non-Fiction, #5
MPBA (Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association) Bestsellers:
SKELETONS ON THE ZAHARA, King, Trade Paperback Non-Fiction, #15
NCIBA (Northern California Booksellers Association) Bestsellers:
SKELTONS ON THE ZAHARA, King, Trade Paperback Non-Fiction, #11
SCBA (Southern California Booksellers Association) Bestsellers:
SKELETONS ON THE ZAHARA, King, Trade Paperback Non-Fiction, #13
NAIBA (New Atlantic Booksellers Association) Bestsellers:
SKELETONS ON THE ZAHARA, King, Trade Paperback Non-Fiction, #10
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Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
by Regis Behe
Sunday, January 2, 2005
“Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival” (Little, Brown), Dean King. A remarkable retelling of the journey of the ship Commerce, a U.S. merchant ship that ran aground off the west coast of Africa at Cape Bojador in 1815. King relates the hellish experiences of Captain James Riley and his crew (which inspired Henry David Thoreau and Abraham Lincoln) with vivid and often gut-wrenching prose that makes the imaginary trials of reality shows such as “Survivor” pale in comparison.
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November 2004
Amazon.com picks #6 Best History Book of 2004 Skeletons on the Zahara by Dean King
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LONDON TIMES
June 2004
Skeletons on the Zahara
Known for his biography of the elusive Patrick O’Brian…Dean King has emerged from the great man’s shadow with a compelling work in his own right… Once ashore, King’s narrative, like Riley’s leadership, grows in stature and certaintly… As King notes, the understanding, respect and compassion between these representatives of the Christian and Muslim worlds offers a timely example in our own troubled age.
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THE WASHINGTON POST
Sunday, April 11, 2004
Desert Storm
The grisly travails of a shipwrecked crew.
Reviewed by Grace Lichtenstein
SKELETONS ON THE ZAHARA
By Dean King. Little, Brown. 353 pp. $24.95
The latest in the recent spate of true disaster tales, Skeletons on the Zahara should come with a warning sticker like those on prescription drug bottles: Do Not Take With Food. Dean King, author of a well-received biography of novelist Patrick O’Brian, recounts the tribulations of a crew of American sailors who were shipwrecked off the coast of Africa in 1815, captured, sold into slavery, fed almost nothing, forced to drink camel urine, and then schlepped all over the desert sands.
Joking aside, Skeletons is a page-turner, replete with gruesome details about thirst, a diet of dried locusts and animal bone marrow, relentless exposure to the sun and the changes in bodily functions that result. King’s plot is right out of Homer: Will the stalwart captain and his mates ever see home again? He has structured it in such cinematic terms that one can almost see the words “An Anthony Minghella film” superimposed on the opening scene — a caravan of 1,000 Arab merchants and their 4,000 camels stretched across the Sahara, caught in a howling sandstorm.
One merchant, Sidi Hamet, had made repeated trips from Morocco to Tombucktoo (King prefers older spellings of place-names, hence the “Zahara” of the title), ferrying loads of barley, cloth, salt and other goods to be traded for gold, exotic items such as ostrich feathers and slaves. He happened upon a nomad’s tent camp, where a bedraggled slave who turned out to be an American sea captain made him an enticing offer: Bring him and his scattered crew to safety in a northern settlement, and they would be ransomed for “many pieces of silver.” Hamet was in a quandary. Unsure of whether to trust the word of a “Christian dog,” he prayed to Allah for guidance.
Flash back to Middletown, Conn., a bustling New England shipping center, at the close of the War of 1812. Capt. James Riley and his crew of 10 were preparing the merchant brig Commerce for an ambitious journey. They would go first to New Orleans, then the West Indies and on to Gibraltar and the Cape Verde islands off the African coast, where they would buy salt, a commodity that should earn a handsome profit back in the United States.
Once the ship is under sail, the story gathers force. King has based his account on Riley’s own narrative, which was published in 1817 and had a wide readership throughout the 19th century. (King says that Abraham Lincoln was among its fans and never forgot the saga of Riley’s ordeal.) In Gibraltar, the crew was almost drowned before the action began, as a wave washed over their longboat after a visit with another ship. King quotes Riley as writing ominously, “We were spared in order to suffer a severer doom.” Indeed, doom hovered over the ship when it ran aground off Cape Bojador in the middle of nothing, just north of the Tropic of Cancer.
When the sailors made their first foray onshore, they were driven away by a band of wild local folk. They escaped in their longboat, only to be shipwrecked again farther south. Soon, fierce nomads captured them, stole most of their clothes and split them up among different bands to be bought, sold and bartered as property.
At this point, the Sahara becomes the star of the story. King does a fine job of bringing readers up to speed at judicious intervals on the customs of the time both in the seafaring world and in global geopolitics. However, the knowledge he shares about the hostility of the desert climate, the brutality of the warring tribes that inhabit it but cannot tame it, and the toll it takes on people and animals alike is graphic and scary. One captive went temporarily blind from the sand and sun. Sores on bodies reduced to skin and bone made walking and even sleeping agonizing. A swarm of locusts carpeted the landscape; the nomads gathered and ate them. A former slave reportedly gnawed on his own limbs for sustenance. The castaways on “Survivor” and contestants on “Fear Factor” wouldn’t have lasted an hour.
As King writes, “the Saharan climate was arguably the most extreme on earth. Its temperature could sizzle at more than 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, the ground temperature soaring 50 degrees higher in the sun; at night, the thermometer could plunge as much as 85 degrees. . . . While only about a tenth of the Sahara is covered in barren sand dunes . . . almost equally formidable are its stepped plains of wind-stripped rock covered in boulders, stones, and dust.” Thirsty yet? King interrupts his tale just long enough for vivid discourses on how humans suffer through various stages of dehydration; the gastrointestinal workings of camels; Saharan customs (no matter who finds food, anyone in the vicinity can elbow his way into a meal; thieves are entitled to take anything left unwatched by its owner); and nomads’ dietary preferences (they don’t like fish and, being Muslim, won’t eat pork).
The redoubtable Riley promised Hamet a reward from a friend in Swearah (known today as Essaouira, in southern Morocco) if Hamet could get the dispersed sailors there safely. The question became: Could Hamet sneak past not just other marauding bands, who would love to rob him of his bounty, but also his nasty father-in-law, Sheik Ali? Early on, Riley had a dream that, after many trials, he would encounter his savior, a man in Western dress on horseback. As the story’s unremitting barbarism continues, not just the Commerce’s crew but also the reader is likely to pine for the greenery of Connecticut.
Even armchair adventurers satiated with exotic travelogues will appreciate heroism amid adversity in this fast-paced account of slow torture — and an almost-happy ending.
Grace Lichtenstein, a former correspondent for the New York Times, is the author of six books.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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DAILY MAIL (UK)
April 2004
Genuinely gripping, full of twists and turns of fate … mesmerising … The torturous journey, with parched tongues and aching bones, in constant fear of bandits who might capture and enslave them, is described in unsparing detail … The game of bluff and double bluff kept the crewman’s lives on a knife-edge. If you want to know the ending, the Hollywood movie can’t be too far behind.
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NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ADVENTURE
January 27, 2004
Author’s Sahara Trek Inspired by Classic Tale
by Mark Kirby
When the American brig Commerce ran aground on the coast of northwest Africa in 1815, Captain James Riley and his crew knew enough to be terrified. Accounts written by other mariners shipwrecked along the same coast chronicled brutal enslavement at the hands of ruthless desert nomads. A few reports suggested that the natives were cannibals.
Rather than test the validity of those claims, the sailors quickly set back to sea in a longboat. Nine days later, plagued by thirst and suffering from exposure, they had no chance but to return to shore. Soon after, the crew was captured by Bedouins and forced to march across the Sahara for days with little food or water. Riley witnessed one of his men, in a famine-induced delirium, gnawing at the sun-charred flesh of his own forearm.
Eventually Riley convinced a desert trader named Sidi Hamet to purchase him and four members of his crew and take them north—to a trading post where they could be ransomed and returned home. Along the way, Riley and Hamet forged a bond that saw them through severe deprivation, an ambush by bandits, and the intrigues of Hamet’s father-in-law, who sought personal profit from the sale of the crew.
