Johanna Angermeyer

Angermyer makes a bit of a mystery out of her father's story, revealing it as she gradually came to understand it through her childhood and youth. It's very effective storytelling. The paragraph that most resonated with me, late in the book, stated her realization that Hans Angermeyer fled Germany to escape Hitler and Hitler's war, spent the entire time in South America (both Ecuador and the Galapagos) and nonetheless died a victim of Hitler's policies -- and of course, American xenophobia. Very moving story.… (más)

"It was probably a family thing - Robinson Crusoe in the genes", 28 Feb. 2015

This review is from: My Father's Island: A Galapagos Quest (Pelican Press) (Paperback)
Starting as a child in California, the author explains the family connection to the Galapagos Islands and Ecuador. The almost legendary account of her father and his brothers escaping Germany just before war, to sail away and live a Robinson Crusoe-like existence on the Galapagos Isles...But what exactly happened to her father?
Angermeyer slowly reveals the whole story in the course of telling her own love story with the Islands, as she goes out with her family to live there and meet her relatives, in her early teens. The Galapagos at this time (late 60s) were a pretty tough proposition: privies built over cliff edges, the struggle for food, the primitive houses. Yet set against this were magic moments: tame iguanas, killer whales and 'wonderful secret places in the bush, where no man or woman has ever walked.'
Highly readable and well-written, enhanced by the two strands of the story working in conjunction.… (más)