Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating tale of survival
Review: "Skeletons on the Zahara" by Dean King reflects a recent trend in history writing towards more personal, localized discussions of history. Books like "Twelve Days of Terror", "The Devil in the White City" and "Krakatoa" taken events that were enormously important when they occurred, but which have, over time, faded into vague remembrance. By looking at these forgotten events, the author has an opportunity to not only tell and original story, but also reflect upon the era as a whole, and draw conclusions about how it shaped, and was shaped by, the event in question.Handled poorly, this approach can feel severely contrived, as the writer attempts to shoehorn a host of effects into his ill-fitting cause. However, when done successfully, as is the case with "Skeletons on the Zahara", the author brings a unique perspective to the period, while engaging the reader with new adventures. In fact, if nothing else, this is an adventure story, detailing the appalling and yet somehow inspiring story of sailors shipwrecked on the North African coast and captured into slavery. King sets the stage, by explaining the disastrous consequences the War of 1812 had on the commercial shipping industry in New England, and how limited prospects on land and potentially rich rewards at sea drove men to a life of danger and separation from their families. Offering personal glimpses into the lives of Captain James Riley and his crew, he paints a portrait of ambitious men, living life on the edge between prosperity and destitution. At the same, he offers a glimpse into the life of a merchant on the Sahara, where not just material wealth but life and health itself is determined by the desert's fickle and unrelentingly brutal conditions. By juxtaposing lifestyles that couldn't be more different except of their common precariousness, the author nicely sets the stage for the clash of cultures to come. When Riley wrecks along the coast of Africa he and his crew find themselves in a world as alien as that of another planet. As they are placed into bondage, there world is literally turned upside down; as white New Englanders they may not have been pro-slavery, but they certainly never anticipated being held in servitude to Africans. Over the following months, Riley, in a remarkable display of leadership and loyalty to his crew manages to wheedle, cajole and bluff their way to salvation even as they suffer horrendously at the hands of their captors and the elements. While the story of survival is remarkable in and of itself, the glimpse King offers into a time and place most modern American's are entirely familiar with is fascinating. Operating within a clan based feudal system, North Africa in the early nineteenth century was a place of shifting, capricious alliances, where attention to personal survival and aggrandizement were crucial. Although he couldn't have been aware of the labyrinthine political systems he was ensnared in, Riley and his crew on more than one occasion almost sparked open war. However, it is in placing Riley's narrative within the larger historical context that King's book truly shines. While the aforementioned aspect of slavery is paramount, "Skeletons of the Zahara" also offers insight for our own age. Even as America struggles to understand the Arab mind, King offers at least a glimpse into a culture that is fundamentally different, but not necessarily at odds with, our own. The compassion shown by numerous Arabs to the sailors outstrips the brutal culture in which they operate. This common humanity touched Riley deeply, and made him a crusader for abolitionism for the rest of his life. There is no reason to think this humanity has eroded over the years, and King obliquely argues that it can become the basis for a new understanding with Islamic culture today. Part adventure story, part history, part social commentary, "Skeletons of the Zahara" breaths new life into a forgotten tale of survival. Given that Riley's narrative helped shaped the minds of such luminaries as Abraham Lincoln and Henry David Thoreau, it is worth reading in its own right, but when coupled with King's historical analysis it rises to a different level. While sometimes presumptuous in his narrative, King has nevertheless produced a book that highlights cooperation and commonality across cultures at a time when such elements are sorely lacking. The author, while primarily interested in telling a fascinating story of survival, is also able to offer precedent for mutually beneficial interaction between American and Islam. Jake Mohlman
Rating: 
Summary: Original is better
Review: A friendly librarian suggested I might like this book. I read it and in so doing found there is a 2000 reprint available. I bought that and far preferred James Riley's account of his sufferings to this third-person account.
The original is reputed to have been one of the few books available to Abraham Lincoln as a youth and to have helped shaped his ideas about the evil of slavery.
The first-hand account also includes Riley's account of a trading caravan told to him by his owner, who took him to civilization and sold him back to freedom.
This tale of indescribable suffering is far more riveting and significant in the words of the man who lived through it. I recommend you read "Sufferings in Africa" by James Riley instead of this book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book! (but is it true?)
Review: A great book! well written, fast faced, well researched (I like footnotes), authentic, believeable, cross-checked with other books, but, at the end of the day, since it is a derivative work based on a seaman's tale, there is a small chance (around 10% IMO, just guessing) that this tale is largely fiction, not unlike certain aspects of Marco Polo's tale. In fact, even the author says the narratives by the two surviving sailors is contradictory in places. But in no way should that detract from the story. Even if half of it is fiction the other half would still merit a book. Neither should it detract that certain sailors lived (but others did not). If anything, it adds to the mystery as to who lived and who did not. Further, the book is excellent in describing the lifestyle and morals of the desert nomads, who largely live the same way today.
