The Swiss Family Robinson

By page 74 it was still just a laundry list of each day's discovery of new items from the island, or items recovered from the wrecked ship. No plot, no adventure. This may have passed my standards for a good read (probably not), but the thing that made me press the delete button on the Kindle with particular fury was the way in which Father Robinson was so damn knowledgable about every aspect of "savage" lifestyles and survival tactics. I mean, what middle-class clergyman from the Alps knows the exact proper way to halve a tropical gourd? Is it likely that this late-18th century minister from a mountain climate knows that a particular tree from a tropical climate can be used for making sewing thread, and also exactly how to make a show more navigable boat out of 8 barrels and a bunch of wrecked plywood? It strained the very limits of my suspended disbelief to the snapping point, and snap they did.

Delete from Kindle. show less

I must have watched the 1960 Disney movie of this book dozens of times when I was growing up. Obviously that colored my reading and when I came across some major differences between the book and movie I was a little surprised. They left out one of the sons, there is no showdown with pirates, and the character of Roberta was completely created for the film. Regardless, The book is a lot of fun, but it’s a very different story from the one I was expecting.

The Robinson family is shipwrecked on their way to Australia. They survive and begin to build a life for themselves on the island that they christen “New Switzerland”. Over the course of a few years the family builds a home and learns how to make do in their new world. In addition show more to the parents, there are four boys: Sons: Fritz, Ernest, Jack, and Franz.

The family’s father teaches survival lessons, like hunting and gathering, but he also teaches his children how to live well. He has a ridiculously diverse knowledge of plants and animals, which at times seemed a bit unlikely. I love that even though they are stranded on a desert island, they work so hard to continue to learn. They are all practicing different languages, studying new sciences, exploring, getting exercise. Their priorities didn’t change. Their father still has the whole family work together and treat each other with civility and respect. He instructs them in everything and they support and encourage one another.

I kept wondering what would happen to a family today if they were stranded and couldn’t use their cell phones. Would they even know how to open a coconut? I kept thinking of Lost, the modern day equivalent of this adventure in some ways. I think a lot of people wouldn’t know how to survive for more than a few days.
There’s one terrifying scene that will stay with me for a long time, it includes a donkey and boa constrictor and that’s all I’ll say. A few of the other scenes where animals are killed aren’t pleasant to read, but they certainly aren’t gratuitous. Each one takes place because they need to survive, not for sport.

BOTTOM LINE: I think this one would be perfect to read aloud to boys. It’s all adventure and learning how to hunt and survive, but the moral lessons about treating animals fairly and hard work give it an added weight. show less

Have you ever read Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books and wished for more of the frontier DIY bits and less of the annoying family sweetness? Well, this is that book, with more old-time engineering and a whole lot more hunting. If this book were a magazine it'd be the love child of Popular Mechanics and Field & Stream, and for some people that's perfect. To me, it felt like a nature documentary: it got off to a fascinating start but before long it was just animals killing animals, over and over. The only thing that got me through the last two out of nine sections of the audiobook was an urgent knitting project. Then at the end the story flashes forward ten years, which is a bit more bearable. Well, that's over with.

Pretty much what you might expect. A mother, father and four sons shipwrecked on what they claim is an island although no one ever bothers to circumnavigate it so we'll never know for sure :) .
Its quite Vernian, in that it spends a lot of time giving mildly interesting and often incorrect information on plants and animals. Usually involving how best to kill them ;) .
I did like the unintentional irony. Sometimes the father would get worried at how callous the sons are getting while praising there killing powers the rest of them time. At one point someone asks why god would created something as vicious as a wild cat, he says while holding up the cat which he just killed :(. There are also some sights you can't unpicture, a small child show more clubbing penguins to death is the sort of thing that will stay with you.
Anyway there just isn't enough here to separate it from the hundreds of other shipwreck stories so i deducted a star... then i put the star back because of the humour.
There's some genuine warm family teasing here and the parents in particular can be quite sarcastic. However in the end i took the star off once more because of the geography.
Sorry but if you have a hippo, kangaroo and capybara in the same small piece of land something has gone horribly wrong, or your at the zoo :lol .

Maybe i should make a shelf for books only worth reading if your immortal :) . show less

My memories of this story came from the Disney movie. So I noticed the differences. Disney reduce the number of sons to three. In the book they have 4 sons. The later half is quite different from the movie.

I was surprised by how violent the boys were toward the animals they met. How they would "punish" an animal. The father really disliked his son Ernest. Ernest was a thinker and more serious not as inclined to physical action, so the father dismissed him as lazy. It made me uncomfortable how the mother wanted then to stay with her. She dreaded her son's going off and having their own lives.

This mostly just annoyed me that I'd chosen to read it over its basis, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. I blame Disney World.

"But in reality, the more there was to do the better. I never ceased contriving fresh improvements, being fully aware of the importance of constant employment as a means of strengthening and maintaining the health of mind and body. This, indeed, with a consciousness of continual progress toward a desirable end, is found to constitute the main element of happiness."

^The moral of Wyss's story, with which I agree, but am incapable of appreciating in such a fantastically providential manner. I think I've always been too old for this amount of good fortune.

DNF. I just couldn't continue with this book. On every second page the boys are killing another animal, shooting with guns. Not even out of necessity for food, just because they were scared or so. They are all very trigger happy. The father is also always preaching and the life lessons are really on the nose. The idea of a family stranded on an island, building a tree house and having adventures, is such a good idea, but the way it is written in this book is really not for me.