Ghost of chance /

Burroughs (My Education: A Book of Dreams) turns 81 this year, but, much to the delight of loyal readers, his latest fiction continues to display a febrile imagination, corrosive wit and edgy desolation recalling his preeminent early work. This peculiar, short volume is a whimsical hodgepodge, interweaving, among other matters, a natural history of Madagascar; a jeremiad for the environment; a colonial adventure and a takeoff on the Book of Revelations. It opens as Captain Mission, an 18th-century pirate, founds Libertatia, a utopian colony on Madagascar dedicated to protecting the indigenous landscape and lemur population (lemurs are known by island natives as ``ghosts''). When international bureaucrats conspire to decimate the colony, overpopulate the island and plunder its flora and fauna (``the Garden of Lost Chances,'' preserved for 160 million years since the island split from mainland Africa), a series of fantastic, ancient plagues are released, destroying much of the earth. This strange and fragmented story presents‘in supple prose that requires no parental advisory‘an environmentalist twist to Burroughs's quintessential theme: the cosmic struggle between bureaucratic Control and the embattled, individual soul. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Burroughs continues to topple literary, social, and cosmological walls in this short but bittersweet version of the rise and fall of a unique settlement on Madagascar in the late 17th century. Captain Mission "threatened to demonstrate for all to see that three hundred souls can coexist in relative harmony with each of their neighbors, and with the ecosphere of flora and fauna." Mission forms a personal bond with lemurs and explores the Museum of Lost Species and the Biological Garden of Lost Chances before Libertatia's fall. Burroughs vividly depicts a variety of horrifying plagues and both the wonders and horrors of drugs as only he can. He traces the roots of the environmental crisis to the replacement of Pantheism with Christianity, deconstructs language, and concocts some powerful moral brew in one of his most accessible and finest books. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries. (Illustrations not seen.)-Jim Dwyer, California State Univ. Lib., Chico (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

From the strange and venerable Burroughs, a tiny slip of a book (to include 17 illustrations by the author) that becomes a cri de coeur for ecological sanity. In his spare, comic-book style, Burroughs opens by tellingor telegraphingthe story of one Captain Mission who, in the 18th century, founded a ``free pirate settlement, Libertatia, on the west coast of Madagascar.'' The settlement's self-imposed laws forbade harming the lemurs that dwelled on the islandalthough these kind and sensitive creatures (``lemur'' meant ``ghost'' in the native tongue), needless to say, were to face calamitous treatment anyhow, by marauders from within and withoutas was the mysterious stone temple that Captain Mission had discovered, known by him to be ``the entrance to the biological Garden of Lost Chances.'' When the temple is destroyed, and with it the lemurs' opportunity of developing into a yet more sensitive and wondrous species, ``Mission knows that a chance that occurs only once in a hundred sixty million years has been lost forever.'' ``Beauty is always doomed,'' writes Burroughs, placing the blame flatly on ``Homo Sap with his weapons,...his insatiable greed, and ignorance so hideous it can never see its own face.'' And thusfor the balance of the bookis unleashed the formidable power of Burroughs the essayist of conscience, agony, and vitriol: chronicling Homo Sap's ravaging of other species (``The humans belch out the last passenger pigeon''), self-deluding opportunism and greed (including ``the Christ Sickness'' and the ``war against drugs''), and the species' folly-laden susceptibility to certain revenge through increasingly vile, unimaginable new diseases and viruses, their effects described in ways calculated to chill the very blood of ``Homo Sap, the Ugly Animal.'' Burroughs, in all, as the high lyric poet of wretched lost hopes. Or maybe not wholly lost: At book's end is an address, with an appeal for funds to help save the lemurs.