Tentatively, Convenience's Reviews > Back to the Stone Age

I probably read this originally when I was 13 or so when I read 17 Edgar Rice Burroughs bks back-to-back. Then I stopped reading his work b/c I thought it was too unsophisticated & trashy. When I 1st posted this to GoodReads I gave it a 3 star rating. Now I've reread it & I've lowered that to a 2 star rating. Despite that, I have to admit that I enjoyed reading it, I just wdn't make much of a claim for it as highly imaginative or great writing. It took me a few hrs to read & when I was younger & had more time for such things I may've read as much as 3 bks a day to 3 bks a wk - so reading 17 E. R. Burroughs bks wdn't've been much of an extraordinary accomplishment.

I've recently had the desire to reread bks that were important to me as a kid b/c my friend Alan Davies interviewed me & asked me about what bks influenced me in those days & it got me to thinking about them again. I'll probably reread some Hardy Boys too. What interests me the most about such rereadings is the rediscovery of what I can still identify w/ in these bks. Burroughs' protagonist, Lieutenant von Horst, has a sense of humor in a world where his type of humor makes no sense to the general barbarity. Reading this conflict of mindsets was one of the bigger delights of reading this for me.

Burroughs uses the barbarity of Pellucidar as a context in wch the protagonist's ethics can shine forth as desirable. "Von", as the protagonist comes to be known, is constantly putting the good of others above simple self-servingness. Instead of just escaping slavery alone, he leads all the slaves to escape. In Pellucidar, the tribal norm is to murder anyone not of the same tribe. Von works counter to this by making friends from various tribes - who, eventually, work for his own good as well. Von's befriending of a woolly mammoth is the most spectacular instance of this.

Now that I've written this brief review, I've upped the star rating to 3 again! My fascination w/ stories of the Hollow Earth no doubt originated w/ the Pellucidar series & w/ Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. For that alone, at least, I thank Edgar Rice Burroughs.