Edgar Rice Burroughs

Jungle Tales of Tarzan Edgar Rice Burroughs

In JUNGLE TALES OF TARZAN, Burroughs gives us an Ape-Man who might have fit in a television sitcom or a domestic drama. We see a Tarzan whose character is barely hinted at in the events of Tarzan on the Apes -- this is a collection of stories that take place in the same years as that first novel, but show us a very different aspect of Tarzan. We see "Tarzan's First Love," a tale of a teenage Tarzan with a distracting crush on a big-but-beautiful female gorilla called Teeka. The Ape-Man (well, boy, actually) declares his love for her and battles a childhood friend for her favor. But in the end he comes to understand that some things are Just Not Meant To Be, and forsakes his childhood heart-throb . . . In "The God of Tarzan," the Ape-Man asks himself the meaning of life -- and attempts to track down God in the same way that he would follow the spoor of a wounded deer. In "Tarzan Rescues the Moon," Tarzan sees a lunar eclipse and in his efforts to rescue the moon, shoots arrows into the moon until the moon re-emerges from the eclipse. In the end, it's Tarzan's struggle to find real meanings in the world around him that distinguish him from the apes who are his adoptive kin -- and make him as fascinating today as he was a hundred years ago.