Tarzan and the Lion Man

Tarzan: Authorized Editions

By: Edgar Rice Burroughs

Narrated by: Ben Dooley

Length: 10 hrs and 50 mins

Publisher's summary

Tarzan and the Lion Man (Edgar Rice Burroughs Authorized Library)

Book 17 of the Tarzan Series—Special Edition Authorized by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

A great safari comes to Africa to make a movie, struggling across the veldt and through the jungle in great ten-ton trucks, equipped with all the advantages of civilization. But now it is halted, almost destroyed by the poisoned arrows of the savage Bansuto tribe. There is no way to return. Ahead lies the strange valley of diamonds, where hairy gorillas live in their town of London on the Thames, ruled by King Henry the Eighth. And behind them comes Tarzan of the Apes with the Golden Lion, seeking the man who might have been his twin brother in looks—though hardly in courage!

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

Public Domain (P)2023 Oasis Audio

Double Doppelgängers

This is a great Tarzan novel, even if it does have an overreliance on doppelgängers

Ben Dooley makes this novel into a great audiobook

This is one of the high quality Tarzan novels. Burroughs is being creative and produces an immensely entertaining and satisfying tale. His derivative works shstoTarzan discovering an unknown African land inhabited with man's evolutionary predecessors, or where he finds a lost Roman outpost, or a medieval British colony, or a surviving city of Atlantis. While these are fun they aren't Burroughs at his best.

This is Burroughs at the top.of his game, only later in the series. He lampoons the movie industry by showing the misadventures of a movie company pushing into an African country, without permission, to make an adventure movie. A local native tribe repeatedly attacks them, some actresses are kidnapped by dessert dwellers, and the actors and crew are shown as arrogant and self-absorbed jerks. The story includes the discovery that a prop is a real treasure map to a diamond mine. I really enjoyed this book.

Admittedly, Tarzan goes into the jungle to rescue the women where he discovers a castle who's inhabitants are gorillas who speak with an English accent. Believe it or not, one of them is a geneticist whose strategy put his own mind into the body of a gorilla and then stole then genetic material from the graves of English nobility from hundreds of years ago and placed their consciousness as into the bodies of gorillas also. This story is so over the top in its ridiculousness that it makes it something different from the derivative works described above. In a way, the geneticist with the gorilla body has the camp feel of the kind of movie the production company was in Africa to produce. Then, the lampooning continues as Tarzan ends up in Hollywood. I am inclined to see this as a particularly well constructed spoof of the writer's own genre.

Ben Dooley's reading of the book is amazing. He has serious performance skills. He produces different accents and some characters have unique voices...I like all of his readings of the Tarzan books, but, this one is remarkable. I repeat what I've written in other reviews, Ben Dooley should be the voice of all Edgar Rice Burroughs audiobooks.