This is Conrad's first book and it sets the stage for what is to follow.  The setting, themes, description, characterization and plotting are all archetypal Conrad.  It is assured with a very complex structure and one an hardly believe that Conrad came out of the gate both this original and developed.  It's not his best work, but it certainly is very good.  It explores the contradictions in colonialism in a real way and also has the kind of delusional lost hero that Conrad can make compelling in a way that almost nobody else can.  Good stuff.

Are you online and ready for global smart card and database genealogy for virtual travelers? Here's how to search family history for nations bordering the Baltic Sea, the Balkans countries, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East.The nations listed in this guide (all faiths) include Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Armenia, Assyria, Greece, Lebanon, Syria, and many other lands in the Middle East, the Balkans-Croatia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Eastern Europe-Hungary, and more.

Collecting details about people is moving toward smart card technology and its offspring. The new wave in genealogy is authentication technology. Authentication begins with new-wave technology used to gather population registers.Compare the new technology to the old method of door-to-door census taking, tombstone tracings, and city directory publishing. No, genealogists are not using smart cards this year, but smart card technology is being used to compile population registers in Europe.

The future holds a new wave of technology used for authentication for banking transactions being applied to other areas. Currently this technology is used for collecting details for population registrars such as census taking.The application for research is of interest to family historians, librarians, and governments.

It's already in use by private industry for electronic authentication.Family history is now about intelligent connections, whether it's a population registrar, census detail, or electronic identity for banking. Smart card genealogy began in 1998 in Finland with governments seeking to put census and population registers in an electronic form that would be available to researchers, and these applications are going global.

I do love Conrad and this book is one of the best up until the last few pages where the climax is both hurried and does not really work.  The slow boil that happens in the rest of the work is fantastic.  There is brilliant character building and Conrad takes a very informed walk through a few kinds of evil people.  The writing is wonderful and invokes, as one would expect, the exotic locale and sense of isolation.  If it wasn't for the ending which does not really come together some how and involves at least two deaths which didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Otherwise very good.  The ending stops it from being one of Conrad's best, but otherwise a typically magnificent work.

I am not smart enough for this book.  The stories might engage me if the writing style were different, but as they are I wasn't really getting anything out of this book.  Time to move on.