Richard BangsRecensioni

Rivergods balances adventurous text from Bangs and Kallen with gorgeous photography. Christian Kallen and Richard Bangs bring many of the most powerful, yet mostly unheard of, rivers to life as they describe trying to raft or kayak each one. By traveling all corners of the globe, they are able to meet indigenous peoples in South America, Australia, Africa, and Asia. By studying their anthropologies, they learn a little about each culture including head hunting and cannibalism. Each river teaches them about the power of Mother Nature and the real dangers of trying to tame her.
As an aside, when I started running with Dr. Tommy Rivs, one of the things he taught me early on was about Islamic religion. In accordance with the beliefs of Islam, no humans or animals can be portrayed or duplicated by man. All art such as tile work, tapestries, and carpets must be of geometric shapes and flowers. It was cool to see Bangs and Kallen talk about it in Rivergods.

The great rivers through tribal lands of PNG plus a little on the Alas River
of the Gunung Leuser National Park in northern Sumatra.

This book traces the adventures of explorers Richard Bangs and Christian Kallen as they raft down rivers in North and South America, Africa, Asia and Australia, selecting rivers with gradients that ensured white water. Along the way they combined physical challenge with anthropological and ecological investigation. Bangs and Kallen encountered hidden African tribes, observed Peruvian ceremonies revering the Inca and discovered for themselves that the Indus is still only partly navigable.

Chapter on Lombok.
One copy in the States,
one copy in Bali.

A premier adventure travel company sent 12 travel writers to write about their "dream trips": Mason hikes a New Zealand rainforest, Roberts explores caves in Malaysia, Hoagland in Yemen, Cahill rafts an Indian river, Salter cycles in Japan, McInerny does the Zambezi, Shoumatoff in Madagascar, Lopez in Africa, Robbins down a river in Tanzania. In South America, Max Apple as odyssius in Peru, Roy Blount Jr adventures the Amazon, and William Broyles survives the Andes. Photographs I had not seen before.

Richard Bangs' Adventures with Purpose is an anthology of fifteen of the author's most recent eco-minded mini-expeditions. The collection spans the globe from Egypt to Papua New Guinea, Annapurna to the Missouri River.

As part of my personal reading program for the new year, every third book must be from the travel lit category. Several years ago I was a voracious reader of travel/adventure/exploration lit to both whet and sate my own appetite for such pursuits. In the interim, I have discovered passions need to be nurtured, and so it was I picked up Bangs' volume that had been sitting on my bookshelf unread for too long.

Adventures opens with a dry encounter about pursuing crocodiles along the Nile River, followed by a slightly better yet mediocre second chapter in Rwanda. Ay, I said, this is going to be a long book. But, perseverance is rewarding and from there on nearly each chapter was more fluid and intriguing, peaking with Bangs' base camp perspective as Ed Viesturs summited Annapurna, capping his pursuit of all fourteen of the world's 8,000 meter mountains.

Particularly after its tedious beginnings, Adventures with Purpose far exceeded my expectations in reigniting my own hankerings for adventure and has given me a slew of must-do experiences to add my life list. More importantly, the book highlights the worthiness of both experiencing and protecting our endangered inhabitants, environments and cultures.

I won this book in a LibraryThing Early Reviewer Lottery but it never arrived. So, I decided to buy a copy from an internet source because it is about the country of my birth and it's Maoriness. I have always been a fan of things Maori and the concept of Kaitiakitanga is a new one to me. I started the book this morning half expecting to be pompously harangued by a well-meaning author I have not yet encountered. I quickly finished the introduction and decided to come immediately to the computer and start this review because Richard Bangs's style and thoughts have already excited me. And, so far, I haven't got into any of the "New Zealand" bits. More soon.
I've finished it and now I can tell you that Richard Bangs is a good writer and a caring kind of guy. I liked the way he tells of his dealings with Maori and Pakeha activists and non-activists who just live the concept. How much his Menasha Ridge editors had to do with his choice of words and style I can't tell, but I really enjoyed the style and the choice of words, particularly the descriptives.
The concept of Kaitiakitanga is almost impossible to pidgeonhole in English. Our language can't really do it. It's not a spiritualist language. Kaitaikitanga is an acceptance of the human's place as just one of nature's wonderful evolutions, an acceptance of the responsibility we have to the time and place we exist in, a knowledge that we have an obligation to coexist in it, manage our use of it and guarantee the rights to it, of all nature's evolutions - now and in the future.
As lover of a book as a physical entity, I was a bit disappointed in the end product. I would have liked it to have been a little bigger, the black and white pictures to have been bigger and better printed and for it to have had a cloth cover and dust jacket. I'm a traditionalist. I looked for but couldn't find a statemnet that it tried to follow some of the "rules" of Kaitiakitanga and be manufactured from recycled materials. Silly, I guess, I like books to be the way they always used to be but I support screw caps on wine bottles. Oh well.
I can tell you this, though, I liked the book, its message and its use of our english language so much that I am recommending it to my wife's book club - and any other book club member who happens to be reading this.½