Rating: 
Summary: Thank you Dean King, and thank you Peter Hillary
Review: After a frustrating run with a dozen or so mediocre books (three best-selling thrillers, two famous name memoirs, three populist science and the universe curios and assorted easy-digest sex and violence trash teasers) I've read TWO brilliant books in the last week! SKELETONS OF THE ZAHARA was one of them. Survival stories can be a real drag after a while, as the miseries begin to mount with no end, but King has managed to make this tale sing with the excitement of legend. There are times when there's something spiritual about the trials of these men, especially when they go out of their minds and into a trippy state with thirst and anxiety. A superb tale. The other book that has simply stunned me is IN THE GHOST COUNTRY. It's about Peter Hillary's heart-breaking journey to the South Pole, the loneliest and most disturbing oddysey of his life on the edge. Hillary has survived where many, many of his friends have died in the mountains -- and many of them who were at his side at the time. On the body-wrecking and mind-warping haul to the bottom of the world, the ghosts of friends and family rise up to walk with him. Shocking, sad, captivating and a very trippy experience. Too many amazing stories to go into here.
Rating:
Summary: Remarkable tale of survival
Review: Anyone skeptical about the limit human beings can and will go to survive need only read "Skeletons on the Zahara." This is the remarkable tale of Captain James King and his crew, their shipwreck off the North African coast in 1815 and the horrific privations they endured at the hands of the elements and their captors.
After their ship wrecks they barely survive and escape an initial encounter with natives. After days at sea on a longboat they must return to land and give themselves to the natives. From here they are slaves, often sold or traded for as little as a blanket.
King relies chiefly (though not exclusively) on King's account (which became a widely popular book read by the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Henry David Thoreau) and the account of another shipmate.
Through "Skeletons on the Zahara" author Dean King transports the reader to the vast, dry desolation of the dessert. One practically experiences the searing mid day heat, feels the cruel blows, suffers the humiliation of being stripped bare and taunted, and undergoes the indignity of slavery. Most of all there is thirst and hunger, twin horrors in heavy doses, Indeed the book can be all too depressing at times But the suffering is accompanied by hope and the endless stores of it that embolden the human spirit and make seemingly anything endurable.
"Skeletons on the Zahara" should appeal to wide audience as King's contemporary account did. It reads like good fiction with heroes, villains, adventure, narrow escapes and historical lessons.
Dean King obviously benefited from visiting the settings of the book. He also wisely includes maps at the beginnings of most chapters to help readers follow the course of journeys.
A great read.
Rating:
Summary: Of Brutality and Nobility
Review: Apparently the true story of Captain James Riley and his ill-fated crews' tale of shipwreck and subsequent capture and slavery was a popular story of the 19th century, mentioned even in the boyhood readings of Abraham Lincoln. Thanks to Dean King, this incredible story of survival, determination, and the range of the human spirit are rekindled in "Skeletons on the Zahara." In the summer of 1815, Riley and crew of the Commerce, a US merchant square-rigger home ported in Middleton, Connecticut, while heading from Gibraltar for the Canary Islands, shipwrecked off the treacherous coast of northwest Africa. Were it not for corroboration from a number of sources, including the published memoir of crewmember Archibald Robbins, this harrowing narrative of bondage and torture at the hands of the barbarous nomadic tribes of the Western Sahara Desert would simply not be believable. But through painstaking research, including his own journey through the desert retracing Riley's steps of nearly two centuries before, author King does an extraordinary job of detailing the tribulations and sufferings of the "Commerces", as well illuminating the customs and culture of the Islamic tribes of a desolate corner of the planet that to this day is mostly forgotten and hardly changed since Riley's fateful voyage. King wisely refrains from over-dramatizing the plight of Riley and his men; from the depths of depravity to the peaks of bravery and loyalty, of suffering and redemption, this story is best told unembellished.