When Riley finally reached safety in 1817, he recorded his ordeal which was eventually titled Sufferings in Africa. The book, widely read during the 19th century, went largely forgotten for over a hundred years.
Upon rediscovering Riley’s classic survival narrative, author Dean King decided to travel to what is today the Morocco-controlled territory of Western Sahara to retrace Riley’s route. Dean’s retelling of Riley’s story, titled Skeletons on the Zahara, is due out in February from Little, Brown, and Co., Inc. Excerpts from King’s book and impressions of his trip appear in “The Cruelest Journey” in the February 2003 issue of National Geographic Adventure magazine. In the following interview, King recalls his journey tracking Riley’s footprints across Saharan sands.
How did you discover Riley’s narrative? What inspired you to retell it?
I was in the New York Yacht Club library, researching my previous book [Harbors and High Seas: An Atlas and Geographical Guide to the Complete Aubrey-Maturin Novels of Patrick O’Brian]. On one of the shelves, I spotted an old leather-bound book with the title Sufferings in Africa on the spine. Intrigued, I pulled it off the shelf and started reading. I ended up sitting down in an old leather club chair and reading for two days straight. I couldn’t put it down; I realized that I’d uncovered a lost treasure.
Of all the brutal deprivations and remarkable struggles that faced the members of the Commerce on their journey, what stands out in your mind as the most grueling?
Definitely the fact that they were going on forced marches while consuming so little food and water. The survivors lost half their body weight. Riley reported that he went from 240 pounds (109 kilograms) to 120 (54 kilograms) and that some of his men at the end of the ordeal weighed around 40 pounds (18 kilograms). Before becoming enslaved, they’d already been at sea for nine days, scorched by the sun and without food. It’s one thing to be traveling with no provisions and trying to save your own life. It’s another being forced across the desert as a slave, which the men were forced to do for quite a while before Riley set out with Sidi Hamet on his epic journey north. As slaves, they traveled with no hope. The stamina and heart it took to keep going is remarkable.
What has been the greatest barrier to reconstructing the ordeal of the Commerce?
The biggest challenge for me was to take the material I had and make it come alive for today’s reader. The way authors told a story back then was different than the way that we would tell a story today. They didn’t write their emotions into a story; they didn’t describe a lot of things in detail and omitted much of the sensory stuff that we’re used to getting now. That was one of the reasons I decided to go to Western Sahara. I needed to run on the sharp stones that the sailors described running across and feel what that felt like so that I could breathe their experience into the modern retelling of the story.
So recovering those sensory impressions was the main reason behind your trip to Western Sahara?
Yes, but I also wanted to verify the accuracy of what Riley and Robbins reported [Archibald Robbins, a sailor aboard the Commerce who suffered an additional 19th month of captivity, also published an account of the wreck]. In their time, there were a lot of wild tales circulating, both in print and verbally, but I immediately realized when I read Riley’s memoir that it was authentic. He took his reporting seriously, but in the book he sometimes wrote far-fetched things—like seeing people who were 300 years old. He also reported that the nomads lived off of camel milk and camel urine. I didn’t know if that was really possible. It seemed unrealistic to me. I felt a need to research and find out what was true, and the surprising thing was that a lot of what Riley reported still happens today.
What’s a good example?
The thing that hit me the hardest was when I was riding with a guide in a Land Rover and I noticed that he had a long thin scar on his neck. I remembered reading in Riley that the nomads treated illnesses by heating up a long blade, the size of a Bowie knife, and using the back end to brand different parts of the body—typically, the ankles, wrist, shoulders, neck. One of the sailors was treated that way for dysentery in Riley’s narrative. I found it horrific and unbelievable. Riley’s critics didn’t believe it either. I asked the driver how he got the scar and he told me that he had been very sick several years ago and had been treated in the exact way Riley described. My jaw dropped. I was shocked that that kind of medical treatment is still being used today. He told me that the treatment saved his life and that he also treats his children with it.
In the book, Riley describes being so thirsty that he is driven to drink camel urine. Did you get a chance to try camel urine yourself?
I did not taste camel urine, but I did inquire about it. One of my guides was quite loquacious on the topic and said that yes, indeed, they do drink camel urine on occasion, particularly the urine of a pregnant camel because it has certain nutrients and is believed to help cure stomach ailments and mouth sores. And, of course, if you’re dying of thirst you will drink any kind of camel urine. The fact that Riley reported that the nomads preferred camel urine to their own was somewhat shocking, but once you get over there, you find out that it’s not that uncommon.
What was the most trying aspect of your attempt to retrace Riley’s steps?
From my reading, I had expected that we would be able to go farther and faster on the camels than we were actually able to. I trained for the trip to prepare for it, as did the people who were with me. But the camels and the camel drivers, they’re just not used to doing the kind of hard, forced march that I wanted to reenact. I wanted to do up to 50 miles (80 kilometers) a day. It turned out that if we could do 30 miles (48 kilometers) that was an excellent day. A more typical day would be 20 (32 kilometers). Riley reported doing up to 100 (161 kilometers). I doubt that he was actually doing that many, but I think that sometimes he did travel 50, 60 miles (97 kilometers) in a day. T.E. Lawrence [a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia] once did 100 miles in a day, but Lawrence was known for almost killing his camels. His guides wouldn’t ride with him at times because he pushed the camels so hard.
How was your own experience astride a camel?
Your relationship with your camel is a remarkable thing. It’s like nothing we know. The people of the Sahara measure their wealth in camels. Camels provide their food—camel milk—and older, lame camels are slaughtered for meat. They’re also your transportation. You rely on the camel so much that you love your camel. Even being there for a short time, I discovered that the camel is such an essential aspect of life on the desert that you just have to respect the camel. It’s a much different kind of relationship than we know with our animals.
What protections from the harsh Sahara were available to you today that weren’t available to Riley and his men?
Sunglasses were huge. One of the sailors, Roger Porter, went sun blind toward the end. The glare fried his eyes; he eventually recovered after not being able to see for a good stretch of time. We also had saddles for our camels and, importantly, we had clothes. For the most part, the sailors didn’t have any clothes because the clothes that they had were so valuable to the nomads that they were all taken. Along the Western Sahara, there are fierce winds. The sand blows everywhere and if you don’t have what they called a shesh, sand pretty much penetrates everywhere—it gets in your ears, up your nose, in your mouth. Even if you have that protective gear on, it still gets everywhere. I was walking across a desert beach to look at a wrecked ship. I had my reading glasses in a case in my pocket. The sand somehow blew in, entered my pocket, got into my glasses case, and scratched up the lenses. A photographer will tell you that every photographic lens must be kept in a sealed plastic bag.
After your experience in the desert, do you think you could have survived the ordeal of the Commerce?
I like to think that I could have dug deep and come up with what it takes to survive that kind of ordeal. But, in the knowledge that a person can be broken, that your spirit can be broken, I’m not sure that you can entirely control yourself. I know that at one point, Riley’s spirit was broken and he looked for a rock to bash his own head on. But he survived that moment and transcended it and it actually gave him more strength. So I think that if you’re in that kind of situation, you’re going to face a crisis, or it may be several crises, and those are the moments that you have to figure out how to get through and gather strength from. You just don’t know. I like to think I could have faced it.
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RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH
April 20, 2004
DreamWorks takes Dean King book
BY JANN MALONE
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
DreamWorks, Steven Spielberg’s movie production company, has bought the rights to Richmond author Dean King’s latest book, “Skeletons on the Zahara.”
“This means that the movie is much more likely to be made,” King said. “As they are saying, it is now on the fast track, and they plan to begin filming before the end of the year. Before DreamWorks got involved, I don’t think that was a likelihood.
“It is a thrill to know that the greatest movie mind in Hollywood is moved by ‘Skeletons on the Zahara’ and wants his studio involved in the making of the movie.”
