Son of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs

Image via WikipediaSon of Tarzan is the fourth in the Tarzan series. I really enjoyed rereading Tarzan. The other two, on the other hand, were a little onerous to read. However, Son of Tarzan was a lot of fun to read. It can be found at Gutenberg.org.

Tarzan's son, Jack, largely inherits his father's traits as a wildman. However, one might say that he did not have his father's upbringing. Tarzan was raised by apes. Jack, on the other hand, was raised by a very civilized woman who did her best to keep Tarzan's nature out of her son. However, all was in vain.

An enemy of Tarzan's manages to lure and kidnap his son into the African jungle. However, Jack manages to escape with his friend, an ape who loves Tarzan, Akut. Akut teaches Jack everything that Tarzan's ape mother, Kala, did. He grows up strong and very much like his father, Tarzan: a lord of the jungle in his own right.

Meanwhile, the story of Meriem is thrown into the mix: a girl who is kidnapped and brought to the African jungle. Eventually, Jack rescues her from her cruel caretakers, and she becomes much like him.

Image by Michael Heilemann via FlickrJack loses her, and, after wrecking the village who had captured her with a horde of gorillas, finds her missing and thinks her dead. It is quite a bit of exciting text surrounding everything.

Ultimately, everyone is united and the ending is a happy one. I would definitely say that this book was quite a bit of fun to read. I highly recommend it to people who enjoy a bit of an adventure. I guess that there is still a bit of the little monkey inside of me that really gets a kick out of Tarzan and his jungle. I suspect that there are millions more in the world who also harbour a similar little monkey that would really love to become reacquainted with Burroughs' Lord of the Apes.

Beasts of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs

Cover via AmazonWhen I was a young child, I loved climbing trees. I also really loved animals. Eventually, I grew up adolescence, and these early predilections likely had an influence over me as I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan series. I'm not sure if I owned the entire series and read them all, but whatever I could get my hands on I got and read. It is likely that if I didn't read the entire series, I nearly did.

Last year, I felt the urge to revisit this hero. Having been in Canada for the first time in years, I took the opportunity of finding the first book, Tarzan of the Apes. It has been long enough since I first read it that it was very nearly like reading it for the first time. It was a pleasure. In short, I often get tired of purified heroes which lack any kind of depth. Too often, in modern film, developed antagonists are more interesting because they are more human than the heroes. Tarzan, on the other hand, is not at all like that. He is a killer, even if he does have his peculiar code of ethics which somehow he got from his instincts rather than from his tribe of apes.

Image via WikipediaBeasts of Tarzan is the third novel in the series. Having come off the heels of having read Le Mort d'Arthur, it is somewhat wanting. The truth is that the protagonists in the story are relatively two, if not one, dimensional and far from interesting. However, the hero is portrayed as something of a bungling idiot. Despite his superhuman senses, he cannot interpret people very well. Also, despite it being said that he has superhuman olfactory senses, he cannot seem to distinguish his own wife, Jane, from that of any other woman. This is not to mention the odour of his two, up to this point, great antagonists, Rokoff and Paulvitch.


Ultimately, in this novel, Tarzan learns that he can control many beasts of the jungle. These animals swiftly become very important to Tarzan. He cannot control the men, despite efforts to both bribe and intimidate. Thus, his only real trusted friends, aside from his wife Jane and Mugambi, are the animals themselves.

Tarzan, of course, manages to triumph over Rokoff. He kills him, but Paulvitch manages to escape. Though it is believed that he has died, it is more likely that he will survive to try his luck again with destroying Tarzan.