Brazzaville Beach

Product Information

She reflects in the novel that the practitioners of all professions have knowledge exclusive to that profession, but that in most cases others could obtain that knowledge provided they studied and worked hard enough. As the book opens, Mallabar is just putting the finishing touches on another book that should prove to be the definitive word on the primates he finds incapable of aggressive behavior, and Grosso Arvore, which was very quickly running out of money, has just been given another grant that will allow it to function for another two years – at least. i didn't really enjoy reading this book, but I won't deny that it was well-written and worth reading if you don't mind traveling on the darker side of both human and animal natures. And when conversing with her friend Meredith, Hope muses on what it means to possess the capacity to enjoy oneself when alone, that is, not to forever hanker after the company and conversation of others.

In one, set in England, Hope relates the story of her marriage to a brilliant mathematician, John Clearwater, whose mind is finely balanced between brilliance and madness. To make it a bit more lusty, he throws in quite a few explicite descriptions of chimpanzee bacchanal sex. But Boyd’s writing reflects an extraordinarily intelligent man who’s learned his craft extremely well. But then a further shock: in the following weeks, Hope watches a northern chimp patrol travel south to launch a full scale war on the southerners. Three or four different plots in her life go on throughout the book and it evolves into a breath taking ride through a young life from love and sex to academia to brutality among tremendously written characters from all walks of life to African malaise as well as human destruction.I hadn’t read anything by William Boyd before so didn’t really know what to expect, but it worked well for me. And to move forward, she must first grasp some hard and elusive truths: about marriage and madness, about the greed and savagery of charlatan science .

A brilliant study which is never dull and where the several stories wound into one, keep you wondering what will happen till the final page.

For decades, Jane Goodall’s work on chimps in their natural environment captivated the world with a vision of largely peaceful, almost Edenic, society, which we, as their closest evolutionary relatives, might somehow aspire to regain.