King’s book, which has gotten excellent reviews from newspapers and magazines around the country, is the nonfiction account of a group of merchant seamen whose ship, the Commerce, crashed onto the rocks below Africa’s Sahara Desert in 1815.
The ship’s crew was captured and enslaved by nomads. During a forced march across the desert, they suffered from dehydration, starvation and exposure.
“The great thing about having Spielberg involved is that I think he has moved beyond just making dramatic, entertaining films. He wants to make great films that have a big impact on the national conversation and on how we see ourselves as Americans and how we view history.
“His recent movies, ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ ‘Amistad’ and ‘Schindler’s List’ did just that, and he was involved in the making of ‘Band of Brothers.’ So to know that ‘Skeletons on the Zahara’ will be handled, at least in part, by a moviemaker with that sort of vision is a great relief and very gratifying.”
King realizes just how lucky he is. “My experience with Hollywood so far has been contrary to all the stereotypes,” he said. “The scriptwriters, Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard, are thoughtful, responsive, down-to-earth guys who are easy to talk to and interested in all my thoughts on the nuances of the story and the characters.”
King sounds so happy at these developments that money issues seem secondary to the story, but, just for the record, if the movie gets made, King will receive a payment in the mid-six figures. “And then,” he said, “I get a percentage of the net, which I am told not to count on.”
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VARIETY.COM
D’Works digs ‘Skeletons’
Lensing expected to begin by year’s end
By NICOLE LAPORTE
Intermedia and DreamWorks are teaming up on “Skeletons of the Sahara,” a film based on the nonfiction book by Dean H. King about American sailors shipwrecked in Africa in the 19th century.
Project, which marks one of the first deals announced by DreamWorks’ new production prexy Adam Goodman, is on the fast track at the studio. Shooting is expected to begin by the end of the year. A director and cast must still be found.
In the partnership, DreamWorks will co-finance the project and provide domestic distribution while Intermedia will produce with Baltimore/Spring Creek producers Paula Weinstein and Barry Levinson.
Carlo Bernard and Doug Miro penned the script. They wrote “The Great Raid” for Miramax and are finishing the rewrite of “The Talisman” for DreamWorks.
Mark Sourian is overseeing the pic for DreamWorks.
“Skeletons” covers the trials of several American sailors who were shipwrecked off the coast of North Africa in 1815, captured by the Bedouins and sold into slavery. Intermedia initially optioned the rights to King’s book in 2001, after it was brought to the company by Intermedia exec Alex Litvak.
Scott Kroopf, president of Intermedia’s motion picture group, said “Skeletons” is a timely project because it “deals with the development of a cross-cultural bond between Arabs and Americans in a way that is both relevant and positive.”
Intermedia is also partnering with Universal on “The 11th Hour,” a movie about the traitorous FBI agent Robert Hanssen. Billy Ray directs.
Both films mark a growing effort by the shingle to work with studios on co-financing and co-producing projects.
Read the full article at:
http://www.variety.com/story.asp?l=story&a=VR1117903211&c=1236
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RICHMOND.COM EXCLUSIVE
Dean King’s Dreamworks
Steven Spielberg snaps up the movie rights to Richmond author’s latest page-turner.
Colleen Curran
Richmond.com
Friday April 9, 2004
When Richmond author Dean King got back from book tour this week, he found the front door covered with his kids’ “Welcome Home!” signs and the startling news that Steven Spielberg’s production company, Dreamworks, just bought the rights to his scorching bestseller, “Skeletons on the Zahara”.
How’s that for a homecoming?
“I’m a little worn out,” King says, sitting on his West End back porch and drinking tea. He surveys the sloping backyard that was trashed by Hurricane Isabel and adds, “but it’s great.”
“Skeletons on the Zahara,” (Little, Brown, $24.95) is the true story of Capt. James Riley and his Connecticut-based crew’s disastrous shipwreck off the African coast in 1815. Captured by nomads and sold into slavery, Riley and his men were forced on a death-march across the Sahara Desert, where they endured starvation, dehydration, plagues of locusts, sandstorms and quite often, death. Captain Riley eventually met a Muslim trader named Sidi Hamet and the two men became unexpected allies in order to survive.
Winning rave reviews from places like the Los Angeles Times, and Entertainment Weekly, “Skeletons on the Zahara” has already hit the San Francisco Chronicle’s non-fiction bestseller list at No.6 and continues to climb the New York Times extended bestseller list at No. 20.
Now, with Dreamworks snapping up the movie rights, it looks like “Skeletons on the Zahara” might very well be coming to a theater near you.
Screenwriters Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard have been behind King’s project since they first saw his book proposal in 2001. They wrote their screenplay based on King’s proposal and shopped it around to Hollywood Studios, with Intermedia picking up the rights. “We loved it…I love the book, but Dean’s proposal is still the best I’ve ever read,” Miro says.
After years of effort, their work paid off when Dreamworks bought the movie rights from Intermedia to get the script made into a movie.
“We loved the breadth of the adventure in a land little travelled and so alien to its explorers, we were moved by the depth of their suffering, but above all we were fascinated by the relationship between these two very different men — Riley and Sidi,” Miro says. “Their growing friendship, initially hindered by mistrust and lies but finally fostered by surprising open-mindedness and intelligence, was both emotionally resonant and allowed us the opportunity to speak about the world’s current state of affairs.”
Back in Richmond, King is still processing the good news.
“Having Dreamworks involved is a bit of a fantasy,” King admits. “It’s especially cool that Spielberg, who is one of the all-time great storytellers in any medium, is so intrigued by the tale. I find that very gratifying.”
Not bad for a kid who graduated from St. Christopher’s.
After high school, King attended Chapel Hill and eventually moved to New York, where he wrote for Esquire and the New York Times. The author of nine books to date, including his popular biography, “Patrick O’Brian: A Life,” King moved back to Richmond in 1997 along with his wife and daughters, to live in the sprawling West End home where he grew up.
But moving back to Richmond hasn’t cramped King’s writing, or traveling, style.
To research “Skeletons on the Zahara,” King paid a trip to the Sahara while on assignment for National Geographic Adventure. Because he wanted to experience what Capt. Riley and his men endured, King subjected himself to many of the same trials. He ran barefoot across the burning sand and jagged rocks. He scaled the devastating cliffs. He endured the camel’s torturous gait, called “the rack.”
“It was brutal,” King says. “After [riding for] 20 miles, I was bleeding through a hole in my back. It was like sitting on a jackhammer.”
But King’s attention to the gory details paid off. Entertainment Weekly writes, “King is almost pornographic in his description of physical pain: skin bubbles, eyeballs burn, lips blacken, and men shrivel to less than 90 pounds…It’s sensational stuff.”
Although the trans-Atlantic trip provided King with enough great clips to make an arresting 12-minute documentary that he brings to book readings, it’s not the only way he collected material for the book.
King wrote and did much of the research for “Skeletons on the Zahara” here in Richmond.
“My books are very research-intensive. I used all the local libraries,” King says. “I couldn’t have done it without inter-library loan. Any book that exists, I can get here. I used the libraries at the University of Richmond, the Library of Virginia…there’s even an astronomer at the Science Museum of Virginia who could research and tell me if there was moonlight on a specific night or not.”
King even worked on the book through Hurricane Isabel, penciling in revisions by candlelight.
The result is a deftly written, page-turning thriller that takes readers on a break-neck journey across the Sahara.
Next week, King reads from “Skeletons on the Zahara” at the Library of Virginia. He’ll also be showing the 12-minute documentary, edited by several top-tier Richmond studios.
Even C-SPAN is making the trek to Richmond to tape the reading. The segment will air on May 1 at 11 p.m. and May 2 at 8 p.m.
Even though his book might be Hollywood’s hottest property, King has no plans to leave Richmond. Instead, he surveys his lawn and talks to the neighbors about the work he’s doing on his yard this weekend. Isabel took down three trees and King is replanting this spring.
“I’m here [in Richmond] for good,” King says with a grin. “I love it.”
