Reviews for Michael Tomkinson's Kenya

The average rating for Michael Tomkinson's Kenya based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-04-18 00:00:00 Mark Flavin This book has sat unread on my shelves for probably about 15 years, and although the trip described is around thirty years old, it still holds some slight value for the armchair traveler interested in East Africa. Boyles warms up with about fifty pages about the island of Zanzibar, pages heavy on history and description of a sleepy, run-down backwater. (Readers are advised to contrast this with the opening chapters of Richard Grant's Crazy River: Exploration and Folly in East Africa, which details the same place some twenty years later, after it has morphed into a bustling tourist destination.) The meat of the book, however, is Kenya -- more specifically, a hundred pages spent on the rail line from Mombassa to Nairobi, followed by another fifty or so pages on Nairobi. Boyles uses the rail line as a framework to muse on the colonial development of Kenya, while also weaving in the story of how lions stalked the work crews building the railroad just before the start of the 20th-century. (The story of these lions has been the subject of at least two books since this one: Philip Caputo's Ghosts of Tsavo: Stalking the Mystery Lions of East Africaand Bruce Patterson's The Lions of Tsavo: Exploring the Legacy of Africa's Notorious Man-Eaters, as well as a major Hollywood movie, The Ghost and the Darkness). The story is rich in eccentric personalities, none more so than big-game hunter and WWI Jewish Legion commander J.H. Patterson. In Nairobi Boyles conducts some moderately interesting interviews with white Kenyans, but it's so dated as to be somewhat skipable at this point. And the book kind of fizzles to a conclusion with a tacked-on trip to the Ugandan border, and two appendices. On the whole, the book is written in a kind of quaint pre-internet travel guideish voice with a lot of advice on logistics. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of funny anecdotes and observations, but unless you're especially interested in Kenya, I can't really recommend this.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-05-03 00:00:00 Angelo Ditullio TITLE: Man Eaters Motel WHY I CHOSE THIS BOOK: It meet the category of travel memoir for my reading challenge REVIEW: There is a lot to like about this book. The writer is knoweldgable about East African history and geography. I learned a lot myself and plan to read some books he referenced. I did not realize how much Asians (particularly Indians) and Arabs played a part of the history of Africa. And the amount of conflict between these groups as well as between blacks and whites. His writing style is easy going. You can imagine talking to him in the same manner and tone. That is both a positive and a negative. What made me give this only three stars was the lack of cohesion. The book is supposed to be about this writer's tracing the route of the Uganda Railroad, talking about that experience as well as giving historical context. It was more historical than travel memoir. The history was good but I would have appreciated more travel memoir. He had room, the book was just over 200 pages. He also jumps around a bit and meanders.