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A review by lordofthemoon
The Beasts of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs
4.0
I've read very little Burroughs and no Tarzan so when I found this slim volume going cheap at a con I grabbed it. The writing style is fairly simplistic but once you get past that and the casual racism (the assumption that white men are superior to the jungle 'savages' is omnipresent but not pushed down your throat; and a tribe leader that Tarzan befriends is counted as one of the eponymous 'beasts' of Tarzan) it's quite a fun story. Tarzan's arch-nemesis Nikolas Rokoff has escaped from prison and is hell-bent on getting revenge. To this end, he kidnaps Tarzan's wife and child and strands the ape-man himself on a jungle island. Yeah, that's like locking the A-Team in a shed, they're helpless, right? It's not long before Tarzan escapes at the head of a pack formed of a panther, tribe of ape-men and tribe leader to rescue his family.
I sort of wish I'd encountered the Tarzan novels when I was younger, they are perfect teenage boy books with lots adventure and men's men where villains are dispatched in appropriately gruesome ways. In saying that, it is very much of its time and the racism and implicit (and sometimes explicit) suggestion that white men are the supreme form of Humanity doesn't sit well. However, if you can ignore that (and it's a big if), there's a lot of enjoyment to be had from this simple story.
I sort of wish I'd encountered the Tarzan novels when I was younger, they are perfect teenage boy books with lots adventure and men's men where villains are dispatched in appropriately gruesome ways. In saying that, it is very much of its time and the racism and implicit (and sometimes explicit) suggestion that white men are the supreme form of Humanity doesn't sit well. However, if you can ignore that (and it's a big if), there's a lot of enjoyment to be had from this simple story.