Read For Free Tales From The Torrid Zone: Travels In The Deep Tropics Conceived By Alexander Frater Shared As Copy

series of essays about many places in the tropics visited by the author, who grew up in the South Seas, has lived his adult life in the UK but is always happy for the excuse to return to the tropics.
There were some interesting pieces, but it seemed something of a grab bag and the author didn't shed a lot of light on the places he visited.

Sometimes I imagine a mildly narcotic vapour drifts across the Torrid Zone, Evanescent as laughing gas, created by decaying vegetable matter, it's borne along by the trade winds and causes a kind of stupefaction in its victims.


Alexander Frater recounts his journeys across the Torrid Zone which is defined as a total ofcountries and various territories across the globe.
Per the map, these are the areas near the equator between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn.


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Born to missionaries in Vanuatu, the author has a love/hate relationship with his "zone" but tackles a project to visit as many of the Torrid Zone locations as possible.
So we get a travelogue that is combined with a memoir and some history, The journeys swing between paragraphs, so that one can be in different geographic areas within one page.
While such structure was disconcerting at first, I adapted as Frater writes some fetching remembrances,

For instance, swimming in the tropics is like plunging into warm bouillon.
The Irrawaddy River in Myanmar engages anyone who sails on her in a running battle of wits.
It's armchair travel, of course, but given the current world situation, it suited me just fine.


Book Season Summer rubescent dawn skies
I really have to disagree with the goodreads review of this is it not vibrantly observed, not terribly witty.
This is the kind of book I absolutely love to read and I have no desire to discover where else he wants to take me.
Still reading but couldn't put it down last night, I must also suffer from mal de jaune, I've been to many of the same places in the "Torrid Zone" and have always been happy in these areas.
After having been disappointed by Frater's book about monsoons, I was happily astonished by the writing in this particular book.
However, I may have disapproved of Frater's lifestyle and inevitable criticism of his father's and grandfather's faith in Christ and ministering as missionaries in an island country, yet I could overlook Frater's ridicule.
. . well, almost. A fine book, if a bit uneven, Frater does have a good eye for the details that you wouldn't catch as a simple traveler, and writes very lyrically at times and very funny at times.
The thing is, some of the locations wartorn Mozambique, some of the Southern Pacific isles and stories for example, the Quiros travels are way more interesting than others, and especially in the middle it becomes a bit of a muddle.
But, he closes with a good set of chapters around one central theme wood, for example and a personal story that brings it all back.
. . Frater's writing style can be rather irksome, Primarily this is a tale of Vanuatu, but it's interspersed with interesting anecdotes about tropical places all around the world.
It reads like it was written by a magazine writer like it is a whole series of unconnected articles.
It could be that I just don't see the connection and when it finally hits me I will fall out of my chair wearing an expression of utter, mindblowing comprehension, but I don't think so.
We'll be spending much of the next few years mucking about in the tropics, otherwise known as the torrid zone, the area between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
This book provides an interesting overview of this region as well as some quirky stories about things we might expect to come across.
Interesting nuggets buried in a meandering and disconnected narrative, Fraser is all over the place in time and space, and doesn't stop to orient the reader very often.
The South Pacific is fascinating, but this treatment didn't work for me, Interesting book, but a bit disjointed at times, Some of the stories spread out over two or more chapters, while other chapters were little more than collections of anecdotes that somehow related to the chapter's main subject.
When the book arrived in the mail months ago, I skimmed through it, thinking "hmmm, . . looks like it might be kinda dull" and put it aside, I was wrong. There was potential for a real dragged out story, had Frater confined himself to Vanuatu the

South Seas nation where he was born and raised his father and grandfather were missionaries there.
However, he does fully succeed in tyingin his experiences in other Torrid locations Africa, Burma, etc.
along the way such that the parts make the intended whole, When this book is good it's fascinating, and when it's not quite up there, it's at least interesting.
Highly recommended. This is a mix of travel narrative and memoir, Frater was born in the south Pacific into a family of missionaries and physicians, He has spent a lot of time in the tropics, working as a writer and on documentary films.
As he narrates, an event will elicit memories from other places and he lapses into anecdotes from there.
His wiritng style is very lush, with complex sentence structure, This makes it hard to speed read, but I suppose gives a sense of the tropics, which Frater stresses is sloooow.
Although not my favorite, I did enjoy this unusal narrative, and it does give a strong sense of place.

