TARZAN OF THE APES

Burroughs, Edgar Rice (adapted by John Freeman)

ISBN 10: 0760715432 / ISBN 13: 9780760715437

Published by Barnes and Noble Books, New York, 1999

About this Item

Quarter-bound in burgundy cloth on olive green boards; lettered in silver on the spine; beige endpapers; headband. Light wear on the corners of the dustjacket; no interior markings. Dj art by Blaine Maley. Size: 8vo.

Seller Inventory # 235980

Bibliographic Details

• Title: TARZAN OF THE APES
• Publisher: Barnes and Noble Books, New York
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0760715432
• ISBN 13: 9780760715437
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Blaine Maley
• Edition: First Thus.
• Condition: Very Good+
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good+
• Book Type: Book
• Seller catalogs:
  • Fantasy

About this title

Synopsis

When Tarzan is orphaned as a baby deep in the African jungle, the apes adopt him and raise him as their own. By the time he's ten, he can swing through the trees and talk to the animals. By the time Tarzan is 18, he has the strength of a lion and rules the apes as their king. But Tarzan knows he's different and yearns to discover his true identity.

Review

First published in 1914, Edgar Rice Burroughs's romance has lost little of its force over the years--as film revivals and TV series well attest. Tarzan of the Apes is very much a product of its age: replete with bloodthirsty natives and a bulky, swooning American Negress, and haunted by what zoo specialists now call charismatic megafauna (great beasts snarling, roaring, and stalking, most of whom would be out of place in a real African jungle). Burroughs countervails such incorrectness, however, with some rather unattractive representations of white civilization--mutinous, murderous sailors, effete aristos, self-involved academics, and hard-hearted cowards. At Tarzan's heart rightly lies the resourceful and hunky title character, a man increasingly torn between the civil and the savage, for whom cutlery will never be less than a nightmare.

The passages in which the nut-brown boy teaches himself to read and write are masterly and among the book's improbable, imaginative best. How tempting it is to adopt the ten-year-old's term for letters--"little bugs"! And the older Tarzan's realization that civilized "men were indeed more foolish and more cruel than the beasts of the jungle," while not exactly a new notion, is nonetheless potent. The first in Burroughs's serial is most enjoyable in its resounding oddities of word and thought, including the unforgettable "When Tarzan killed he more often smiled than scowled; and smiles are the foundation of beauty."