Island of the Lost has been a bestseller in various categories since the first publication in 2007.
It has 2919 ratings. With an average of 4.5 stars.
So why would the site put a savagely critical review in the "top review" rating?
This is how it reads:
Top reviews from the United States
Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2020
Verified Purchase
This book is mainly about killing baby seals. He spends a tremendous amount of time detailing how they lured parents away from baby seals then clubbed their brains out. He writes extensively about the tactics they used to get the parents away from the babies who hid and cried in bushes. Then they went around clubbing the babies in the head. I realize they had to eat seals to survive but the author seems to enjoy writing about it. Clubbing seals is seriously half the book.
49 people found this helpful
For a start, I am not a "he". And the book is not about killing baby seals. It is about two ships that wrecked on an uninhabited island in the sub-Antarctic in 1864.
It is a comparison of the fates of the two crews.
The island is wracked with icy gales twelve months of the year. The only edible plants that grow there are a kind of mega-herb, which is hard to cook, and difficult to eat. The island is also a breeding platform for sea lions, in the season. It is where sea lions go to mate, give birth, and then in due course head off for other grounds. Apart from very oily and tough shags, there is nothing else to eat.
Sea lions. Shags. Tough and fibrous herbs.
"Erin" is unhappy that the two sets of castaways killed sea lions for food. She (or he) mentions "baby" sea lions. According to the castaways' diaries, they tasted like lamb. I wonder how often "Erin" has eaten lamb?
These shipwrecked crews struggled to survive for months on end. Obviously, they killed sea lions to keep themselves alive. Their journals and memoirs record this. But they also record building huts for shelter, the way they got along with their fellow castaways, their daily routine, exploring the island, desperate efforts to signal help. Food was terrifyingly scarce.. In one case, the survivors cannibalized one of their dead shipmates. Is this preferable to eating sea lion meat?
The Hooker's (or New Zealand) sea lion is now a protected species. The island is a protected site, and one needs New Zealand Department of Conservation permission to land on it. But, back in the day, it was very different.
I make this plain with a history of sealing in the early days, describing the terrible result of the sealer's greed.
Evidently "Erin" did not read the book at all. His or her review should never have been published. Looking up his or her name, s/he has a history of complaining about every purchase from Amazon. She or he uses the review facility as a kind of complaint desk.
To balance this out, here is a review that reaped many, many more "helpful" checks.
Customer Review
Reviewed in the United States on November 11, 2016
I am an engineer and in a position to appreciate how hard the tasks accomplished by these shipwrecked men were. Especially impressive was Raynal, the Frenchman from the Grafton. I am not sure I could even duplicate his bird cage, much less his concrete chimney or his handmade nails or his new boat made out of the old shipwreck. I read in the epilogue that original account published of the Grafton shipwreck by the survivors ignited a craze at the time to steer away from technology and get back to first principles like gardening, and shipmaking. I feel the same way today.
I have read several of these 19th century adventure books, like Ernest Shackelton's polar voyage and George De Long's experience on the USS Jeanette wreck. This ranks right up there among the best of these.
It contrasts the experience of two sets of castaways on the same deserted island in the Southern Ocean south of Australia. The island is forbidding in the extreme with terrible year-round weather, high craggy cliffs, low wind-twisted trees and scrub brush, and a pestilence of biting black flies and blue-bottle flies.
The first set of shipwreck survivors provides the Shackelton example of both moral and physical leadership leading to a 100% survival rate for all the castaways of the Grafton. The second set of castaways resembles the "Lord of the Flies". The second set of castaways from the Invercauld has about a 10% survival rate and experience a wide range of the worst in human behavior.
My impression is that both sets of castaways carried this great and horrible experience with them for the rest of their lives. The Grafton castaways learns timeless lessons about leadership and courage, while the Invercauld crew learns fear and loathing and recrimination that likely haunted them for the rest of their lives.
I have read several of these 19th century adventure books, like Ernest Shackelton's polar voyage and George De Long's experience on the USS Jeanette wreck. This ranks right up there among the best of these.
It contrasts the experience of two sets of castaways on the same deserted island in the Southern Ocean south of Australia. The island is forbidding in the extreme with terrible year-round weather, high craggy cliffs, low wind-twisted trees and scrub brush, and a pestilence of biting black flies and blue-bottle flies.
The first set of shipwreck survivors provides the Shackelton example of both moral and physical leadership leading to a 100% survival rate for all the castaways of the Grafton. The second set of castaways resembles the "Lord of the Flies". The second set of castaways from the Invercauld has about a 10% survival rate and experience a wide range of the worst in human behavior.
My impression is that both sets of castaways carried this great and horrible experience with them for the rest of their lives. The Grafton castaways learns timeless lessons about leadership and courage, while the Invercauld crew learns fear and loathing and recrimination that likely haunted them for the rest of their lives.
But one must ask why Amazon does this? Surely it doesn't help sales.
No wonder, perhaps, that Ingram is selling three times the number of my books that Amazon is.
1 comment:
Awful. Our mutual friend Alaric had the same thing done to his last but one book. We have a pact to submit a reasonable, sincere, but not necessarily jubilant Amazon review the moment we put out a new book. That way, the first out of the gate is not a millstone. (How's that for a mixed metatarsal.)
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