Rating: 
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.
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: 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: The real Tarzan
Review: Tarzan is back in an adventure more in tone with the remainder of the series than the original Tarzan novel. Sinister villains, lost races and beautiful priestesses are a mainstay of the series and this book introduces the best of all. Sinister villain-Nikolai Rokoff who would compromise his own sister's honor for money. Lost City-Opar, the remnant of sunken Atlantis. Beautiful priestess-La of Opar, who passionately chases our man Tarzan through several adventures. Tarzan is marooned near his jungle home and gravitates from civilized man to savage man to ape man over the course of the story. His realization that not all Arabs are sneering villains and not all blacks are cannibalistic headhunters is a welcome relief from the stereotypes that are usual in the series.
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 book is truly one of my most favorite books I have ever read. While reading this book I could not put it down. I had to pry myself away from the book just so I could eat! This book is filled with adventure to the fullest. I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone to read.
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
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
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