Inconsistent Dispatches from Far-Flung Lands

books:

	• Richard Bangs' Adventures with Purpose: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Earth (Adventures with Purpose) Richard Bangs Menasha Ridge Press, 2007 - 350 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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The Bigger Picture

This book is an amazing look at our big picture, its environment, and challenges that are the same all over the globe. How do we protect our environment while the population explodes, poverty is rampant, and wars rage?

Its also a beautiful testiment to some of the world's most unique landscapes, waterways, and wildlife. It offers hope that some of the solutions may help save some of our wildest most significant places.

Inconsistent Dispatches from Far-Flung Lands

Richard Bangs' "Adventures with Purposes: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Earth" is a series of travelogues, 16 stories about his travels to remote and often wild areas of the earth. The areas are obviously beautiful, but this doesn't always show through in Bangs' somewhat inconsistent writing. The inconsistency extends to the handling of social and political issues as well - conservatism is fraught with good intentions and imperfect payoff, and the issues surrounding both wildlife and ancient tribal cultures can be tricky to handle.

Occasionally, it all works well - in "The Digital Village", his trip to Papua New Guinea, he evokes the jungle and the culture he runs into well. The result of the cameras he brings for the tribespeople are happy ones, too; and help provide a little window into the culture. The violence from the old culture is acknowledged too, a shadow over the visit to a long-remote area. Elsewhere it's handled less well; "Down the River Jordan" is disjointed, and you never get a feel for the passage down and alongside the river; even given the political mess and the pollution, it's a disappointing passage.

Mostly it's in between these two extremes, though; not all the voyages dip into such disputed issues, and in most of the travelogues he can hit at least a few good notes, even when the journey never becomes a coherent whole. It really is a book of dispatches, little vignettes even within the 16 longer stories, and perhaps would be better read piecemeal than all at once.

He also never deals with his mixed attitude towards tourism -it's touted as an answer to preserving many of the threatened places and wildlife, but he share the common disdain for the same resorts and crowds he wishes would save the areas he loves. Still, the book has perked my interest in some of the places he's visited, and the view of places I've never been can be fascinating when Bangs is at his best.

***

(I received a copy of the second printing of this book via the LibraryThing EarlyReviewers Program.)

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Running such wild rivers as the crocodile-infested Tekaze in Ethiopia, Richard Bangs used to lived for the adrenalin, for the rush of reveling in the misery of hardship and sidestepping death around every bend. Now a respected conservationist, he still travels to demanding exotic environments, but with a new, more sober objective: he wants to save these special places. Bangs' personal experiences of "witnessing many special places preserved and lost" led him to write Adventures with Purpose, and the book follows the author to Bosnia, Libya, Panama, the American West, Rwanda, Thailand, and more as he seeks out disappearing cultures, peoples, habitats, and ecosystems ? particularly rivers ? so that he can show readers that the loss of these special places will be a catastrophe. Written in the vivid, intimate style that made his earlier books both critical and commercial successes, Richard Bangs? Adventures with Purpose is an unforgettable composite portrait of a world in peril and an inspiring guide to rescuing it.

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