Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika

ISBN-13: 9780141009841 / Angielski / Miękka / 2005 / 336 str.

Giles Foden

Opis

At the start of World War One, German warships controlled Lake Tanganyika in Central Africa. The British had no naval craft at all upon 'Tanganjikasee', as the Germans called it. This mattered: it was the longest lake in the world and of great strategic advantage. In June 1915, a force of 28 men was despatched from Britain on a vast journey. Their orders were to take control of the lake. To reach it, they had to haul two motorboats with the unlikely names of Mimi and Toutou through the wilds of the Congo. The 28 were a strange bunch -- one was addicted to Worcester sauce, another was a former racing driver -- but the strangest of all of them was their skirt-wearing, tattoo-covered commander, Geoffrey Spicer-Simson. Whatever it took, even if it meant becoming the god of a local tribe, he was determined to cover himself in glory. But the Germans had a surprise in store for Spicer-Simson, in the shape of their secret 'supership' the Graf von Gotzen . . . Unearthing new German and African records, the prize-winning author of The Last King of Scotland retells this most unlikely of true-life tales with his customary narrative energy and style. Fitzcarraldo meets Heart of Darkness, this is rich, vivid and flashmanesque in its appeal - military history at its most absorbing and entertaining

Recenzje

Another delightful tale sieved from the flotsam of African military history from a writer who is fast creating a niche of his own Arena

O autorze

Giles Foden was born in Warwickshire in 1967. His family moved to Malawi in 1972 where he was brought up. His first novel, the acclaimed The Last King of Scotland (1998), is set during Idi Amin's rule of Uganda in the 1970s and won the Whitbread First Novel Award; his second novel, Ladysmith (1999), is set during the Anglo-Boer War in 1899; Zanzibar (2002), is set in East Africa and explores the events surrounding the bombings of American embassies in 1998. The Battle for Lake Tanganyika was published in 2004 and in 2007 he edited H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines for Penguin . Giles Foden was born in Warwickshire in 1967 and grew up in Africa. The author of three novels -- Zanzibar, Ladysmith and The Last King of Scotland -- he works on the books pages of the Guardian. From 1993 to 1997 he was an assistant editor of the TLS. In 1998 he won the Whitbread First Novel Award and a Somerset Maugham Prize.