As with another Richard Bangs book, The Quest For Kaitiakitanga is slightly different in its outlook. The Ancient Maori consider themselves the 'guardians of the land', not unlike our own Native American unon our soil. But with an eye on the eco-movement bangs shows us how the Maori way is slowly becoming the modern way for us to live and prosper as a race. Bangs is no armchair traveller, he is out there, hiking, climbing and kayakking in and around and through the wilds of New Zealand offereing wonderful descriptions of the breathtaking landscapes. Almost makes you want to book a flight right this minute! A terriffic read, and a great one for the shelf to read over and over again.

This was a fabulous book to read. I am a bit more of an armchair travellar, or was back in my earlier days, but now I tend to read a lot of travel narratives and this one has it all!! Running into the wilds of Ethiopia, facing hardships...and admitting it...whereas most travel narratives gloss over the hard parts. In this book you are take to exotic locals, burt with an ecologists eye for the environment. Bang's carries you to Libiya, to Panama and even out into the American West. You will not be wanting for adventure when you read this book!.

What I especially liike about Bang's work is that you are also introduced to the culture, the environment, the ecosystems, and what is happening to them...in the present day and age. Not only will you find yourself enthralled by his accounts of his travels, you may find yourself prodded to be come a bit of an eco-activist to follow up on what is happening to our world.

When I first began reading this book, I thought the author had forgotten to write for his audience and was instead writing for himself. Each story after the introduction opens a little window into these areas. The people are real and the author's voice in his stories gives the impression that he is truly awed by their determination and sacrifice. I'm glad I made it past the intro and truly enjoyed this book.

I'm more than ever convinced after reading this book that the people who due the dangerous white water rafting are completely crazy. This is a fascinating journey, well written and riveting. Your right in the boat with them at all times and at times can almost feel their fear or frustration. I re-read Alan Morehead's White Nile and his Blue Nile while reading this which enhanced this story much more.

The concept for this book is great and most of the adventures are amazing. The book is full of good stories and compelling personal journeys. Many of the places and stories in this book are fascinating. There were many highlights in this book for me –like the trip down the Neretva River in Bosnia or visiting an isolated village in Papua New Guinea. I found the last chapter of the book—a quick sketch of an African safari—to be touching.

At issue for me, unfortunately, is the writing. It took me over a month to read Adventures with Purpose and I struggled to finish it. Bangs is clearly a storyteller at heart and I imagine his wit comes across better in person than it does on the page. Bangs is a very casual writer and his writing doesn’t hang together very well. I think if the editing had been better it would have vaulted this book to the next level, because the bones of a good book are here.

After struggling to stay involved with the book, I asked my husband (who is also a voracious reader and is unlike me an outdoorsman) to read Adventures. He too found it difficult to get through and gave up about a quarter of the way through.

The first several chapters highlighted the plight of places/people in need of help. In the first chapter, for example, takes Bangs to the Nile, where he explores work to bring the crocodile back from the brink. In another, very interesting chapter, he visits the Moken people of Thailand’s Andaman Islands, who are struggling to recover from the devastating 2004 tsunami. There was a good mix in these chapters of both environmental/ecological and humanitarian concerns to which Bangs brings attention.

I was really disappointed, then, when the book lost this focus on helping. Richard Bangs’ definition of purpose is broader than I expected, but I thought that once the scope expanded to include stories of personal purpose, the book bogged down. The chapters on mountain climbing, in particular, were indulgent and out of place in this book—especially when there so much other material Bangs could have explored in more depth in some of the other chapters. Bangs, in my opinion, should have cut the number of chapters in half and put more energy and information into the remaining chapters.

http://archthinking.blogspot.com/2008/09/review-richard-bangs-adventures-with.ht...

This is a wonderful book, with "adventures" that take you to some incredibly remote (and very interesting) parts of the globe. There were so many favorites, I'm hard pressed to pick one. What I really liked though is Mr. Bangs' eco-friendly approach to his tours and also, he just lets the native people, animals and areas shine in their own right. He doesn't try to make them "be" an one ideal or preconceived notion we might have of the areas and what is within. In a way, he lets you think for yourself. There is immense tragedy here, in the expansive destruction of our world, but even so, most of the stories had a hopeful tone to them. I learned more in this book of stories about say, Macedonia, than I have in my prior 40 years of life. All are fascinating. I did not give it five full stars because I did not care for the chapters on mountianeering. They seemed misplaced in an eco-focused book. They were stories about a couple of guys climbing their "demon" mountains (Eiger and Annapurna). Okay, but certainly not on a par with the other stories, where he just goes to explore and report on the land(s) he finds. On some areas he offers unique insights having gone years prior ~ and he reflects on the degradation and demise of the areas, but also the success stories. Great book. Highly recommended for both the armchair adventurer and those who might want to go out there and make a difference. Mr. Bangs is your average Joe and if he can do it, I felt many times, wow, so can I. Time to get off the beaten path and leave only footprints; and maybe even give back to our ailing planet too.½

(I received a copy of the second printing of this book via the LibraryThing EarlyReviewers Program.)

