Mark Braun

A superb collection of Fran Lebowitz's earlier work. One of our best, quick-witted humorists and social commentators!

Haggard recycles his basic white male adventure formula that worked for SHE so well into a grind-'em-out copy that doesn't play well in 2020. Overall, I wish I'd have been this book's editor; it needed a lot of fixing for overlong, get-to-the-point segue ways to too-brief plotlining. But, you're reading a 110 year old aventure yarn; enjoy the time warp and language because it's gone for a lot of reasons. A group of adventurers travel to fulfill a promise to an African queen and in search of one man's kidnapped son. The handsome heroic fellow romances the queen, promised in marriage to her scheming uncle. There seem to be gaps in Haggard's descriptive tale; at about two hundred pages in, the comrades do a lot of travelling with explosives almost as a second thought. They get stuck in a feudal situation enroute, pick up a faithful dog and finally arrive to blow up a sphynx. Promised riches beyond imagination, they also encounter a buried city, catacombs of dead kings and blow the spiritual symbol of the bad tribe to pieces. Dog gets poisoned, dies in two sentences. "Niggerdly" and every variation of white colonialism gets used a few times. I was good with it all once it finally began to roll; a typical British penny novel's-worth of writing for the masses long before any other form of mass adventures existed for the price. ONE THING: every image of the queen on covers and any illustrations that got used shows her as caucasian as a 1920s Theda Bara; she's Black throughout the yarn, and our hero is admonished for not only endangering them as a group, but for romancing a mentioned other race –and denouncably jewish to boot– entirely. Haggard went light in their story by telling it as observed by another main character as they sneak around, but the possibilities were lost for a great romance, partly as Haggard never had the knack to fully tell a complete one.