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PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, March 28, 2004
Author Dean King revisits the amazing journey of Capt. James Riley
By Regis Behe
The leather spine of the book simply read “Sufferings in Africa.” When writer Dean King opened it nine years ago in the library of the New York Yacht Club, he had no idea he was about to read an adventure story that influenced Abraham Lincoln, James Fennimore Cooper and Henry David Thoreau.
“It was an amazing narrative from this captain, this memoir of suffering, struggle and, ultimately, transformation and redemption on the desert,” says King, author of “Skeletons on the Zahara.”
“Sufferings in Africa” was written by Capt. James Riley. In May of 1815, Riley and his crew of the Commerce left Connecticut on a voyage that would take them first to New Orleans, then the Cape Verde Islands, before returning home.
Unfortunately, the ship ran aground off the coast of West Africa near the Canary Islands. Thus began a harrowing adventure in which the crew was forced to endure some of the harshest conditions known to man — then and now. They were enslaved, separated and forced to serve their captors, nomadic Arabs who despised them because they were Christians. Nearly naked, the crew endured long marches across what was then called the Zahara, or Great Desert, sometimes subsisting on urine — their own and camel’s.
Food was scarce at all times. Riley’s normal weight was 240 pounds. At the end of his 800-mile, two-month journey, when a British consulate in Morocco paid a ransom for Riley and four of his crew, he weighed less than 90 pounds.
King says he was especially struck by the crew’s enslavement.
“As Americans, we champion freedom so much,” King says. “The idea of being enslaved in another land was intriguing.”
A nautical expert whose other books include a biography of “Master and Commander” novelist Patrick O’Brian, King especially noted Riley’s attention to detail.
“It was richer, it had more psychological and spiritual realization than most accounts,” King says. “Also, quite remarkably, there’s this amazing relationship the captain developed with the Arab trader (Sidi Hamet) who transported him 800 miles across the Sahara.”
When Riley and his crew were ransomed, he hired a translator to interview Hamet. Thus, in Riley’s account — and in “Skeletons” — there is the story of Hamet’s life, which includes two crossings of the desert to Timbuktu and tales of caravans besieged by sandstorms and attacking enemy tribes.
King, however, knew that sailors have long been notorious for spinning yarns and tall tales, and wanted another confirming source. He found that in “A Journal: Comprising an Account of the Loss of the Brig Commerce …” by Archibald Robbins, an able seaman on the Commerce who had written his own version of the Homeric journey.
No one had ever compared the two stories, and King found that they meshed in most details. But in order to completely understand the travails of the sailors, King decided he needed to personally retrace as much of their trail as possible. What he found was a land that, in many ways, has remained relatively unchanged for the past 200 years.
“Riley is really the first Western ethnographer of that region, and his observations on the nomadic tribes are still quoted,” King says. “Much to my surprise, a lot of what he reported that seemed wild in 1815 still exists today.
“I expected to go there and hopefully be able to identify landmarks on his route, and see the terrain, but I didn’t expect to be able to confirm the social customs he reported. But I found plenty of cases where I found the exact same things he reported.”
King calls the area on Africa’s west coast, where the Sahara Desert borders the Atlantic Ocean, a “no man’s and nomad’s” land. Since 1975, when Spain relinquished control, the area has been in turmoil as Morocco and Mauritania have both sought control while Algeria supported a movement by indigenous peoples. The longest-running United Nations refugee camps are located on the Mauritanian border, but the area rarely gets international attention because all that is at stake are fishing rights and some trace minerals.
“Consequently, no one goes there,” King says.
But he did, and one of the great moments of his trip was when one of his guides, Mohammed El Arab, taught him how to ride a camel.
“The gait of a camel is called a rack, and you quickly find out why,” King says. “Both legs on either side swing together, and it’s a very rough ride because they are very (muscular) and hard.”
Almost as soon as King first mounted his camel, it took off running. King lost his balance and was hanging to one side as the beast’s legs whipsawed next to him. He fell to the sandy beach, stunned and a little scared.
“Mohammed comes riding up to me and says, ‘King, what are you doing? That was your fault.’ I’m sort of scratching my head wondering how that was my fault, still checking my bones. Then he says, ‘It doesn’t matter, because camels are sacred animals; they are blessed by Allah. Those who fall from camels are never hurt.'”
After King got over the shock of his fall, he realized it was a great moment. In “Sufferings in Africa,” Riley had told a story that eerily matched King’s camel debacle.
“To have that almost exact same experience was amazing,” King says. “The only way to understand the desert and the Bedouin is to understand the camel. Camels can be cantankerous, smelly beasts, but you learn to respect and love your camel because it’s your transportation. They eat shrub brush and turn it into nutrition-rich milk, so it’s your food. If the camel goes lame or gets old, you can kill it and eat it.”
Lincoln cited “Sufferings in Africa” as one of the half-dozen most influential books of his youth, and Riley himself became a staunch abolitionist as the result of his experiences. In today’s fractious international climate, King thinks the book remains timely and important. Riley and Hamet were able to work together despite different goals and no common language.
“Here we have a clash of Eastern and Western cultures,” King says, “and two guys who manage to overcome their differences and achieve a common goal.”
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TIME MAGAZINE
Monday, March 1, 2004
A R T S / B O O K S
Sailing the Seas of Sand
A true tale of mariners marooned in the Sahara
By LEV GROSSMAN
Abraham Lincoln once made a list of the books that had influenced him. Mostly he went for the heavy hitters — Plutarch, the Bible, The Pilgrim’s Progress — but one of his choices sticks out for its total obscurity: James Riley’s An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce, a memoir by a luckless sea captain who was shipwrecked on the Saharan coast of Africa, where unspeakably horrible things happened to him. Dean King, the author of a biography of Patrick O’Brian (of Master and Commander fame), stumbled on a copy of Riley’s memoir and decided to produce a thoroughly researched, authoritative account of Riley’s disaster.
Skeletons on the Zahara (Little, Brown; 353 pages) begins in 1815 when Riley, on his way back from a routine trading voyage — the proverbial three-hour tour — got lost near the Canary Islands and ran aground in what is now southern Morocco. He and his crew suffered horrifying extremes of exposure, hunger and thirst (King is especially good on the gruesome physiology of dehydration) and were eventually taken as slaves by the Bou Sbaa, a tribe of nomadic Arabs who scratched out a perilous living in the Sahara, trading and feuding and drinking surprising amounts of camel urine. Seen through Riley’s eyes, the Sahara is a nightmare looking-glass world, where camels are sacred and men wash their faces with sand. It couldn’t have been more alien if he had been captured by Klingons, but Riley manages to form a kind of friendship with one of his captors, a charismatic merchant named Sidi Hamet who helps him survive the ordeal.
You can see why Lincoln went for it. These 19th century naval disasters are satisfying largely in direct proportion to the suffering of the protagonists, and Riley’s agonies are of truly Shackletonian proportions. But there’s richness in the narrative too. Skeletons on the Zahara (the Z is a 19th century spelling) is more than a horror story. It’s a tale about a man who discovers his own courage in the face of catastrophe, and an instructive fable about cultural contact: Americans and Arabs searching for firm common ground in a wasteland of shifting sands.
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SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Sunday, February 22, 2004
Into the fire
A captain and his crew survive a shipwreck only to become slaves in the African desert
Reviewed by Martin Rubin
No matter how much of a legend someone is in his own time, sooner or later he may be forgotten. Capt. James Riley of Connecticut, whose merchant ship Commerce was wrecked off the northwest coast of Africa in 1815, was definitely such a phenomenon. After surviving captivity at the hands of Muslim slave traders and enduring the hardships of a lengthy trek across that most inhospitable of terrains, the Zahara — or as we know it today, Sahara — Desert, he wrote an account of his experiences that was an international best-seller. Now, thanks to Dean King, a magazine writer who read this forgotten tome and became fascinated by the extraordinary saga it contained, Capt. Riley may become a legend in our time as well.
