The Black Rhinos Of Namibia: Searching For Survivors In The African Desert, by Rick Bass

If this book had only contained its content about the black rhinos of Namibia, an admittedly appealing group of near-sighted survivors of the remote and barely habitable wilderness regions of the Namib/Kalahari Desert, it would be a short essay and immeasurably better as a work. Unfortunately, this book of more than 250 pages managed the unforgivable crime of being both boring offensive and boring at the same time. The book is offensive, why else, because the author is a whiny leftist environmentalist activist who opines on the struggles faced by the grizzly bear and his hostility to private enterprise and land use in the West, where between two thirds and four fifths of the land is owned and sealed off by the federal government, most of it for no good purpose. The book is boring because the author repeats his point, such as it is, over and over again, while showing a reflexive myopia not exceeded by the titular rhino of the book in favor of African approaches and mindsets. He is welcome to stay in Africa–except when he tries to teach writing in Rwanda, a subject he is nowise qualified to teach–and not bother publishing in America as far as I am concerned.

At least two thirds of this book is pure trash, the author meandering in a uselessly poetic and discursive way through his own unimpressive thoughts about the land and the people and animals who live on it in Namibia and the United States and other places, and the rest of it tends to show the author in a rather poor light as a kvetch who struggles to deal with any limitations on his freedom to explore the wilderness. If this book was lopped and cropped to a level where it would be an essay about black rhinos, it would contain some information about the author’s thoughts about rhinos, expressed once and not repeatedly, then a discussion about his experience with rhino trackers trying to see the noble and somewhat timid and prickly animals up close without spooking them (no easy task), and closing with a self-effacing account of the author spending a night in a national park dealing with restrictions not very successfully or gracefully. The result would be a short essay in a magazine like National Geographic where people could laugh at him and his idiocy while also appreciating the rhino that moved him to write. Making this short essay into a book was a mistake, and the publisher who paid the author for this trash deserves to be forced to refund everyone who was unfortunate enough to buy this book or even, like me, read it in a library because we mistakenly thought we were reading a book about rhinos rather than about the dim and demented mind of its author. It is worth knowing this author’s name, if only to know what books to avoid reading even by mischance.

In terms of its contents, this book is between 250 and 300 pages and is divided into three chapters. After beginning with a map and a prologue, the book contains three parts. The first part of the book, pastoral, takes up a bit more than 75 pages and basically consists of the author’s half-baked and repetitive and strident expressions about the wilderness as a whole. This section of the book is largely a waste and sets up the reader for frustration and boredom. The second part of the book consists of the author’s thoughts about the wild. During this section he happens to see the rhinos in the wild and have a few close encounters with them that are at least a bit interesting, but there is far more bloviating by the author on various matters relating to the environment and wilderness here again, so even though this is the best section of the book, it is by no means great without some serious editing the dross. The third part of the book, which takes up the last 40 to 50 pages of material, consists of the author’s thoughts on staying at a dusty Namibian national park where the author complains about conditions. During the book’s epilogue, which is a sizable one at 30 pages, the author talks about the surprising death of Mike, the English rhino tracker that had accompanied the author during his own travels, due to a surprising seizure while he was surfboarding on the skeleton coast on vacation. It is a shame that the tracker died but it is also a shame that it was not a better writer to memorialize him. After this the book closes with acknowledgements.