Tim Jeal

More of a hagiography than a biography, but very well done. The affect of Stanley’s traumatic childhood on his entire life is very much front and center. The author acknowledges his desertions and his sometimes brutal behavior, though he definitely downplays them. Uses tons of primary sources to demonstrate how Stanley was often his own worst enemy, trying to burnish his reputation by presenting himself as having killed and exerted control more than was actually the case. The items about his relationship with his son were particularly touching, leaving me to wonder how he fared when Stanley died… (more)

Extremely detailed, pretty slow going at the beginning, but great for breaking down the mythology. Even without the myth, Baden-Powell was a real pioneer, an army officer founding a boy-run, peace-oriented youth organization to compete with the Boy's Brigade and other military-oriented youth groups.

The book is especially good about the siege of Mafeking. B-P may have embellished a few things, but he was an authentic hero at Mafeking.

And no, the book does not say that B-P was gay. It says that he spent so long in all-male company (boarding school and the army) that his only truly close friends were men. He didn't seem to know how to relate to women as closely as to men.
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"Explorers of the Nile" provides a detailed description (an overly detailed description in my mind) of the explorers of the Nile and east Africa. Clearly well researched, but the details of names and places only other historians might recognize, and which the reader will most likely never come across again, made my eyes cross and my mind wander.

There's a lot to learn from the book about the explorers of the area, the geography, the history, and I enjoyed the analysis toward the end of the book discussing the after affects of the explorations and the colonization on the current events in those Countries.

But I think that a more readable book on the subject, although more limited in content, was Martin Dugard's "Into Africa: The Epic Adventure of Stanley and Livingston".… (more)

Stanley is most famous for finding Livingstone, but it was a publicity stunt, his real legacy were two crossings of equatorial Africa, the first in recorded history. The popular perception of Stanley as a young upstart who finds Livingstone then turns into a brute killer and imperialist enabler, a model for the Heart of Darkness turns out to be wrong, he is more victim than victimizer, a scapegoat. Jeal does an admirable job establishing Stanley as one of the great African explorers who was unfairly maligned, in no small part due to Stanley's own insecurities from his workhouse upbringing. He wanted to appear tough and strong, and went too far in his memoirs, even when the truth was more sanguine. Of course much of this is speculation, other authors might speculate differently, but Jeal had access to a trove of newly available primary source materials. And Jeal is no hagiographer, as his biography of Livingstone can attest, so his opinion is credible. The third major expedition Stanley took, the rescue of Emin Pasha, is about as Apocalypse Now as it gets for Victorian explorers. They went deep up the Congo, then up another major river into a thousand mile forest full of headhunters, columns got separated and people went insane committing brutish atrocities. Documented in Stanley's In Darkest Africa and later adapted to the 1978 play The Rear Column (dir. Harold Pinter).… (more)