Sun Herald
Northern Star
Mudgee Guardian & Gulgong Advertiser
Sun Herald (02/09/2007)
Review by Frank Walker
Author: Tony Park
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Park is an Aussie who fell in love with Africa and now spends half the year there doing wildlife studies and writing. This is his fourth African novel and he just gets better and better. His descriptions of the southern African bush and mountain jungles are so vivid you can just about feel the sun on your skin and smell the dust and animals. Safari is a well told, compulsive yarn of battles against poachers who decimate wildlife and something that is far more sinister that emerges in the hunt. Park spins a good story but also manages to highlight issues confronting African such as economic chaos and AIDS.
Northern Star (08/09/2007)
Safari
Review by Candida Baker
Author: Tony Park
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Well, move over Wilbur is all I can say. As a teenager I was an avid reader of Wilbur Smith and his African odysseys, and I'm sure if I was a teenager now would be wanting to read Tony Park, who seems to have muscled in on the territory and updated it. Not only that but Park is an Australian, whose first book, Far Horizons, was not published until he was 40, thereby, as he says, proving: "that life begins at 40."
Set in a volatile Zimbabwe and the jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Michelle Parker jumps at the chance to visit the famous mountain gorillas, but is understandably wary that this chance has been given to her by a professional big-game hunter, Fletcher Reynolds.
But no, he is not the love interest- and there must be one, mustn't there? That is left to the ex-SAS (naturally) officer, Shane Castle, who has been recruited by Fletcher to spearhead an anti-poaching campaign. But is Fletcher's commitment to stamping out poaching as true as it appears?
Is this book designed with a Hollywood film in mind?
Mudgee Guardian & Gulgong Advertiser (17/09/2007)
Love affair with Africa continues to seduce
Safari
By Tony Park
Pan Macmillan, $32.95
Reviewed by Susan DeLong
In this, his fourth gripping adventure novel, you can smell Africa.
From the open grass country where lions hunt kudu, to the deep humid jungles, where the last surviving gorillas live, Tony Park's insightful descriptions make you feel you are there.
While we eagerly turn page after page to find out who gets shot, who betrays whom, who has a torrid sexual affair, we realise as we close the last page of Safari, that we have been educated.
There is a lot to learn about the vast African continent.
The different countries, like Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mozambique, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia, Sudan, Angola, Malawi, Somalia, Swaziland, Lesotho, Central African Republic, The Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of South Africa.
The people are all different and speak different languages and the problems of this continent are troublesome.
The vestiges of colonial rule have given way to an epidemic of Aids, grinding poverty, exacerbated by greedy politicians and war lords who fatten their own pockets from the funds raised by ageing rock stars and the well meaning but naive west.
Starving people do not make the best protectors of endangered wildlife.
It's a tough job to explain to people whose kids are hungry, that there is a more secure future in protecting habitat for lions, elephants, buffalo and rhinos, for well heeled tourists to photograph, when they want to clear the land to grow a bit of food for their human family.
Hunting and killing animals by the rich for sport, is to me repellent.
But the point can be made, that controlled hunting, which brings in scarce foreign currency, actually might secure the continued survival of the valuable species.
Even corrupt government officials are starting to recognise that native poachers must be stopped.
Whether they are the greedy who are killing animals to get valuable ivory tusks to sell, or the hungry, killing for the pot, they are destroying Africa 's most valuable commodity, its astonishing wild animals.
Against this turbulent background, Tony Park weaves a story about Zimbabwe, professional big game hunter Fletcher Reynolds.
Few foreigners want anymore to pay to hunt in the unstable political environment and keeping poachers from killing the valuable animals is a full time job.
So Fletcher and his rich American dentist client come up with a scheme to make this hunting ground an irresistible rite of passage for macho men.
Fletcher hires ex SAS officer Shane Castle to spear head the anti poaching campaign. Fletcher falls in love with Canadian researcher Michelle Parker who jumps at the chance to stay in Africa after losing her grant money.
They all go to visit the famed mountain gorillas and to build a hunting camp in the jungles of the corrupt Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The rich clients arrive to hunt but soon it is obvious that animals won't be the only prey. Michelle must decide between the two men, both attracted to her, but only one can have her.
Another page turner from Tony Park whose love affair with Africa seduces us all.
