Reviews for Longmans English larousse

The average rating for Longmans English larousse based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-01-13 00:00:00 Jason Dainty Interesting account by a Victorian lady, wife of a naturalist, of their travels in eastern Indonesia, then part of the Dutch and Portuguese East Indies. As the back cover points out, these are places visited by very few people even now, such as East Timor, Sulawesi and Irian Jaya, and Mrs Forbes really doesn't have an easy time of it, spending about half of the book with malaria and several times watching friends lose children to tropical disease, not to mention the house nearly catching fire! The book is very much of its time and some of her comments about the "Natives" and "John Chinaman", even if she's being nice about them (which she isn't always), come across as appallingly racist to modern sensibilities. Likewise, they are there to take away specimens of flora and fauna, including taking dead birds of paradise, which we view as unacceptable now. She also wrote her book mainly for ladies, whom she felt wouldn't understand her husband's more scholarly book about their travels! Mais autres temps, autres moeurs.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-08-20 00:00:00 Thomas Woodall Charming story of her experiences traveling in remote islands of Indonesia with her naturalist husband in the 1880s. She is a keen observer and displays a remarkable stoicism to her many privations.