Neil Peart cycles his way through West Africa and brings us along with him, dysentery and all. The Masked Rider details his physical and spiritual journey, through photographs, journal entries, and tales of adventure. Peart's "masks" are the masks that we wear--culture, psychology, labels, expectations--and his book reveals how traveling in a very foreign land allows us to peer behind them.
Review
"Peart's writing is lyrical and his tale poignant, fully capturing an extraordinary journey, both as a travel adventure and as memoir." —Library Journal on Ghost Rider
Book Description
Dysentery, drunken soldiers, and corrupt officials provide the background for Neil Peart's physical and spiritual cycling journey through West Africa. The prolific drummer for the rock band Rush travels through African villages, both large and small, and relates his story through photographs, journal entries, and tales of adventure, while simultaneously addressing issues such as differences in culture, psychology, and labels. Literary and artistic sidekicks such as Aristotle, Dante, and Van Gogh join Peart and his cycling companions, reminding the reader that this is not just another travel book—it is a story of both external and introspective discovery and adventure.
The Masked Rider: Cycling in West Africa FROM THE PUBLISHER
By November 1988, when Neil Peart arrived in Cameroon, he'd been expanding his own life and art through almost twenty years of travel and adventure. Concert tours of North America and Europe with his Rush bandmates, and the shared creative odyssey of lyric-writing and drumming, had only fed his insatiable curiosity and creative ambition. Through solo travels in Europe and North America, then to China and East Africa, he continued challenging himself to do more, learn more, achieve more. Adventure travels moved from inspiration to perspiration and back again, as that irresistible quest for new horizons and new adventures inspired the wish to shape those horizons and share those adventures in words. Like a story, each journey took on a shape and structure from beginning to end, through daily challenges of problem-solving and adaptation, and resonated in his life forever after. Experiences, hardships, and exultant survival enriched his worldview twice over -- once in the living, and again in the challenge of capturing them in words. Now 36, Peart was ready to attempt two of the greatest challenges of his life. The month-long bicycle tour through Cameroon would be his first trip through West Africa. Covering more than a thousand miles of primitive roads, trails, and goat paths, it was considered "the most difficult bike tour on the market."
He had chosen to travel by bicycle, at "people speed," because his other great challenge was creative. With notebook, tape recorder, camera, and an author's transformative perspective and awareness, Peart's goal was to inspire, "inhale," his experiences of the sub-Saharan country, its cultures and art, religions, languages, multiple ethnic and colonial histories, and especially, its people -- chiefs and villagers, soldiers and schoolchildren, missionaries and prostitutes -- so comprehensively and imaginatively, that in "exhaling," he could write with sufficient insight, accuracy of understanding, and vividness of memory, that his story would reveal and illuminate for the Western world something of the "face" behind the mask of Africa. Peart's creative achievement as author became his first published book, and in the eight years since its original publication in 1996, The Masked Rider has become appreciated by readers worldwide as a rare, special, and unforgettable travel memoir and portrait of West Africa, as seen through the mask of the visiting "white man," and through the equalyl complex masks of the Africans themselves.
Art & Photography
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