The Return of Tarzan [UNABRIDGED-MP3 CD]

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Summary: The best Tarzan adventure
Review: "Return of Tarzan" is my favorite Tarzan book I have read. John Greystoke (Tarzan) has renounced his title and begins to return to the wild when he becomes involved in some Russian theives, then takes empolyment with the French Secret Service, and after a while goes back to Africa to become a cheif of a warrior tribe, finaly discovering Opar, an ancient jewel mine for Atlantis. Jane Porter has many adventures herself, getting involved with Russian spies (the same one Tarzan fought earlier) and then is ship wrecked in Africa, and is taken prisoner and offered up as human sacrifice by the pristess of Opar. The action is great, and I loved the description of nature, the jungles, deserts, and the oceans. The temple in Opar is very realistic (as far as this fantasy genere goes), and Tarzan is still pretty green to civilization, prefering the savage wilderness to the cities. There is only one complaint, and that's the huge coincidences that keep happening; both Tarzan and Jane run into the same people (the Russian and the Oparian pristess), it's just too much. But hey, this is nothing compared with what happens later in the series, when Burroughs gets really lazy.

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Summary: Tarzan's adventures lead him to the city of Opar
Review: "The Return of Tarzan" by Edgar Rice Burroughs is the second volume in the Tarzan series. First published in 1913, this book is a work of genius. There is something about Burroughs' writing that is captivating, and this book is no exception. "The Return of Tarzan" is a highly entertaining volume.

The book first starts with Tarzan on a ship going from New York to France. On this trip, he makes friends with a Countess and makes an enemy with her brother, a Russian. The Russian will attempt to cause Tarzan problems for the following months. After growing tired of France, Tarzan decides to return to Africa. However, his journey is beset with adventures in desert and wilderness.

The story leads to Tarzan finding Opar, the lost outpost of Atlantis, in the heart of Africa. Although both the men and women of Opar are white, the women retained their beauty, while the men are more ape-like in appearance. From here, there are more adventures and peril.

For great adventures, as you may have come to expect from Edgar Rice Burroughs, "The Return of Tarzan" will meet your needs.

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Summary: The Return of Tarzan
Review: Great book for older children and general collectors alike!

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Summary: Not as good as the first in the series
Review: If you read Tarzan of the Apes, you have to read this sequel. The first book ends with too many plot lines unresolved not to find out what happens to them.

However, that is probably the only good reason to read this book.

Burroughs is inconsistent: William Cecil Clayton, known as Cecil in the first book, is suddenly known as William in this one. Characters simply drop out of the narrative. Olga de Coude, Alexis Paulvitch, Kadour ben Saden and his daughter, the faithful Abdul: All of these characters take a central role at one point or another to simply disappear without explanation.

As for Tarzan himself, his dialogue is jarringly incongruous: "'Civilized ways, forsooth,' scoffed Tarzan. 'Jungle standards do not countenance wanton atrocities'" (p. 31). Tarzan seems to spend half the book soliloquizing and the other half getting elected king of something or other, only to go off and abandon his subjects without a word.

The Return of Tarzan is not nearly as successful as its predecessor. If you read the first book, you'll want to read this one as well to find out how things turn out. However, based on the quality of this book, I would not delve any further into the series.

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Summary: A Charming Yarn
Review: In a way, Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Return Of Tarzan is his most exemplary work. That is to say, it contains the best examples of what works and what doesn't in Burroughs' fiction.

First, what doesn't:

1) If you have a problem with ridiculous coincidences, The Return Of Tarzan is probably not for you. I sometimes think "Serendipity" is Burroughs' real middle name. For example: in ROT, Tarzan is thrown overboard and swims ashore to the same spot on the west coast of Africa where he was born. A little later, Jane Porter, the love of Tarzan's life, is shipwrecked at the EXACT SAME SPOT.

(Wait, it gets better.)

Finallly, Paul D'Arnot, Tarzan's best friend, JUST HAPPENS to be patroling that same strech of African coast and JUST HAPPENS to decide to investigate Tarzan's birthplace AT THE SAME TIME that Tarzan and Jane are there.

