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First published in 1914, Edgar Rice Burroughs's romance has lost little of its force over the years--as film revivals and TV series well attest.Tarzan of the Apesis very much a product of its age: replete with bloodthirsty natives and a bulky, swooning American Negress, and haunted by what zoo specialists now call charismatic megafauna (great beasts snarling, roaring, and stalking, most of whom would be out of place in a real African jungle). Burroughs countervails such incorrectness, however, with some rather unattractive representations of white civilization--mutinous, murderous sailors, effete aristos, self-involved academics, and hard-hearted cowards. At Tarzan's heart rightly lies the resourceful and hunky title character, a man increasingly torn between the civil and the savage, for whom cutlery will never be less than a nightmare.
The passages in which the nut-brown boy teaches himself to read and write are masterly and among the book's improbable, imaginative best. How tempting it is to adopt the ten-year-old's term for letters--"little bugs"! And the older Tarzan's realization that civilized "men were indeed more foolish and more cruel than the beasts of the jungle," while not exactly a new notion, is nonetheless potent. The first in Burroughs's serial is most enjoyable in its resounding oddities of word and thought, including the unforgettable "When Tarzan killed he more often smiled than scowled; and smiles are the foundation of beauty."
Tarzan swings to life Tarzan is not politically correct, is anthropologically naive, is just short of racist, sexist and a certain fantasy. In the end, none of that matters. Tarzan is the hereo upon which all attention centers, and that is how it should be. Edgar Rice Burrough's classic pulp fiction work reads nearly as strongly today as it did almost a hundred years ago. So what if his "apes" never really existed (although, one is tempted to think of them as some lost tribe of giant Australopithcines, improperly classified and then rendered extinct before they could be correctly classified. Borroughs was writing at the start of the sixth great age of extinctions, after all). Sparing in his prose, as many victorian writers were, Borroughs manages to stir the imagination to treetop heights and we really care what happens to the orphan Tarzan as he becomes a man. Tarzan's initiation into the world of Western man is perhaps more unbelievable than his more gradual and much earlier settling into the ape world, and less satisfying. We lose Tarzan when we lose the "ape-man" but his devotion to the comely Jane is genuine and compelling. In short, go Tarzan! A note on the booksurge volume: it had a mistake in paragraphing almost certainly not in the original, inconsistent page breaks between chapters, and a back cover blurb which was literally a non-sensical half-sentence. There was no bio of the author or even previous publishing credits. This classic author deserves much better.
A Timeless Classic!! I cut my teeth in the 60's and 70's reading Tarzan comics, which then segued to the original Edgar Rice Burroughs novels. And I am glad that I did!
After watching numerous old Tarzan movies and comic books, (which were way better than any movie or cartoon ever made!), the novels breathed more life into the much mishandled Tarzan legend. Burroughs wrote so well, that the jungle came alive, and you can actually believe that a human babay can be raised by wild apes.
And now, after all of these long, long, years, since the original novel was written, (1914), finally perhaps a modern-day filmaker will bring the REAL Tarzan to living, breathing life, as it should have been a long time ago. With the hopeful usage of modern CGI, Tarzan can be like Spiderman, truly seen for the first time on film as it is in the books.
If you have watched the old and new movies, including the Disney cartoon - then you don't have a clue as to the REAL Tarzan! If this big filmaker director sticks with the original books, or somehow makes it better, like Peter Jackson did for King Kong - then Tarzan will be the biggest blockbuster hit ever!Tarzan Tarzan of the Apes was recommended to me by my teacher and I thought that it would be just a regular Tarzan story. but as I read this book, it was different from anything else I read about Tarzan. It was really fun and intresting. This book is a rerally fast paced book full of action, adventure, mystery, and a bit of romance. It is very intresting and although the start was tiring and boring for me, the book moves along fast later on in the book and it becomes a page turner. A person name Lord Greystroke and his wife land on a strange island and give birth to a child. But when apes come and discover them, they kill the man and women and leave behind their dead ape child and take Tarzan thinking that he is a ape. So Tarzan lives his live raised by apes and thinking that he is a ape. Until men of his own kind come he doesn't know what man is. When they come, Tarzan has to choose to which realm of the world he will go to. The civilization of mankind or the vast and dark jungle of the island. This presents a intresting story and if you read it I am sure you will be satisfied by this book too.
