Cheap The Lost Tribe (Book) (Mark Lee) Price

It isn't long before perceptive readers begin to notice the parallels between Mark Lee's first novel, The Lost Tribe and Joseph Conrad's masterpiece, Heart of Darkness. First and foremost, there is the journey, a nightmarish trek through the war-torn heart of a nameless Central African nation that could be any one of a number of actual countries in which political corruption, unchecked disease, rampant poverty, and mass murder are part of everyday life. Then there is the charismatic, troubling central figure of David Mather, a Christian relief worker who uses his mission digging wells as a cover for his real agenda: making contact with the Maji, an elusive nomadic group whom he believes to be one of the lost tribes of Israel. To this end, Mather has gathered a small group of fellow travelers: a struggling anthropologist and his wife, three Africans (a missionary, a mechanic, and an elderly mystic), and Ben Chase, a theology-school dropout, occasional news-service stringer, and narrator of this dark tale.

The landscape they pass through is populated by renegade soldiers, guerrillas without a cause, and the occasional mad European. Massacres, epidemics, and the casual brutality of people just trying to survive become increasingly common--and the group's strategies for moving themselves further along their chosen path come at greater and greater cost. With The Lost Tribe Mark Lee has crafted a superb adventure tale that builds inexorably from its first knockout sentence ("On the morning of my execution, I woke up late and found a marabou stork tapping on the window of my hotel room") to its troubling end. Though Lee occasionally overworks spiritual issues, especially in the use of the mystical African, Kazi, he more than makes up for these lapses with his unsparing portrait of an Africa in agony and a man willing to compromise morality in his search for meaning. --Alix Wilber

AUTHOR:	Mark Lee
CATEGORY:	Book
MANUFACTURER:	Picador USA
ISBN:	0312186959
TYPE:	Action & Adventure, Africa, Fiction, Journalists, Lost tribes of Israel, Nomads, Popular American Fiction
MEDIA:	Hardcover