Rating: 
Summary: Amazing and important
Review: This is a difficult book to describe: it masquerades as a Theroux style travelogue, but is anything but. I love Paul Theroux, but this totally transcends his travel writing. Chatwin starts out describing a trip to the Australian Outback. It starts out pretty conventional, in beautiful descriptive prose...but before too long you realize you are actually reading Chatwin's brilliant ruminations about the human race as a species, where we came from, and where we are going. The book is NOT really about the Aborigines, though they provide a number of terrific characters, and I suspect someone who really wanted to know more about the actual Songlines could be disappointed by this book. He very clearly sets up his own views against those of many important and popular thinkers. To sum it up, he makes a case that humans are not really an aggressive species at heart, and that evolution has not really programmed the human to fight for power but to defend the tribe. Not every will agree with this, but he makes a wonderful case and the book is beautiful and crystalline and should be read by everyone.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing and important
Review: This is a difficult book to describe: it masquerades as a Theroux style travelogue, but is anything but. I love Paul Theroux, but this totally transcends his travel writing. Chatwin starts out describing a trip to the Australian Outback. It starts out pretty conventional, in beautiful descriptive prose...but before too long you realize you are actually reading Chatwin's brilliant ruminations about the human race as a species, where we came from, and where we are going. The book is NOT really about the Aborigines, though they provide a number of terrific characters, and I suspect someone who really wanted to know more about the actual Songlines could be disappointed by this book. He very clearly sets up his own views against those of many important and popular thinkers. To sum it up, he makes a case that humans are not really an aggressive species at heart, and that evolution has not really programmed the human to fight for power but to defend the tribe. Not every will agree with this, but he makes a wonderful case and the book is beautiful and crystalline and should be read by everyone.
Rating: 
Summary: A desperate last shot at meaning by a fellow who cared
Review: To really understand this book, of course, you have to understand that Chatwin knew he was dying of AIDS when he wrote it. Hence, (I think) the notes (which have raised so many pros and cons and head-scratchings among reviewers) tacked on at the end. He, sadly, was sinking fast and needed something to round out the book. The book, then, is not so much about the aborigines (which, as one reviewer has noted, it would be better to check out an Anthropolgy text on) as it is about the ailing Chatwin.-But who was Chatwin? I think he was primarily a) an erudite hyper-aesthete (He started out working for museums); and b) an unflagging disciple of Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher whose most famous dictum was "Everything is fire." In other words, everything is in constant change. Everything is on the move. Everything is being consumed and reborn. Whether it looks that way or not. As the poet Delmore Schwartz put it, "Time is the school in which we learn, that Time is the fire in which we burn."-This is why,I think the aborigines grabbed hold of his imagination at the end of his life, "Aboriginals,in general, had the idea that all "goods" were potentialy malign and would work against their possessors unless they were forever in motion." And, like Heraclitus, he inveighs against the members of his own race, "The whites were forever changing the world to fit their doubtful vision of the future."-But what was Chatwin's vision of the future? What did he expect to find out there in his dying days?-I think he gives the answer on page 293, the penultimate page of the book, where he writes, "...the mystics believe the ideal man shall walk himself to a 'right death.' He who has arrived 'goes back.' In Aboriginal Australia, there are specific rules for 'going back' or, rather, for singing your way to where you belong: to your 'conception site', to the place where your tjuringa is stored. Only then can you become-or re-become-the Ancestor. The concept is quite similar to Heraclitus's mysterious dictum,'Mortals and immortals, alive in their death, dead in each other's life."---I'm not at all sure exactly what this passage means. But the basic idea, I think, is that you keep moving down your songline or metaphysical groove or whatever until you die where you belong and thus rebegin a ghostly cycle of reincarnation. Chatwin's tone in quoting the Aboriginal beliefs and Heraclitus give us no clue as to how much of this he actually believed...But we do know from his life that he was always walking, always searching up to the very end.-Reading the book with this knowledge lends to it (despite the jumble it is that caused my four star review) an almost heroic quality.-So read it and be inspired!
Rating:
Summary: A Canny Book
Review: What a marvelous book. It draws you in and lets you observe aboriginal Australia in a seemingly detached and unemotional way, yet you find yourself there with him sharing every experience. This ability to avoid cliches and to stir emotions of pity or anger or even ambivilance is remarkable and is a demonstartion of Bruce Chatwin's legendary writing skills.
Rating:
Summary: A poetic primer on Australian aborigines
Review: When I first migrated to Australia in 1983, I immediately started asking questions about the country's indigenous aborigines. For me, it was simple curiosity. New Zealand, where I'd come from, had imperfect race relations, but Maori dances, hakas, and creation stories were taught from primary level at every school. Like many "Pakeha" (white) New Zealanders, I had a part-Maori partner - whom I later married. In Perth, however, no-one I spoke to, including white journalists with whom I worked, could tell me what the "Dreamtime" spoken about in aboriginal culture meant. Their demeanour suggested the very questions displayed a lack of taste. Strange then, that it should have been a Briton who gave me my first insights - to have the boldness both to outline and celebrate the unique richness of Aboriginal cosmology, and to put it in the context of the great nomadic traditions of human life. This is beautifully written, wry and teasing; it respects aboriginality, but shows a lightness of touch rare in this particularly fraught field. Arguments have been made against this book on anthropological grounds, and on the grounds that no non-aboriginal person should presume to write about such matters. There may be merit in these points of view; I am simply grateful that Chatwin turned his brilliance to this subject. I find this book as illuminating and as life-affirming now, as when I first read it many years ago. Other books I can recommend, although more prosaic in style, are Geoffrey Blainey's "The Triumph of the Nomads", Henry Reynolds' "Frontier" and "Why Weren't We Told" and the official reports into the so-called "Stolen Generation" and the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. There is still a way to go.
Rating:
Summary: This is an anazing, unforgetable rich feast of a book.
Review: When Jimmy Buffett referred to this book in "A Pirate Looks at 50", I immediately went and bought it. As someone who had avidly read Richard Haliburton's books and National Geographic magazines while growing up, I felt an immediate kinship with Bruce Chatwin. Only, he lived out these awakened hunger's of his soul and spirit and shared them in wonderfully crafted words that not only captured his experiences but revealed multi-strata knowledge in a way that gave wonderful depth and richness in an engaging, readable, unique style. It was a rare gift and shared by a rarer individual - someone that not only appreciated but also reveled in every aspect of life. A Renaissance man who wanted to share has given us infinite pleasure. He was the writer/traveler/person we would all like to think we could be.
Rating:
Summary: I can see clearly now
Review: When you start reading "Songlines" you don't expect it to affect your view of the world with as much force and intensity as it does b/c Chatwin is modest in word, his prose refreshingly lacking the frilly embellishments that so many authors feel compelled to use. Brimming with insights on one of the oldest indigenous cultures of the world, "Songlines" - fact or fiction - has reawakened the politics of cultural hegemony in my consciousness.
Rating:
Summary: Much more than a travel book
Review: William James said that to "learn the secrets of any science, we go to expert specialists, even though they may be eccentric persons, and not to commonplace pupils." It seems, Bruce Chatwin used the same method to shed light on what for him was the question of questions: the nature of human restlessness. The Songlines consists of the stories of the eccentric experts in the science of restlessness Chatwin met in Western Australia, and notebook entries ranging from Blaise Pascal's philosophical reflections to a meeting with Konrad Lorenz in Austria. Chatwin had originally intended to use these notebook entries for a book on nomads. He gave up the project but the entries reveal the man and his quest. In a way, The Songlines is Chatwin's own songline: a track which tells of what he found on his wanderings, and what he considered worth singing.
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