Tick Bite Fever

by David Bennun

Book Overview

Tick Bite Fever is the unconventional memoir of a very unconventional childhood.

In the early Seventies, Dave Bennun's family transplanted themselves from Swindon to the wilds of Kenya. His father, who was a doctor, had lived in Africa before (but had felt it expedient to leave when the South African government realised he was carting explosives around in the boot of his car for the ANC). For Dave, Kenya was bemusingly new. It would...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0091897432
• ISBN13: 9780091897437
• Release Date: August 2004
• Publisher: Ebury Press
• Length: 308 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.0" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

Reminds me of my childhood

I grow up in Kenya at the same time as the author and this book brought back so many memories and lots of laughs!

He brings Africa to you

I laughed and laughed, David Bennun really brings Africa back. He just knows people and the world you live in when you are there. I love Zambia and Kenya, and he just made it alive again. Thanks for the great read, and I won't sell mine!

First Symptom? Serious Laughter!.....

No oxymoron that. Not in David Bennun's hands. A Brit whose family left England for Colonial Africa in his boyhood, Bennun's nature evidently never expatriated the stiff upper lip, the sharp eye for the contagiously absurd, or---and this may be Fever's greatest selling point, for it makes all the rest so possible---the palate for language as only the bellwether British wield it. Far from a pythonesque humor; you know: with simple silliness the Wont that you often wish Wouldn't? Bennun is drop-dead funny. And I don't laugh-out-loud easily. More than once, my chest having long since rounded the corner into some soundless seismic convulsing, I dropped the book on my faintly blue-feeling face from asphyxiating in bed. (The story of his Jack Russell terrier alone is worth humor's All Time list.) And I ask you: How often do any of us ever delve along a literary skill that wastes not a single sentence? You can count those masters of concise thoroughness on half the one hand you use to hold up a favorite book (or in my case, not). Bennun is as aerodynamic an author, in his own milieu, as the greatest I've ever seen: and if that makes him the Nabakov of Satire? then Vladimir--not David--it is. Damn near every utterance morphs into a garrulous gem, no sentence dispensable, most quip-laden and quotable, all culminating in chapters memorable to a one about the real Africa in David's openly unreal vantage, his own foibles always foremost, from a self-deprecating wit-in-progress. Myself?.....Never one to let the complete absense of company dampen a conversation, I'd often read things in the book over again immediately--aloud--just to share them with somebody---Anybody---me usually the handiest, splitting my own sides with disemboweling dependability. But, like the boy in the book, I too have a hard time learning my lessons. Why even now, from time to time, foolishly undeterred by my bedtime injuries I read on, headless, only to wind up again the very picture of casualty: a free arm broken over my eyes, elbow high, while alone beneath it my open mouth, wide as the search for affordable dentists, palsies off in porcine snorts, gaped like a gash so they tell me, the very wound of the proverbial Death From Laughing. So: don't say you haven't been warned........ Needless to say, David Bennun's book ends way too soon, which is to say, it ended at all, and, Endorphin-addiction being what it is, sent me hunting the world wide web for the guy when all else failed. Now I DID locate a superb skill-set-exemplary article he penned about ITN's anchor-siren Daljit Dhaliwal meeting her prime american fan David Letterman, on air, that may still be available on-line, but other than that for now, alas---rein plus. Nevertheless, Bennun here is a fever worth catching, but only if you can stand the symptoms. Happy breathing.......