For King has written a marvelous account of fortitude and faith, “Skeletons on the Zahara.” He has brought to life not only James Riley but also his crew — at least one of whom, Archie Robbins, also wrote a book that was widely read. In addition, “Skeletons” examines the various desert folk who enslaved and tormented the sailors and in one case ultimately saved some of their lives. From the beginning of “Skeletons on the Zahara,” with its memorable description of a failed caravan traveling south across the desert to Timbuktu in western Africa, the reader will sense that he is in the hands of a masterly guide:
“When the wind at last halted and the sand fell to the ground, three hundred men lay dead on the desert. … All but two hundred of the camels had been spared. As the men dug them out, the beasts rose, grunting and snapping madly, weak-kneed, snorting out the beetlelike parasites that grew in their nostrils. There were no plants for the camels to eat where they had stopped, so the men watered and fed them from the dwindling provisions. For twenty-four more days they racked through deep, hot sand. To keep the camels from flagging under their loads, they gradually dumped tons of the salt they carried for trading. … They found little forage for the suffering camels, whose humps grew flaccid and sagged. … Sidi Ishrel concluded that they had no hope of salvaging the caravan. They could only try to save themselves, so he ordered all but three hundred of the best camels to be slaughtered. They would drink their blood and the fluid stored in their rumens, and they would eat and dry as much of the meat as they needed.”
This is not an author who needs the far-off to elicit his strengths as a narrator: His evocation of the Connecticut River — its landscape, its commerce, its society, its history, even its trying navigable exigencies — is as gripping as that of any exotic locale. Similarly, King has a lovely and vibrant sense of history: The War of 1812 has never seemed more real to me than while reading his account of how it was viewed in New England and of the effects the conflict had had on its economy.
Indeed, King has an unusual talent for evoking the past — its essence as well as the smells, sights and sounds — while still managing to view it in the light of what we have come to know in the many decades since. This is evident not only in his attention to what anthropologists have discovered about the habits and practices of the Sahara peoples but also in his use of earlier and later explorer narratives (mostly European) about this area to put Riley and his crew’s experiences in some kind of context.
King is skillful at showing the travails of the exploiters without in any way indulging in moral relativism: Their cruelty and cupidity are never explained away or excused, no matter how harsh their circumstances are revealed to be. It is also interesting to see the extent to which their religion (Islam, with its rigid moral codes) is able on occasion, but not always, to mitigate or soften the cutthroat practices common to their unforgiving environment.
Given the British harassment of American sailors that Riley had bitterly tasted in the years leading up to the War of 1812, it is ironic that his eventual salvation should have come from being ransomed by a British consular official in northern Africa. Less surprising is that the two men should have become lifelong friends, and one of the many pleasing features of “Skeletons on the Zahara” is that it gives the rest of the story for all concerned where this is known. The fate of three of the Commerce’s crew is unknown, and two sailors, including the first mate, are reliably believed to have spent the rest of their days enslaved to Saharans. So terrible was their physical state when last seen alive that despair at their cruel fate wars with amazement that human beings could survive such torment.
And the book is full of terrible descriptions, from the progressive stages of thirst to unimaginable sunburns and man’s inhumanity to man — to say nothing of women’s, who certainly do not appear in this region as the gentler sex. Yet it is not at all a depressing book, perhaps because of what it demonstrates about the power of endurance and also courage. Riley’s experiences as a slave and his observation of the Muslim slave trade in Africa led him to become an active abolitionist upon his return to his own country, although he died in 1840 before the United States rid itself of this shameful blot upon its polity. And since a young Abraham Lincoln was among the many fans of Riley’s book, the captain may even have played a slight role in bringing about the emancipation of American slaves.
“Skeletons on the Zahara” is usefully illustrated with many detailed maps that help the reader follow this picaresque nightmare. King has piled his book high with details of all sorts, but far from loading it down or making it tedious, the very accretion of fact upon fact upon fact imbues the book with nuance and substance. This is one of the most absorbing and satisfying books to come out in a very long time.
Martin Rubin is a California biographer and critic.
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle
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THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE
February 22, 2004
SURVIVAL RUN
The Commerce has gone aground, the crew enslaved – ‘Skeletons on the Zahara’ is a brutal, true tale
Reviewed by Neal Matthews
By Of the many lessons flowing from this inspirational retelling of the 1815 shipwreck of the Yankee merchantman Commerce on the coast of North Africa, the most pertinent are also the most chilling. The detailed picture of the ways of Islamist tribal life, albeit from the early 19th century, dovetails with some of the worst news coming out of the Middle East. Tribal loyalty trumping the public oaths of Iraqi police officers; the intransigence of Afghan warlords faced with the mere paper of a new constitution; the brutal subjugation of Saudi women – it was all well-rooted on the parched Sahara 200 years ago. Like a car wreck, this book is hard to turn away from, and you can end up despairing that the West and the Middle East will ever achieve a meeting of the minds.
A meeting of the hearts is another matter. I welled up with pride-in-humanity for the valor and honesty of a few of the Arab traders and sheiks who, though motivated solely by self-interest, ended up saving half the 12-man Commerce crew, after an 800-mile forced march across the torturing dunes and thornbush wastes. The other crewmen were lost forever as slaves to the desert nomads.
There are two heroes in this book: 35-year-old James Riley, who captains the Commerce and musters superhuman effort to keep himself and some of his crew alive through the worst privations imaginable, and the Arab trader Sidi Hamet, who buys Riley and delivers him for ransom to a British consul-general, then dies trying to rescue other members of the crew.
We meet Hamet in the book’s prologue, detailing how his father-in-law, Sheik Ali, takes back Hamet’s wife and children as collateral on a debt Hamet owes him. The origin of this debt is a gripping tale in itself: Hamet and his brother setting out on a camel caravan across 1200 miles of the Sahara to Tombouctou, in which a sandstorm kills 300 men and 1,000 camels, and destroys the merchandise the father-in-law had fronted the brothers. Later, 200 of the surviving traders slaughter one another in a bloodbath prompted by their deranging thirst. The debacle eventually leads Hamet to Riley, and each becomes the other’s salvation.
“Skeletons on the Zahara” is a sprawling feast, and sometimes, especially early on, writer Dean King’s propensity to follow tangents can be trying for the reader. For instance, when the Commerce leaves Connecticut and lands first in New Orleans, we’ve already been told too much backstory about the Connecticut shipbuilding industry and the families of the crew. Other, more important details, are left unexamined. Oddly for a writer who penned a biography of Patrick O’Brian and a glossary of seamen’s terms and phrases as a companion to O’Brian’s series of novels about the early British Navy, King makes no judgments about several of Capt. Riley’s blunders that bring his seamanship into question, and ultimately lead to the shipwreck.
The first of these is Riley’s failure to notice that strong currents push the brig off course in the Bahamas, causing it to strike a coral reef in what could have been an early end to the voyage.
Later, in the Strait of Gibraltar, what King describes as a “rogue wave” capsizes the brig’s longboat carrying Riley and four crewmen as night falls. They’re saved by the luck of the wind carrying their voices to a rescue ship; the circumstances are questionable, but King ignores the implications for Riley as a seaman.
Then, on the way down to the Cape Verde islands, Riley decides to take a shortcut from the more conventional (and safer) course, but bad weather and an unusually thick fog move in, and the captain misinterprets the changing color of the water. He credits it to clouds, when in fact it’s due to the sand blowing off the African desert. The Commerce is swept to the east by the Canary Current while Riley thinks he’s still passing through the Canary Islands, and when he hears a roaring sound he interprets it as a squall. In reality it’s the sailors’ worst nightmare: pounding surf along the coast of North Africa. The Commerce hits hard, and is doomed in the breakers.
The seamen had heard all the stories of what happened when other ships had made the same mistake. The crews were either murdered by desert nomads (true), or eaten by cannibals (myth) or beaten into slavery (true). Strangely, when Riley orders that provisions be brought up from the hold of the stricken ship and moved to the beach, no firearms are included. Their one chance of escape is the longboat, which the sailors eventually do use to elude the first murderous band of nomads they encounter. But the boat is in such an unseaworthy condition, due to neglect, they nearly die in it. The longboat’s dilapidation has to be laid at Riley’s feet, but King gives him a pass.
