Tasmanian Family Robinson

Swiss Family Robinson was not quite the book that I expected it to be. My expectations were based on the disney movie, which I should have anticipated being much more tame than the actual book. Still, even key things were different. For example, the family spent only one summer in the tree house and the rest of their habitation on the island in a salt cave. What amused me though was that Weiss made no attempt to accurately portray any particular island. Instead, he set the family down on an island that was home to creatures from all seven continents. Once there, the family ate everything. Their diet was as varied as that of the tasmanian devil in the Warner Brother's cartoons. Among the things I can recall off the top of my head, they ate: agoutis, antelope, apes, bears, beavers, beef, a boa constrictor, boars, buffalo, bull frogs, cabibara, canadian roughed grouse, clams, ducks, doves, eels, flamingos, geese, goats, grubs, herring, jackals, kangaroos, lions, lobsters, monkeys, mussels, ostrich, oysters, parakeets, parrots, peccaries, penguins, pigeons, pigs, porcupine, rats, salmon, sea turtle, sheep, sturgeon, swans, tigers, tortoise, seals, sea lions, walrus, whales, zebras and even rabbits. Not only this, but the island was somehow naturally stocked with every imaginable edible plant. Or, if it did not grow naturally, the ship that the family had been wrecked on had either saplings or seeds to be planted. The afterward to the book describes how the book was based on campfire stories told by the author's father for the purpose of igniting his son's interest in natural history. If anything, it seems that the authors interest in nature was a gastronomical one.