Richard Bangs' "Adventures with Purposes: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Earth" is a series of travelogues, 16 stories about his travels to remote and often wild areas of the earth. The areas are obviously beautiful, but this doesn't always show through in Bangs' somewhat inconsistent writing. The inconsistency extends to the handling of social and political issues as well - conservatism is fraught with good intentions and imperfect payoff, and the issues surrounding both wildlife and ancient tribal cultures can be tricky to handle.

Occasionally, it all works well - in "The Digital Village", his trip to Papua New Guinea, he evokes the jungle and the culture he runs into well. The result of the cameras he brings for the tribespeople are happy ones, too; and help provide a little window into the culture. The violence from the old culture is acknowledged too, a shadow over the visit to a long-remote area. Elsewhere it's handled less well; "Down the River Jordan" is disjointed, and you never get a feel for the passage down and alongside the river; even given the political mess and the pollution, it's a disappointing passage.

Mostly it's in between these two extremes, though; not all the voyages dip into such disputed issues, and in most of the travelogues he can hit at least a few good notes, even when the journey never becomes a coherent whole. It really is a book of dispatches, little vignettes even within the 16 longer stories, and perhaps would be better read piecemeal than all at once.

He also never deals with his mixed attitude towards tourism -it's touted as an answer to preserving many of the threatened places and wildlife, but he share the common disdain for the same resorts and crowds he wishes would save the areas he loves. Still, the book has perked my interest in some of the places he's visited, and the view of places I've never been can be fascinating when Bangs is at his best.

If you read the author's introduction to the book, you will find yourself expecting a collection of travel essays all focused on man's destruction of a particularly magnificent piece of nature, or the prevention thereof and, indeed, the first few are just that. Shortly, the thrust of the essays changes and they become simply essays about extreme adventures the author has had, with little or no "conservation" bend to them. This is, perhaps, for the best...had all 300+ pages recounted stories like the first couple, the reader would have been in despair by the end of the book.

Bangs has certainly had more than his share of exciting and colorful adventures and, even vicariously, they are quite thrilling. Due to their essay format, they are recounted at a fairly broad level. I would have liked a bit more depth to a few of them but they were all interesting. Even those that were too lightweight were descriptive enough to convince me that trying to get to Annapurna Base Camp or a camel expedition to the Akakus Mountains in Libya after the temperate season are absolutely not things I want to experience in my life.

This book will present you with a wide variety of settings, ranging across five continents and everything from hellish desert to hellish rain forest to hellish alpine locales. Along the way, you will meet a wide variety of amusing, idiosyncratic, committed, adventurous and colorful characters.

The author does have a dry way of playing with words, such as mentioning positively the prophet Muhammed and negatively the profit Wynne.

The book does have two flaws, in my opinon—one minor and one major. The minor flaw is simply that I got a bit tired of Mr. Bangs' self-promotion. At first, I was a bit amused at his constant (any essay involving a river was guaranteed to mention it at least once) reminder to the reader that he had been the first to traverse this river or that, and his taking the time to make sure that you knew he had more scars than the other crusty fellow he met but, after a while, it just became a bit annoying. However, this was relatively small potatoes and didn't really interfere with the book.

What causes this book to miss a recommendation (3 or more stars) from me is simply that the author is far, far too in love with his own vocabulary. He never uses a 5¢ word when a $20 one can be squeezed in. Thus we have "aperçu" instead of "glimpse", "horripilation" instead of "goosebumps" and "agrestic" rather than "rural". I don't mind...in fact, enjoy...adding to my vocabulary a bit when reading a book. However, if I have to stop every few pages throughout the entire book to look something up, the flow of reading is destroyed. After I got past fetial, feculence, fuscous, heteroclite, quondam, fissiparous, proceleusmatic, entrepôts, synecdoche, irredentism, apologues and tardigrade, I simply stopped looking up words unless a sentence made absolutely no sense to me without a definition.

If you are lucky enough to possess a world-class vocabulary, you may find it a good book. For me, it was simply OK. I wish the author had spent a little less time searching for big words and little more time filling out the stories a bit more.½

I totally loved this book. Very interesting, many great tales. If you love travel books get this one!