It is the crew itself, driven mad by hunger, that nearly turns cannibalistic. While camped with their Arab masters, two sailors lure a child away from the tents. “Riley discovered them and rushed up as they were about to kill him with a stone,” King writes. ” ‘I convinced them that it would be more manly to die with hunger than to become cannibals and eat their own or other human flesh,’ ” King quotes Riley from the captain’s later writings. A couple of days later, Sidi Hamet arrives with his brother and purchases Riley and four of his shipmates.
King bases his book largely on Riley’s own account of the wreck and the aftermath, which was published in 1817, as well as the book of another surviving crewman, Archie Robbins. King also traveled to the Sahara in 2001 to trace parts of the sailors’ journey, and it shows in the verisimilitude of his physical descriptions. Though King’s reconstruction expands upon Riley’s book, the captain’s original telling, available on microform at the UCSD library, has a you-are-there feel that King could never reproduce. (Riley’s narrative was distributed widely in the early 19th century, and its account of his metamorphosis into an anti-slavery crusader may have influenced young Abraham Lincoln.)
The transformation of Riley from a strapping 240-pound commander into a whimpering 90-pound wretch is a survival tale right up there with Shackleton’s Antarctica heroics and the Donner Party’s snowed-in travails. Quickly, the men are reduced to drinking their own urine. When they are captured by the nomads, they’re already so pitiful-looking that the Arabs, especially the ululating women, find them repulsive. They are stripped naked and forced to walk or ride on camels through radiating heat. Their skin peels off in sheets, their tongues swell and their feet are lacerated by stones. They are relieved to be able to drink camel urine. When the desperate captives stumble into a small encampment one day around noon, “Instead of sympathy, the spectacle ignited a frenzy of disgust,” King writes. “They reviled the men with shrill curses and spat on them. … In a land that imparted good and evil qualities to all things and denounced women as conduits of evil, any contact with Christians was dangerous.”
At the heart of the book is the complex relationship between Riley and Sidi Hamet. God and family guide both men’s destiny and give them a universal connection, but they are also bonded in deceit. Riley, who picks up Arabic amazingly fast, tells the nomads and traders some whoppers: that he and his men are British (trying to explain they were from another continent across the ocean was too risky), that he personally knows the Sultan of Morocco and that he has a friend in the north who will pay Hamet if Riley and his men are delivered to the sultan’s realm.
It’s a bluff. Riley knows nobody in Africa, and he’s just trusting to luck that he can get word to the British consul in the nearest port.
The town of Mogadore, about 700 miles north of the band’s wanderings in the trackless Sahara, is Riley’s only hope. Captives could be redeemed there to foreign merchants and consuls for about $150 each. “To get there,” King writes, “he had to cross the desert past hostile Bedouin tribes, past the fortified Berber towns of Souss, and finally past the operatives of the Sultan of Morocco, where Christian slavery was technically illegal and the sultan was fond of ‘gifts’ Western nations paid for their rescue.” Hamet agrees to undertake the journey and protect Riley and his mates along the way, but promises he’ll slit Riley’s throat with a scimitar if he is revealed to be lying about having a rich friend named “Consul” in Mogadore. Riley agrees to the deal.
Running this gauntlet takes two months, and builds to a pressure-filled climax that depends solely on trust among strangers, and good men standing by their word. The ending is given emotional power by the depth of empathy you feel for Hamet, whose rescue scheme is almost hijacked by his own predacious father-in-law, the villain we first met in the book’s prologue.
The endgame itself is a ripping yarn, a testament to King’s writing, since Hamet has long since proven himself a true, resourceful survivor and the reader already knows that the sailors will be saved. Riley and Hamet end up as comrades, their mutual salvation resounding as a message of hope we sorely need now.
Neal Matthews is a freelance writer in San Diego.
Skeletons on the Zahara
A True Story of Survival
Dean King
Little, Brown, 351 pages, $24.95
Excerpt from Skeletons on the Zahara
Sidi Hamet knew that if his presence were made known in the town, he would risk being coerced into selling the Christians to Sheik Beyrouk, the ruler of Wednoon, or to Sheik Ali, his father-in-law. Thus he decided to bypass Wednoon. In the late afternoon, he woke the [five] sailors and took them to a nearby hut, where he had bought a honeycomb. Hassar’s hungry men had caught wind of the meal and loitered around hoping to share in it. Balancing a bowl containing the hive on his knees, Hamet distributed sections to the sailors with one hand while holding his gun in the other in case Hassar’s men abandoned their cautious self-restraint. The sailors attacked their portions like bears, swallowing along with the rich honeycomb the tender young bees that filled it. Tears rolled down their hollow faces as they ate the calorie-laden gold. They were so sated that they fell asleep again under a palm tree until dark.
Ten days after leaving the Valley of the Locusts, they crossed the St. Cyprian wadi, reaching the coast just north of Cape Barbas. Robbins had come full circle, in more ways than one. Neglected by [his master], his health had begun to deteriorate and would continue to decline over the next month until he hit his lowest state since arriving on this shore in the longboat. His diet of hard-boiled blood and locusts made him severely costive. The less he worked, the more he was shunned. “I was completely dried up; and the skin was contracted and drawn tightly around my bones,” he said. The combination of his chafing clothes and sleeping on the hardpan had worn the skin and flesh off his hips so that he could touch his hipbones on both sides. He was “now literally reduced to a skeleton.”
The end, one way or another, was near.
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MINNEAPOLIS STAR
Published February 15, 2004
Review: ‘Skeletons on the Zahara’ brutally authentic
Emily Carter, Special to the Star Tribune
In 1815 Capt. James Riley’s ship and crew wrecked on the northwest coast of Africa. After an abortive escape attempt, they were immediately enslaved by a group of mobile Arab “tradesmen.” According to Dean King’s often gripping nonfiction account in “Skeletons on the Zahara,” conditions were horrific, survival by no means certain.
The only thing the men had to depend on was the negotiating skill of their captain, a man whose every business venture had run aground and who had hoped that this expedition would help him escape his enormous debts. His main captor, a desert merchant named Sidi Hamet, also was in serious financial trouble: His previous expedition had ended in disaster, and Hamet was in hock up to his eyeballs to his powerful and bullying father-in-law. Hamet’s reputation rode on Riley’s assurance that he and his men would be purchased by their important friends at the British consulate.
Riley of course, had no such friends, and his claim was a desperate gambit, as, perhaps, was Hamet’s assertion that he would have to kill his captives if the purchase price was not forthcoming. Even getting to the consulate, however, involved many months and miles crossing the searing desert sands and weathering beatings, malnourishment and narrow escapes for Riley and his men.
The sailors considered their captors savage brutes, while the Muslim traders were certain that the infidel cargo they transported was vile, unclean and less worthy of respect than swine. It would be an easy shot to say that things haven’t changed much in the cultural-tolerance department, but this was a time when human beings routinely were bought and sold by both Arabs and the Western world; we were all savages in those days.
What makes Dean King’s account of this adventure so riveting, is, in fact, not the horrors of captivity or deprivation suffered by Riley and his men but the two personalities at the core of the tale: Riley and Hamet. That these two men, failures in everything they had previously attempted, behaved with integrity and acumen, ensuring a positive outcome for everyone involved, is truly a tale of success against all odds.
Unfortunately Riley skirts the core character issues involved in this harrowing account, giving more time to documenting the effects of dehydration on the pale skin of Europeans and the physical attributes of malnourishment. These details, while ghoulishly riveting, are laid on so thick that the reader becomes desensitized by the second half of the book. The first 80 or so pages will be of interest only to nautical-history buffs, involving as they do endless accounts of longitude, latitude and depth soundings.
Once the ship has wrecked, though, the narrative takes off. There is a kind of brutal authenticity to King’s factual description both of the traders and their captives that fastens the reader firmly within place and time.
In the end, however, the real question of how Riley and Hamet rose to such a difficult occasion, when neither had shown himself particularly competent, let alone heroic, is left to the reader’s imagination. As gripping a nonfiction account as this is, one can’t help but wonder what a great novel it would have made.