Feb. I reread the book forgetting I had read it earlier, THis is at least therd time this has occurred while trying to review a "new" book.
I guess my memory is sliding fast, Here is the later review:
Fraters gather and grandfather were Presbyterian missionaries or physicians in the New Hebrides and he was born there.
He spent a lot of his life as a writer and correspondent in the tropics, This book is centered on his return visits to what is now called Vanuatu, He describes the terrain, the weather, the people and the influence of tourism on the place.
This is intermingled with reminiscences and tales of his ancestors and other tropic adventures, Together the stories of now and then, him and they, make interesting reading, Frater meets a number of locals and as he visits with, and interviews them we get a sense of the lives in these regions.
In addition to Melanesia, Frater tells interesting short stories about numerous other tropical areas he has visited, particularly in Africa but also in Indochina.
He writes well, with a crisp pace and incorporates a lot of tongue in cheek humor.
My overall take away is that life in most tropical “paradises” is in fact, miserable, The heat and humidity is debilitating, the bugs and disease rampant, and the concomitant lethargy just plain boring.
Give medegrees latitude anytime,
Wonderful book, poetic and reminiscent, Has the dreamy quality of the tropical subjects of its pages, Small remembrances interspersed with a gossamer thread of narrative that brings the author back over and over to the original torrid place that started his fever for equatorial zonesVanuatu.


Grandson of a Scottish Presbyterian minister who was the first Frater to travel into the deep tropics, and son to parents that set up both hospitals and schools there, Alexander retraces his family's roots in the region.
Surprisingly to the author, the locals still remember his missionary grandfather with great fondness and gratitude, though the still running church is in need of a new bell.


So begins the adventure of procuring one from the very old and historical White Chapel Bell Foundry that made the famous Liberty Bell amongst others Westminster, Canterbury, etc.
and getting it to an island in the middle of the South Seas,

I adore travel literature, but Frater's books really stand out to me for their humor, love of the absurd, and droll insights.
If you are a fan of Gerald Durrell, Redmond O'Hanlon, David Quammen or Eric Hansen, this is right up your alley.


It's a slow, sensual, leisurely, tropical meander through most of the hot, sultry places the planet has to offer.
Bat curry, reflecting lakes, magic mushroom omeletteswhat more could you want from a travel memoir An exceptional travelogue/memoir.
A lesser cousin to Frater's excellent Chasing the Monsoon, Tales From the Torrid Zone is choppy and uneven, mucking up an indepth travel essay about Oceana, where Frater grew up, with myriad asides about other tropical locations Frater has visited during his tenure as chief travel correspondent for The Observer.
From one of the most celebrated travel writers at work todaya vibrantly observant, witty, utterly captivating account of a lifetimes worth of travel between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.


Part memoir, part travelogue, all passionate appreciation, Tales from the Torrid Zone begins in Iririki, Alexander Fraters birthplace.
On this tiny island in the South Seas republic of Vanuatu, his grandfather, a Presbyterian missionary from Scotland, converted the inhabitants, his father ran the hospital and his mother built its first schoolhouse in their front garden.
And it was on Iririki where, on the eve of his sixth birthday, Frater fell victim to “le coup de bamboo .
. . a mild form of tropical madness for which, luckily, there is no cure,” and which has compelled him, again and again, to return to the “seeding, breeding, buzzing, barking, fluttering, squawking, germinating, growing” deep tropics.


His travels take him to nearly all of the eightyeight countries encompassed by this remarkable, steamy swath of the world.
He delves deeply into the history and politics of each nation he visits, and into the lives of the inhabitants, and of the flora and fauna.
He is, at once, tourist, explorer and adventurer, as fascinated withand fascinating aboutthe quotidian as he is with the extraordinary.
But certainly, he does not lack for the extraordinary: dining with the Queen of Tonga in a leper colony making his way across tropical Africaand two civil warsin a fortyfouryearold flying boat delivering a new church bell to a remote Oceanian island.


From Fiji to Laos, Mexico to Peru, Senegal to Uganda, Taiwan to Indonesia, Frater gives us a richly described, wonderfully anecdotal, endlessly surprising picture of this diverse, feverish, languorously beautiful worldas much a state of mind as it is a geographical phenomenon.
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