Journeys to the Other Side of the World

Image credit: QBD

As I’ve said before, voyeurism is the primary attraction of literature for many people and while fiction, truly, is a wondrous way to have exciting and magic experiences without ever leaving the comfort of your couch, I would recommend that people give non-fiction a go for the same reasons. While most people see non-fiction as expositional or educational and only bother if they’re invested in the subject matter, I am here to say that those people are missing out and that you can have the same magical voyeuristic experiences while reading about places that exist right outside your door.

This week, my adventure from the Shelf spanned across New Guinea, Australia, and Madagascar with Sir David Attenborough’s Journeys to the Other Side of the World.

Following on from his earlier memoirs that chronicle three earlier ‘zoo quests’, this book sees Attenborough and Charles Lagus travel across the globe in search of exotic animals to film and capture, as well as strange and fascinating aboriginal lifestyles to document. While Adventures of a Young Naturalist was all about the animals (with a few human interactions thrown in), this book focuses just as much on the various races and tribes of people that populate the planet with their own religions, ceremonies, and ways of surviving in lush or harsh landscapes.

Attenborough’s sophisticated prose and expositional style of writing, intermingled with various personal tones, opinions, and anecdotes, continues to blend the line between boring naturalist textbook and stimulating non-fictional read. Each chapter of the book is a reminder that there are stories and characters out there in the real world that are just as fascinating and funny as those from an author’s imagination.

Image credit: Daily Mail

While the book is not, admittedly, stimulating the entire way through –there are some areas that, unless you’re very interested in the subject matter, become a little dry and require perseverance- the majority of its pages are filled with interesting facts, stories, anecdotes, and characters that are sure to spark interest and imagination; maybe even spark a desire to travel to a few of these places and see them for oneself. This is what makes it a good book.

Journeys to the Other Side of the World is a collection of memoirs written by Sir David Attenborough –taken from journal entries- and compiled into a complete novel. The three ‘zoo quests’ contained are Quest in Paradise, Zoo Quest to Madagascar, and Quest Under Capricorn. It was first published in 1891 by Lutterworth Press as Journeys to the Past: Travels in New Guinea, Madagascar, and the Northern Territory of Australia and was rereleased as Journeys to the Other Side of the World in 2018 by Two Roads.