Emily Carter of Minneapolis is the author of the short-story collection “Glory Goes and Gets Some.”
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BACK TO THE EDGE: IN RESEARCH FOR BOOK,RICHMONDER ENDURES HIS OWN TEST OF SAHARA SANDS
Publication: Richmond Times-Dispatch
Byline: Jann Malone
Date: 02-15-2004
Edition: City
Section: Features
Dean King’s defining moment came inside a fisherman’s shack built on the literal edge of the Sahara Desert, where it drops 200 feet straight down to the Atlantic Ocean.
He was a few days into some on-site research for ” Skeletons on the Zahara,” his latest work of nonfiction. The book, published by Little, Brown and Co., comes out tomorrow.
King was in Africa to retrace portions of the route taken in 1815 by one of the skeletons, American Capt. James Riley, whose ship, the Commerce, crashed onto the rocks below the same desert. In those days, it was called the Zahara.
Riley and his crew of merchant seamen, mostly from Connecticut, were captured and enslaved by nomads. They endured unimaginabsun exposure incurred on a forced march through the desert.
At one point in his own account of the experience, Riley observes that he and his crew are wasting away, becoming ” skeletons on the Zahara .” The ordeal cost Riley, who left Connecticut weighing 240 pounds, half his body weight.
In that same desert in 2001, things weren’t going so well for King and his team of fellow Richmonders, either, though King would be the first to tell you that their problems didn’t begin to approach the scope of Riley’s.
King and his team were in much better shape because, for one thing, they carried bottled water for their adventure, which he calls “a Land Rover-assisted camel trek.”
They also had food, clothes, sunglasses, cell phones, Internet access and global-positioning technology to tell them their location in a land of shifting sands where maps still aren’t very useful.
And don’t forget, they also had those Land Rovers.
But King, who’s 41, also had a problem. “I’d planned this trip for a year,” he said recently, sipping a mug of hot tea in his home just off Three Chopt Road. “I’d been working on the book for three years. I’d brought videographers. I’d brought photographers. I’m on assignment for National Geographic Adventure magazine. I’ve set this whole thing up.The responsibility’s on my shoulders.
“I’d come halfway across the world to retrace this guy’s route. I’m determined to experience what Riley and his men felt, and it’s not working out the way I planned it.”
It was, well, too easy.
He wanted to run at Riley’s forced-march speed, but the camels and the guides were operating more slowly, much the way city time and country time aren’t in synch in this country.
“The camels would only go so far, so fast. The guides could only do so many miles. Even though we had run and we were in shape, I had to deal with the reality on the ground, which was that we would travel a maximum of 30 miles a day using the camels.”
King believed Riley had been pushed farther and much, much harder.
“I really wanted to go hard, and I would get mad if we didn’t. All along it was, ‘We’ve got to go faster. You get on the white camel, let’s go. I will run.’ “
At one point, sensing his frustration at the slow pace, one of the guides challenged King to a foot race. “Here we are running across the desert over stones. It was mad, foolish, because you can break your ankle easily.”
One night, despite all their high-tech gear, King and his team ended up in the wrong place, in that oceanside fishing village instead of the spot where the guides had set up their base camp for the night.
Eventually, the base camp sent out trucks and found them. “My guys all loaded into the truck and went back, but I stayed out overnight with my guides and the camels, because I wanted to experience that.
“I’m thinking we’re going to ride overnight and get the camels to camp, and then we’ll keep going.”
Instead, when they reach the fishing shack at desert’s edge, one of the guides tells King he knows the man who lives there. He wants to stop and visit. King can’t believe it. “But, for some reason, I didn’t argue. I just said to myself, OK, they’ve had a long day. Let’s just stop.
“We go in, and we’re sitting with this guy. He, of course, makes us tea and shares his bread. He lives in a shack that’s probably 10- by-10 clapboard and is literally on the edge. He fishes out of his back window and reels big fish all the way up 200 feet.
“It was at that point, sharing the conversation, sharing the food, that I realized I had to do what they wanted to do. I had my own little transcendental moment, where, like Riley, I had to realize that things weren’t going to happen the way I wanted them to, no matter what I did or how hard I tried. I realized I needed to abandon some of my preconceptions
and go along with what was happening.”
King didn’t see the parallel at the time. “I didn’t have that kind of distance on it.”
He would encounter other parallels, too, experiences that would make ” Skeletons on the Zahara ” a much better read.
The book tells Riley’s story, not King’s. The piece King wrote for the February issue of National Geographic Adventure weaves details of his own trip into an excerpt from the book.
But even though King’s story isn’t part of ” Skeletons ,” he was able to describe what happened in 1815 in details made more vivid by his own experiences in the desert.
King, also the author of “Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed,” a biography of the maritime novelist, discovered Riley’s story in the library of the New York Yacht Club. He was doing research for one of his books that explain the language and geography of O’Brian’s works.
“I was just looking on a shelf one day, and I saw on the spine the words ‘Sufferings in Africa.’ I cracked it open and started reading. A lot of this old stuff is very stilted and almost silly and hard to believe. Here’s a guy speaking from 1815 who still speaks today in a way that’s convincing and meaningful, and he tells a good story, too. I realized that this voice was really working for me.
“I read for about an hour, then I came back the next day and read the whole thing. It was very powerful and I became fascinated by it.”
Before long, he’d written a proposal and signed a $750,000 contract with Little, Brown for the project.
Riley’s story was riveting, but King still felt the need to retrace his steps. That’s because writers in Riley’s day didn’t provide a lot of details, especially the sensory impressions we’re used to reading today. He also wanted to do firsthand fact checking to verify what he’d read in Riley’s memoir.
The trip almost didn’t happen.
Scheduled to leave Richmond the week after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, King believed he’d have to postpone it until his Moroccan outfitter told him, “We can do it. I’ve got the camels ready.”
King landed in Casablanca the day the United States started bombing Afghanistan.
Also on the team from Richmond were school friend and neighbor Ted Lawrence and his wife, Claudia D’Andrea, and J.P. Kang. Lawrence and D’Andrea had been living in East Timor, where he was doing peacekeeping work and she was finishing a doctorate in Third World studies. Kang was the technology wizard in the group.
Remi Benali, the National Geographic photographer, came from France. Two kinds of guides, local and outfitter provided, completed the group.
The trip cost about $20,000, by King’s estimate. National Geographic Adventure paid part of the cost, and the rest came from King’s advance from his publisher.
King and his team flew from Casablanca to Western Sahara, a disputed territory now controlled by Morocco. There, he found his plans to follow Riley’s route thwarted at just about every step by nervous military police.
“I think they were actually worried that something might happen to us. It was such a tense time, if something were to happen to Americans in a Muslim country.
“You know, the fact that I didn’t get to closely re-create the route was disappointing at first, but I realized I was absorbing so much. My conversations with the guides were so informative that I was satisfied with what I learned.”
For instance, from guide Mohammed el Arab, communicating in a mixture of Spanish, Arabic and French, King learned what to expect from encounters in the desert.
Today, as in Riley’s day, “What they want to find out is this: Is there salt ahead? Is there sugar ahead? Did you see bandits? Did you see friends? I came to realize that when you’re in the desert, it’s more a matter of finding friends than avoiding enemies.”
Riley wrote about the willingness of nomads who had almost nothing to share what little they had with strangers. “That was so graphically portrayed on my own trip,” King said.
They were eating lunch when they saw a man walk over the horizon. “It was like we were a magnet and he was a metal ball. He came in, our guides didn’t know him, but they hugged and they were laughing. There was never any question whether he would share a meal. It was just part of their hospitality, the way things are done in the desert.”
When King’s boat trip on the ocean was scuttled by the military police, he stood on a bluff over the ocean, where he could smell the sea and hear the breakers crashing onto the rocky shore below.
Then, clinging to a rope some fishermen had staked to the top of the cliff, he went right over the edge.
“When our guide did that, I thought he was insane. The next thing you know, we’re all bounding down the bluff. We’re off the face of Africa, between Africa and the sea.”