"Skeletons on the Zahara" is highly recommended for anyone with an interest in adventure, American history, nautical lore, Islamic culture, and the triumph of the soul over the body, and is yet additional proof to the old adage: fact is indeed stranger than fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Desert Heroism
Review: As a boy, Abraham Lincoln read the memoir of Captain James Riley, and never forgot its story of slavery in the Sahara (or Zahara, as Riley would have known it). Thoreau knew the book. It was an international bestseller, and it might have been one of the few books besides the Bible in some American homes. Riley was a legend in his own time, but no longer is in ours. He is back, brought to us by Dean King, who read Riley's memoir of his adventure in the Sahara, and then read a narrative of the same adventure from a fellow crewman of Riley's, and then himself traveled in the still inhospitable and dangerous regions described in the two books. King has produced _Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival_ (Little, Brown), a wonderful account of fortitude under the most extreme conditions at sea and on the desert. This is one of the great adventure stories, full of the tortures by man and nature, and of course of the success of an indomitable spirit. Captain Riley and his "good Yankee crew" of eleven left Connecticut for an ordinary merchant voyage in 1815, and eventually foundered on the west coast of the Sahara, six hundred miles south of Morocco. They were beset by hostile, thieving nomads, but briefly escaped by taking to sea in the ship's longboats. They were eager to be away from the Sahara, which everyone knew was a realm of death but which was at the time uncharted, mysterious, and full (so the stories went) of cannibals. They ran out of provisions at sea and were forced to make for Sahara land south of Bojador, and their prospects were just as bad. Other tribesmen captured them, took their goods, and made them slaves. There are many pages devoted here to pain, extreme sunburn, thirst, hunger and other travails. The means of relieving these tortures are often unpleasant to contemplate as well; the way the captors and crew made do eating unmentionable parts of camels as well as snails and locusts are detailed here. Riley's eventual captor was a desert merchant Sidi Hamet, who was in financial trouble. Riley assured Hamet that he had important friends at the British consulate, hundreds of miles away. He insisted that these friends would buy him and the crew back for a high price. Of course, there were no such friends, and Riley was bluffing; Hamet insisted that if the ransom price was not paid, he would slit Riley's throat, and perhaps he was bluffing as well. The hapless Riley and the hapless Hamet make the core of this tale, and King cannot be faulted that his source narratives don't have enough details to describe Hamet fully. He emerges, however, as a friend and savior, even if he was initially only after the ransom. Riley could not have known it, but there was indeed a procedure for ransoming slaves, and a British consular official made it happen, becoming Riley's lifelong friend. A measure of the two months in captivity is that Riley normally weighed 240 pounds, and when he was ransomed he weighed less than ninety. Not all of his crew made it back, and some of them may have spent the rest of their lives as slaves. King's exciting and surprising narrative ends with the speculation that Riley may even have had an effect on his own country's slave trade. He became an active abolitionist, easily able to discuss the immorality of slavery; and perhaps since Lincoln admired Riley's book, it may have done its little part to bring emancipation about.
Rating: 
Summary: From one crisis to another
Review: Having read reviews on Amazon and seen the book in Philadelphia I bought a copy last week. It isn't published in the UK for another couple of months. I'm afraid I found the book fairly poor. A reviewer compares the feat to that of Shakleton. Shakleton's greatest claim to fame is that he never lost a single man on any exploration - plus sailing to South Georgia from Elephant Island and crossing the South Georgia's mountainous interior. Captain Riley does not compare. His list of near misses on one trip really is remarkable. He narrowly saves his ship on a reef off the Florida coast, nearly drowns himself and some crew from a sinking longboat in Gibraltar, misses the Canary Islands and hits the coast of Africa, gets one of his crew taken off to slavery to save his own neck, and then sets sail in a poorly maintained longboat with his remaining crew heading south to a French colony but inexplicably decides to return to the site of the shipwreck (notwithstanding the destruction of the ship and the dangerous local population). Needless to say the longboat is beached 200 miles from the wreck - navigation was clearly not the Captain's strongpoint. If they had travelled further south rather than returning to the ship they would found civilisation in a day or so. I'm afraid I was not impressed with the author's style. He does provide smatterings of information along the way but I felt this was trying simply to stretch the text. His choice of sources is eclectic. On dehydration he sites 'WJ McGee, a notable amateur thirst-researcher and director of St Louis Public Museum'. While interesting there must surely be more authoritative sources. Overall I can't recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: A true survival epic
Review: I agree with many other reviewers that the ordeal of Captain Riley and his crew is a riveting description of one of the most extreme human ordeals ever recorded. On top of that is the almost unbelievable tale of the survivors' journey out of the desert. I found Skeletons on the Zahara particularly interesting in light of the current strained relations between the eastern and western worlds. Although almost 200 years have passed since the events described occurred I thinks we can still learn something regarding the differences between the cultures. Sidi Hamet was a fascinating character. Although not entirely honest he was fundamentally decent. His very existence in such a hostile environment seems incredible yet there he was and at least five sailors lived to see home again because of him.
Rating: 
Summary: what if a good writer had written this story?
Review: I agree with the other reviewer who said that this story cannot compare with Shackleton's story, but this is still a story worth reading. Too bad it is written by a mediocre writer. Dean King tries to enliven the story by pretending to know what Riley and his shipmates must have said or thought. At one point, he says that Riley picked up a piece of fruit that he must have thought was a date. The fruit was bitter, and King says that Riley made a connection between the looks-good-tastes-bitter fruit and Africa. Except that this little metaphor is fiction and I doubt that Riley ever thought Africa looked good. King's attempts to turn this into a spiritual journey or to find the wisdom hidden in the misery...you'd find better in high school essays. The dialog King makes up is awful. Bad writing. That said, it is still a good story. Borrow it from the library, though.
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