Robert Twigger

The author, an inveterate walker, works out that a straight line drawn north to south through England connects many ancient, historical sites including Stonehenge and Avebury and ending in the semi-island of Lindisfarne off the north east coast. He's not a believer in ley lines but he understands that place can harbour the intangible. Give you a connection to something other worldly. He decides to walk the line. He camps as he goes along, from time to time reluctantly staying in a B and B or show more a hostel but mostly happily content in his little tent whatever the weather. He has an admirable contempt for 'private, keep out' signs. He sleeps in all sorts of odd little hidden spots in woodlands, farmland or even the front garden of a stately home. An amusing companion with an acerbic, cynical but open and friendly view of the world. He chats to people but prefers his own company. Walking, as it often does, prompts philosophising and reminiscing. As many digressions as descriptions and all the better for it. show less

I really enjoyed 'Angry White Pyjamas'. It's part martial arts memoir, part meditation on Japanese culture, and part flat-sharing comedy. Twigger could easily have slipped into tedious macho territory, but never does. Instead, the book is alternately hilarious farce and thoughtful commentary on finding your focus and goals in life. A really fun read, albeit one that will probably put you off ever trying aikido.

Twigger, about to get married, needed a goal, and his roommate solved his problem by discovering there was a $50,000 award being offered by the Wildlife Conservation Society of New York to anyone who could bring back a live snake over thirty feet long. (Seems a rather bizarre award for a conservation society, but then what do I know?) Anacondas, the snake one usually thinks of as being large, rarely exceed eighteen feet in length, so the python seemed the best bet and they live in southeast show more Asia.

Twigger is one of those travel writers who engage your interest telling a seemingly irrelevant story chocked full of information. The python, for example, can be rather disgusting. When asked the worst thing about pythons, a snake expert Twigger consulted replied, “When they shit on you. It can be very liquid, white urea mixed with black faeces. Sometimes they spray it all over you, very pungent. And a fifteen foot python can produce a lot of crap.” It also takes at least a twenty-five-foot snake to eat a man. “But if it did, there’d be nothing left except your gold fillings and maybe your wristwatch.” The last-ditch protection against an attacking snake is to ram snuff down its throat. The nicotine is absorbed almost instantly by the snake’s chemo-receptive Jacobsen’s organ and the snake dies almost instantly.

Now, think about that. That’s really useful information. In any case, off Twigger trots for Kawala Lampur and Buru, where he meets and describes the local villagers in his quest for the big one. Often the hunt for the snake takes second place to his travelogue of the jungles, but his descriptions of local customs, food, and the impact of logging on local communities is entertaining and informative. The result of the hunt I will leave for you to discover. I did find it anticlimactic, however. show less

Robert Twigger demonstrates his impressive abilities as a raconteur in his book, Red Nile: A Biography of the World's Greatest River. He links thousands of years of human history and tells diverse and interesting stories about the social, geographical, military, political, etc. history of the region. He writes in an engaging, conversational manner that I quite liked. The topics of his stories included the famous (Napoleon, Cleopatra, Sadat, Flaubert...) and lesser known historical figures show more who were affected by the Nile in a variety of ways.

At times Twigger did express some still-lingering elements of a British colonialist mindset when talking about the varied occupations of the region. Also, he included a very small bibliography and did not directly cite any sources or include any footnotes in his work. Admittedly, his topic was enormous and a bibliography would likely have been as long as the actual book, but it would've been nice to see more information about where his stories came from. In some ways I reminded of the writing style of Shelby Foote, whose Civil War volumes are incredibly engaging but contain no references. Twigger was also typically cautious about accepting claims from primary sources at face value but did from time to time include statements of dubious value- I recall one in particular where he took a 19th century's explorer's description of a group encountered along the Nile to mean that they could likely have been an unknown group of Homo ergaster (who otherwise died out hundreds of thousands of years earlier.)

Overall I really enjoyed this book. It demonstrated the role the Nile has played in shaping human history for an extremely long period of time. show less