[.ca] The Lost World of the Kalahari (ISBN 009942875X)

gripping, informative and inspiring:
I stayed up until three AM reading this book. It's both gripping, informative and inspiring. Van Der Post starts out telling us about the wild Bushman, untamed or corrupted by civilization, almost extinct in his time, certainly gone by now. Then he regales us with a wonderful story about his expedition into the deepest dessert areas of the Kalahari to find the last living indigenous Bushmen. There is magic in this book, in the panoramic, images he paints of nature scenes and spiritual moments of insight and mystic wonder. Part of the goal of the expedition was to create a documentary for BBC. I'd love to find a copy of that to view. The mixture of the gritty reality of mounting and carrying out a real safari expedition, blended with the wonder and surprise the author shares makes this a very special book. We have so much to learn from history's lost indigenous cultures. Books like these help remind us of the different, incredible ways one can be human. If you like this, you will most certainly also like Original Wisdom, by Robert Wolff.

Should come with warning label:
Anyone who is thinking about reading this book should know that VDP was a major BS artist. Very good at it too, was a friend of royalty and also Jung. If you can find it, read J.D.F. Jones "Storyteller: The Lives of Laurens Van Der Post". VDP was constantly reinventing himself. Many of his stories about everything from his war record to his Bushman connections were exaggerated or just plain invented. People loved to hear this stuff about the great white hunter, the ancient heart of Africa, blah blah blah. To his credit, he did oppose apartheid. If you want an readable book on the Bushmen, try Elizabeth Marshall Thomas' "The Harmless People". At least she actually knew them! BTW The film is called "The Lost World of the Kalahari", BBC 1958. Don't know if you can get it on video. A better bet would be "Kalahari Desert People", by John Marshall.

Quick, Quick,Honey, Quick:
The song of the honey divining bird who leads the bushman to honey in return for a share of the spoils.........the little artist with the zebra skin belt from which hang horns full of of pigment........the sip-wells.........cupid and his tiny bow......the perpetual water and the tree of knowledge....... Magic image after magic image, and such an insignificant looking little book. Anyone who knows the name of the film made at the time of the writing of this book or where it is availabe please post a review.

More About Van Der Post than the Bushmen:
Laurens Van der Post is one of those writers -- at least on the evidence of this book -- for whom it is not enough simply to master his material; he also has to dominate it. His descriptions and accounts of the bush of Southern Africa are indeed compelling. Unfortunately, they are far too often buried under considerably less interesting material. I wanted to see and hear a whole lot more of the Kalahari and the Bushmen and a whole lot less of Van der Post's incessant insistence on his relation to the desert, his relation to the Bushman, his troubles with the cinematographer he hired to photograph his search. Also, this book was written in 1959, in the United States a time well before the Civil Rights movement and in Southern Africa a time of apartheid and white colonialism. Van Der Post is very much a man of his era and the book is replete with paternalism and grousings about the black porters in his expedition. Finally, his leadership is abysmal. He takes his party to a huge swamp in the Okavango where to any casual observer the elusive Bushman (Bushman, Laurens, not Waterman) would be least likely to be found. This gross miscalculation takes up well over a third of the book and must have sorely tried the patience of those in his expedition even more than it tried the patience of this reader. In fairness, for those unfamiliar with the Bushman and the Kalahari and Okavango of Southern Africa, this book does serve, despite Van der Post's flawed, and heavy-handed writing.

As beautiful as the stars in the desert night:
van der Post has put his soul into the making of every sentence of this beautiful book. His words are polished to the un-self-conscious ornateness of patterns of rock burnished by wind. Even if Spode were half as odious as the author portrays him, he would be a real pain to deal with. What van der Post does not seem to realize, though, is the necessity of this counterpoise; if he had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent him. Spode's sourness sweetens van der Post's aim. The book overpowers as a sunrise does. You may shut your eyes or turn away, but there are rich beauties to savor. My only regret is the lack of photographs.