Oh. And don’t forget what King calls “the brutality of riding a camel.”
Riley’s description of what riding camels did to his and his crewmen’s bodies is gruesome. Says King: “They really rip up your backside. They bounced so hard, we’d have to take water bottles and stuff them under our straw saddles to keep from bouncing off the back.”
Still, “you come to rely on your camel. You come to love your camel. You begin to understand the bond: Their camel is their transportation. It’s their home. Their camel is their greatest symbol of wealth. Their camel is their food. They drink the camel milk, and if the camel is lamed or grows old, they slaughter and eat it.”
Even a trip as challenging as King’s included some lighter, time- warp moments. One night, while he stayed out in the desert with the guides and looked for a camel crossing, the rest of the crew drove into town. Kang went into an Internet cafe.
“He started e-mailing and found out my wife was online. So they instant-messaged between Richmond and the Sahara, while I was out looking for a camel crossing in the wadi. I thought that was a great combination of events.”
King’s wife, Jessica, explained later just how amazing that connection was:
“I almost never went online, but I was online that night.”
Now, comfortably settled in the newly renovated house he grew up in, surrounded by Jessica and his four daughters, King has forgotten the military interference, the too-slow pace and, especially, the way the camel rides rubbed him raw.
He’s ready to go back.
Just outside Laayoune, the biggest town in Western Sahara, he saw people sitting out on the desert on blankets, the way we take picnics to the park. Why? “The guides said, ‘Well, they love the sand, they miss the sand, they come out of the towns and into the sand.’
“I can understand that. I think a lot of people have felt the tug of the desert and want to go back. I definitely feel that.
“I do a lot of cross-country walking, and I enjoy the fact that you’re carrying everything you need, and that you’re moving on your own feet.
“There are special challenges and a special aesthetic to the desert, but there’s an appeal to the quiet, the loneliness, the stillness.”
And there are those transcendental moments. “I generally find those when I do a cross-country walk. There’s always a part of the trip where you wonder, ‘Why the heck am I doing this? I can’t believe I’ve done this three times before and I swear every time that I’ll never do it again.’
“You’re in pain, you’re suffering, and then something happens psychologically, mentally, physically. You adapt, and all of a sudden you’re on a high, and you’re enjoying it and you realize this is what it’s all about. You leave with that great feeling, the desire to go, to travel again.
“Maybe, in a way, this is where it happened here.”
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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Starred Review
* When the American cargo ship Commerce ran aground on the 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’ 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. (Feb. 16)
Forecast: A major media campaign, including ads in the New York Time Book Review, USA Today and Time; radio and TV interviews; and a six city author tour will ignite interest in this captivating adventure tale. The book has earned advance praise from Nathaniel Philbrick (In the Heart of the Sea) and Doug Stanton (In Harm’s Way).
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From “Expeditions from Hell,” by Jonathan Miles, Men’s Journal, February 2004, p. 38
“As with barbecued rib seasonings, this month’s best adventures come in two varieties: wet and dry. Dean King’s Skeletons…is the latter, and reader beware: This account of 12 Americans shipwrecked in North Africa in 1815, enslaved by nomads, and then hauled along on a Dantean odyssey through the desert, is scalding enough to induce vicarious dehydration.”
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LIBRARY JOURNAL
February 2004
In 1815, 12 men boarded the merchant ship Commerce in Connecticut, bound for the Cape Verde Islands after a brief stopover in Gibraltar. Weather and unfamiliar surroundings, however, caused the ship to wreck on the inhospitable coast of what is now Mauritania. Taken as slaves by regional nomads and separated (some never to be seen again), the dozen sailors endured great hardships. King (Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed) rivets with this account of Captain Riley’s nine weeks of captivity: traveling inland nearly 800 miles, then back west, and finally north to Morocco, where he was luckily ransomed by an American consul. Referencing Riley’s journals and those of crewman Robbin (which became best sellers in their day), King writes an astoundingly researched treatise on Islamic customs, nomadic life, and desert natural history, as well as detailed descriptions of dehydration, starvation, and caloric intake. Included are an 85-title bibliography, detailed maps of the northwest coast of Mauritania and Morocco, a glossary of Arabic terms, and wonderful photographs of King’s own trip as he retraced Captain Riley’s journey of enslavement. A wonderful, inspiring story of humankind’s will to survive in spite of inhospitable conditions and inhumane treatment, this work should be in all public libraries, maritime libraries, and African collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/03.]-Jim Thorsen, Weaverville, NC
Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
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Jennie Shortridge
Riding with the Queen
ISBN: 0-451-21027-1
Author: Jennie Shortridge
Published by NAL Accent, a division of Penguin Group (USA)
Trade Paperback Original, 352 pages
$12.95 US / $19.50 CAN
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“Riding with the Queen is a poignant, riveting adventure full of moments that are touching and insightful, but never predictable. Tallie is a fresh, unique character whom I couldn’t stop rooting for!” — Caren Lissner, Author of Carrie Pilby
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“This skillfully written novel is gripping from the get-go. Tenderly and without ever blinking, Jennie Shortridge evokes the psychic damage of childhood–and the will to survive. A life-affirming must-read.” — Caroline Hwang, Author of In Full Bloom>
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“Witty, engaging, Jennie Shortridge writes with an easy grace and a backbeat of the blues that lends a quiet authority to this novel of a woman trying to stay halfway sane in a wholly crazy world. Plenty of books can take you there; this one will bring you home. Keep an eye on this writer.” — Summer Wood, Author of Arroyo
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“Like the novel she inhabits, Tallie Beck is funny, sexy, smart, and heartbreakingly real. A wonderful debut.” — Louise Redd, Author of Hangover Soup and Playing the Bones
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“A kick-in-the-pants read. Tallie Beck is as brassy a blues singer as you’d ever want to meet.” — Katie Schneider, Author of All We Know of Love
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Alan Cutler, Ph.D.
THE SEASHELL ON THE MOUNTAINTOP: A Story of Science,Sainthood, and the Humble Genius who Discovered a New History of the Earth
ISBN: 0525947086
Author: Alan Cutler, Ph.D.
Publisher: E P Dutton; (April 14, 2003)
Hardcover: 240 pages
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“An excellent introduction to his [Steno’s] life and work… Cutler’s rich and thought-provoking book should prove the starting point for more rounded studies… A well-written, much-needed account of Steno’s life which will bring his name to a far wider audience than geology students, devout Danish Catholics and historians of science.” — Times Literary Supplement
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“Alan Cutler’s account of Steno’s life is more than just a history lesson; it is a fascinating account of the struggles and triumphs of an incredible genius involving some of the greatest scientific names that have ever lived.” — Business Times (Singapore)
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“Cutler’s smart and readable biography puts Steno right at the forefront of the geographical revolution. Clearly, he had joined the pantheon of science long before the church beatified him in 1988, officially setting him on the road to sainthood.” — Natural History
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“…what is so intriguing about this little book is the way it makes you wrestle with the unwillingness shown by people, however intelligent, to accept the evidence of their own eyes.” — Daily Mail
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“Alan Cutler fluidly and elegantly charts the birthing pains of geology… In a beautifully written, slim book, Cutler has not only sketched a portrait of a man who is not as widely known as he deserves, but has painted a fascinating tableau of a philosophically complex period.” — Daily Telegraph
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“Alan Cutler’s biography of Steno is insightful, entertaining and beautifully produced. It is written with a grace that will delight anyone with even a passing interest in the story of how we came to understand the inner workings of the Earth.” — Sunday Telegraph
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Doris A. Fuller & Natalie Fuller
Promise You Won’t Freak Out: A Teenager Tells Her Mother the Truth About Boys, Booze, Body Piercing, and Other Touchy Topics (And Mom Responds)
ISBN: 0425195910
Authors: Doris A. Fuller & Natalie Fuller with Greg Fuller
Publisher: Berkley Publishing Group (May 1, 2004)
Paperback: 237 pages
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November 2004
Amazon.com picks #1 Best Parenting Book of 2004 Promise You Won’t Freak Out by Doris A. Fuller & Natalie Fuller
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RT