Worlds to Explore: Classic Tales of Travel & Adventure from National Geographic, edited by Mark Jenkins
439 pages
Published 2006
Read from January 4 to January 10
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
As
soon as I read Mark Jenkins' introduction, I knew this book was going
to be a disappointment. When I found it squeezed randomly into the
chaotic mess of my library's travel section (the inconsistent and
possibly inebriated application of the Dewey decimal system at my local
library deserves an entire rant of its own, so I won't mention it
further for now), my heart filled with glee. I adore old National Geographics,
especially from the classic Grosvenor eras (1910s to late 1970s). I
have a soft spot as wide as Africa for the romance of early twentieth
century exploration and world travel, even as I despise its implicit and
overt racism, sexism, colonialism, and patriarchal tone of benign
"improvement." Worlds to Explore's cover blurb promises "more
than 50 stories from the magazine's first half-century," implicitly
suggesting (to my mind, at least) the inclusion of more than fifty complete
articles, written by such motor-, airplane-, and rocket-age luminaries
as Teddy Roosevelt, Roy Chapman Andrews, Joseph F. Rock, and many
others. A quick flip through its pages revealed original maps and
photographs from the articles. I didn't stop to think how they could
squeeze fifty complete articles into a scant 439 pages; I guess I
just figured the font looked pretty small. I was too busy immediately
checking out the book and placing it at the very top of my reading pile
to think such thoughts.
But the introduction quickly deflated my
dreams. "The following selections," I read -- and my heart sank to my
knees. Sure enough, Teddy Roosevelt's massive East African safari -- the
source of the Smithsonian's African dioramas -- gets slimmed down to
eight and a half pages, including one map and one picture. The first
motorized crossing of Africa, from Lagos to the Red Sea by 1930s
motorcycle, gets crunched down to a handful of paragraphs about
improvising bike repairs out of dental plates and antelope hide --
fascinating stuff, but mere crumbs of what must have been a spectacular
article. Jenkins eviscerated each of the fifty-plus articles that fell
into his hands, ripping out a quick anecdote or two for his Frankenstein
abomination of a book and discarding everything that makes the rambly
Grosvenor-era travelogues so charming. I like the rambly bits,
the contextual bits, the scene-setting, that weird and uncomfortable
section where the author has a lovely formal dinner with a tyrannical
dictator, the paternalistic comments on the plucky women of the
grass-hut village. I don't want anything edited down or massaged to
soothe modern sensibilities. I want the authentic experience, horrible
social attitudes and all. Without context, Worlds reduces
socio-geographical history to a keepsake of yarns. What could have been
the most amazing book I read all year becomes a slumping disappointment.
I
want to use the entire buffalo, as it were. Jenkins shoots dozens of
them just to get at their spleens. I'd have been 100% happier with this
book if it were a collection of, say, a dozen complete articles with
original maps, photos, and illustrations. I know I could just get the
complete National Geographic archives on disk, but hey -- if that's an argument against my idea, then what's even the point of Worlds to Explore?
Out
of all the articles butchered apart for this collection, the only one
I'd read before was "Triumph on Everest," by Sir John Hunt and Sir
Edmund Hillary, which appeared in the July 1954 National Geographic.
That was a wonderful article, a signal conquest, a resounding victory
of the jet age, gleaming with the manly sheen of 1950s optimism. The
selection just made me wish I had the complete issue again, with all its
fabulous pictures and its full account of the climb. My favorite
selections were those regarding travel by "motor" (or, even more
charmingly, "flivver") across Africa, Asia, and Mexico in the 1920s and
'30s. I totally want to invent "flivverpunk" as a science fiction
subgenre now. The romance of the early motor age is one of my very
favorite species of romance. But that's a whole other story.
An
aside: My late grandfather had accumulated Geographics in an old
army-ration water barrel in the basement (to preserve them from damp, I
guess?). Most of the collection was from the late '50s, '60s, and early
'70s, but there were a couple anachronisms, issues so old the color
plates were printed separately from the articles and bunched in between
them. The oldest was the July 1932 issue, with its dazzling color photos of Ford Model A's climbing the new motor-roads into the Colorado Rockies. I also remember the January 1952
issue -- not so anachronistic, perhaps, but memorable for the article
"Solving the Riddle of Chubb Crater" (now Pingualuit). You can't find a
more iconic image of 1950s privilege than the bottom picture here:
Caucasian men's men grinning away on their boy's life adventure,
"solving the riddles" still left undiscovered in the remotest corners of
a jet-shrunken globe. You can't find a more iconic caption for the
1950s dominant culture attitude than the subtitle of the next article,
"America's 'Meat on the Hoof'": "Because housewives want smaller beef
roasts, bigger and leaner pork chops, scientific breeders remodel the
steer and hog." In a world smothered by anthropogenic climate change and
global environmental catastrophe, there's a lurid fascination in
watching it all begin.
I could go on and on, picking out little
details from every issue scanned in on that site. I think I'm steadily
talking myself into purchasing the digital archives, actually.
Anyway.
Yeah. This book. It was okay. Could've been a lot better. It's worth a
peek, especially if it's in your local library and you need ideas for
jungle incidents and oriental encounters in your a steampunk or
flivverpunk or atompunk story. But the complete digital archives would
be a far superior investment if you're in the mood to buy something.
Next up (and already in progress): Parrot & Olivier in America by Peter Carey.
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