I mean, come ON.

2) As Gore Vidal has pointed out, Burroughs couldn't write dialogue to save his life. For example, in ROT he has Rokoff, the novel's heavy, exclaim, "Name of a name!". Does anyone talk like this? Has anyone EVER talked like this?

Next, what does:

1) Burroughs is, as much if not more so than any writer of his generation, a natural born yarn-spinner. If I had to pick any writer, living or dead, to sit around the campfire with my friends and I and keep us entertained, Burroughs would probably be the one.

2) Burroughs was absolutely gifted in describing action, fight scenes in particular. I think the great Robert E. Howard may have been his only peer in this regard.

3) Burroughs probably gets more mileage out of the "fish-out-of-water" scenario than any writer I've ever read. My favorite example of this is a scene in which Tarzan, wild man of Africa, is depicted haunting the libraries and museums of Paris by day, and sipping absinthe(!) and smoking cigarettes at Parisian clubs by night. What a picture! Did he ever run into Ernest Hemingway? Now THERE'S an idea for a story!

Upon reading The Return Of Tarzan, many would say it's a fairy tale, pure escapism.

Well, thank goodness for that. Burroughs may not have been a peer of the Vidals and Hemingways of the world; nonetheless, we need him just as much.

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Summary: OMG!!! REDICULOUS!!!!!!!!
Review: It should be titled "Tarzan Lord of Coincidence." I just read the first one a couple of weeks ago, and I couldn't get enough. I couldn't wait to tear into the second in the series. I should have stopped with the first. I just could NOT let go of the way everything just "luckily" happened. For instance, Tarzan on a ship in the Atlantic and becomes friends with Miss Strong and her mother who just happen to be Jane Porter's best friend. And as the ship which they were on in the Atlantic, passed another ship which was carrying Jane and Cecil. Tarzan was thrown overboard by Rokoff and able to swim to shore, which happens to be the very spot where Tarzan's parents cabin was in Africa. Then Jane happens to bump into Miss Strong on the streets of London and after their greetings, swapped stories about Tarzan. She and Cecil and company, take a yacht and become shipwrecked. Most escaped on lifeboats, but they were separated that night. Jane, Cecil, and Rokoff finally reached shore about 5 miles from the same cabin which was built by Tarzan's parents. The rest of the lifeboats landed AT THE CABIN!!!! Then of course the inevitable happens. Jane is captured by the Crooked legged men of Opar, Tarzan saves her and returns to the cabin, and there is D'Arnot, who befriended Tarzan in the first novel. He and his ship just happen to be coming to that spot to visit and LUCKILY save the castaways! And lets not forget to mention that Tarzan was made king of an African tribe, able to marry (but didn't) the high priestess of the people of the lost city of Opar, and then he once again became the leader of the original group of apes that he was raised with. All this was just too much.

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Summary: Entertaining, better than the films.
Review: Like most people, I encountered Tarzan in movies, but only about a year ago got around to reading the first book. What a different experience. I don't think I've seen a movie that was very faithful to the novel. "Greystoke" got the tone and theme, if not the narrative. What's is essential to the books, and usually left out of the screenplays, is Tarzan's ability to live in the jungle, but to function in "civilized" society as well.

The second novel (like the first) is essentially episodic. Tarzan, having renounced Jane Porter's love and his title, embarks on a series of adventures, including saving a woman's honor, surviving a duel, traveling to the Middle East as a secret agent, and finally finding himself marooned in the jungle he grew up, and discovering the city of Opar.

Overall, the novel entertains. Tarzan remains a solid character. Occasionally, Burroughs' prose tends towards purple, and some of the dialogue can be stilted. There are also certain descriptions of the native African peoples which aren't terribly enlightened. However, the whole book is a blast.

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining, better than the films.
Review: Like most people, I encountered Tarzan in movies, but only about a year ago got around to reading the first book. What a different experience. I don't think I've seen a movie that was very faithful to the novel. "Greystoke" got the tone and theme, if not the narrative. What's is essential to the books, and usually left out of the screenplays, is Tarzan's ability to live in the jungle, but to function in "civilized" society as well.

