The Return of Tarzan (Tarzan)

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.

Rating:
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.

Rating:
Summary: Filled with ADVENTURE!
Review: This is, to my mind, the best of the Tarzan series. If you like "Raiders of the Lost Ark" then you'll love this sequel to "Tarzan of the Apes." Like "Raiders," "The Return" is chalk full of adventure. You name it, it's got it: desert adventure, ocean cruises, spy stuff, lost cities, beautiful women, Paris, jungle adventure (naturally), evil Russian villians, etc., etc. Okay, I admit that some of the coincidences in the story are quite unbelievable, but the writing and story are so captivating that you tend to pay it no mind. "The Return" is definitive proof of why Tarzan is perhaps the greatest adventure hero of all time! I would love to see this story made into a movie!

Rating:
Summary: Really Big Story
Review: This Story is so Big it spans three continents and Lots of action some romance and maybe a loittle wine and cheese in Paris