Candice Millard

Years ago I thoroughly enjoyed Millard's [River of Doubt], about Theodore Roosevelt's journey on the Amazon, so I thought this would be another interesting narrative history, this time focusing on the Nile. And in many ways the book delivers. Richard Burton is as fascinating a man of his times as Roosevelt, and the expeditions he and John Speke undertake in 1856-1863 are fraught with danger, illness, and disasters that kept me turning the pages. The highlight of the book, IMO, was their guide, Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who was stolen from his village as a child, sold for a bolt of cloth by Arab traders, and was enslaved in Western India for twenty years. Once freed, he returned to Africa and became one of the most travelled men on the continent and a highly regarded guide (including Stanley's trip to find the lost Dr. Livingstone).

My issues with the book stem from the author's almost giddy hero-worship of Burton, an interesting man (anyone who speaks 25 languages and 10 dialects interests me), but a deeply flawed one as well. Millard is so busy defending Burton from Speke's accusations that I didn't feel as though Burton was viewed objectively. Millard attempts to shed a bit of light on the way European explorers exploited the natives who did most of the work and whose own maps and geographies were discounted, but it's still a book about the Europeans. I don't know what I was expecting, but I closed the book knowing more about the area and the principals involved, yet disappointed. Perhaps it's impossible to read a book about nineteenth-century European explorers without being disappointed.… (mere)