Young Adult Ballantyne, Robert Michael: The Gorilla Hunters v1 28 dec 2008

[mtravellerh]

This might well be MobileRead's first split edition. Don(Dr.Drib) will post the LRF version, while I'll do the IMP and PRC versions.

Dr.Drib's version is available here and a great version it is, too!

As you might have seen in my postings, I took quite a liking in the man Ballantyne and will continue posting his books (there are a lot of them online)

This was one of the first books that the prolific author Ballantyne wrote. After he had come back from his early work in Canada with the Hudson Bay Company, and written his three books in that setting, he wrote an adventure story, "The Coral Island", about three boys who find themselves cast away on a coral island in the Pacific. That book was extremely popular, and was certainly in print for over a hundred years. This book has the same three boys, now grown into young men, as the principal characters. One day the idea comes to one of them, that it would be interesting to go to Africa, hire a guide, equip themselves with a goodly supply of shot and gunpowder, and then go and kill as many gorillas as they can. Rather pointless, you might think. But the tenuous scientific reason they had was that one of the three would keep a note-book in which he would put down as much as he could about the sizes of the gorillas, and other observations about them. To see the point of this you will need to know that gorillas had only very recently been discovered when the book was written.


The dialogues in the book are bright and amusing, and you will have to console yourself that these were not real gorillas that were being shot, but only paper ones.

Anyway, consider yourself warned: PI content (but then again, BRM couldn't know that then)
Nice cover, beautiful illustrations (might be a little dark) and lots of reading fun.

Comes from Athelstane via Internet Archive.

Have fun!

PS: This is my 400th book post.

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