The second novel (like the first) is essentially episodic. Tarzan, having renounced Jane Porter's love and his title, embarks on a series of adventures, including saving a woman's honor, surviving a duel, traveling to the Middle East as a secret agent, and finally finding himself marooned in the jungle he grew up, and discovering the city of Opar.

Overall, the novel entertains. Tarzan remains a solid character. Occasionally, Burroughs' prose tends towards purple, and some of the dialogue can be stilted. There are also certain descriptions of the native African peoples which aren't terribly enlightened. However, the whole book is a blast.

Rating:
Summary: Tarzan takes Paris!
Review: That's not the whole story of course but it's an impressive part of it. Tarz renounces his family name,fortune and the woman he loves, giving it all to his cousin, and he does it all in Wisconsin! Yup, Wisconsin. Hurting from the ordeal, he heads off to Paris to forget about Jane. Wow, the Apeman in the City of Lights! So he spends time in Paris, almost has an affair with a Russian noblewoman, whups on her brother(an evil Russian spy), hangs out in art galleries and operas and eventually joins the French Secret Service out of boredom. All this is just the set-up for the rest of the novel. The book does seem to end too quickly but I think that has more to do with the serial/pulp nature of the story's publication deadline than any fault of the author. Tarzan and The Return of... are an entertaining 0ne-Two punch. Anyone who reads #1 should finish the experience by reading #2. I wish someone would make a film of this book, it's more interesting than the first one.

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Summary: The Return of Tarzan: The Genetic Superman
Review: The commercial success of E. R. Burroughs' TARZAN OF THE APES in 1914 inevitably led to what was the first in a long line of sequels, THE RETURN OF TARZAN. The first book introduced the forest god who is described so often in biological superlatives that generations of readers and critics have either thrilled to his near superhuman feats or have villified Burroughs for racist attitudes that if expressed today in a new work of fiction would be immediately classified as politically incorrect.
Burroughs' strong point as a writer was to place his hero in a series of exotic locales, then watch him interact with the natives. In TARZAN OF THE APES, this exotic locale was Africa. In THE RETURN OF TARZAN it was first Paris, then the Sahara, then a lifeboat, finally culminating in a personal favorite of Burroughs, a lost city. By the start of this sequel, Tarzan knows his lineage as an English lord, but is determined to hide that since he truly believes that his cousin, William Cecil Clayton, would make a better lord and husband for his beloved Jane. Tarzan immediately gets involved with a married Russian countess and her issues with her criminal brother and her older husband. Partly as a consequence of his interaction with the villainous brother, Nicholas Rokoff, Tarzan is lured into a room where he is attacked by a dozen Paris muggers. The scene that details this mugging is one of the great chapters in literature that focus on this topic. Tarzan is described as a jungle Hercules that fights like some impossible combination of a raging gorilla with the speed of a panther. The muggers are quickly dispatched in a manner that has since become a trademark of his. The rest of the book shows Burroughs both at his best and worst. Burroughs simply has no ear for dialogue. His characters, with Tarzan being the worst offender, speak in the courtly pseudo-dialect that Burroughs thought all lower classes believed that all upper class folk used. Tarzan fondly recalls his childhood and his foster ape mother with a friend, D'Arnot: "To you my friend, she (his foster mother) would have appeared a hideous and ugly creature, but to me she was beautiful--so gloriously does love transfigure its object." Further, readers are often annoyed at Burroughs' oversuse of coincindence to keep the plot moving. Then there is the racist element. His villains are invariably dark, swarthy, or black.
In the lost city of Opar, the women priestesses are lovely, erudite, and white. The men are deformed, apelike, and black. The high priestess, La, tells Tarzan that only the most eugenically perfect men are selected to be mates for her priestesses. In this book, as in many others, Burroughs often has some high priestess tell Tarzan that he would make a suitable choice. Clearly, Burroughs' Tarzan series was meant to be entertaining, and any potentially disturbing polemics that do not ring as politically correct today can be dismissed as the style of a man whose books have had more of an impact on nearly every culture on this planet than any other author.