Jon Bowermaster

This is the journey of traveler Jon Bowermaster. He is used to traversing the globe solo, on assignment for National Geographic and The New York Times (to name a few). The adventure in Descending the Dragon is unlike any other. Bowermaster and a small team of four take to kayaking down Vietnam's northern coastline. Seeing Vietnam from the water was a completely different experience for Bowermaster. He gained a much different perspective of the fishing communities and beach dwellers than if he had approached them from land. As much as he would have liked to have traveled the entire coast by water government restrictions forced him and his crew to travel by land on occasion. Probably the most poignant moment in the book was when Bowermaster was visiting a pagoda and met a monk who desperately wanted to tell him something but couldn't out of fear of betraying the government. Later Bowermaster is told, "Be careful what you use of our words, our faces - because, if the government gets wind of even a small complaint made by us, you will be gone from here and you will have no idea what happens to us" (p 129). It is a land of beautiful contradictions.… (més)

This is a collection of competently written magazine stories about conservationists and adventurers mostly written for magazines that cater to those interests like Outside and National Geographic Traveler. If you are interested in those subjects and those kinds of people, this book would be of interest to you. But it fails to make the leap that would make these folks interesting to those of us who don't live and breathe polar expeditions, environmental campaigns or other subjects covered here. And, I'm sorry to say, a couple of instances of inexplicably bad (or nonexistent) editing were quite jarring -- like the description of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. learning his father had been assassinated. Bowermaster describes Kennedy waking up early to read the Washington Post for California primary results, then feeding the paper slowly into the fire at the family home. Followed immediately by a quote from Kennedy describing the priest waking him up with the news while he was at boarding school. So where was he? And surely someone, either at Outside or in this publishing house, knows what "penultimate" means. Yes, these are quibbles but in nonfiction credibility rests in the details.
The best section of the book was the one titled "Artistes," which featured profiles of Africa conservationist Peter Beard and filmmaker George Butler -- the story of the fiasco of Butler's film about Teddy Roosevelt's safari adventures was particularly good.… (més)