I fell in love with the African explorers after I saw the cult-favorite movie, "Mountains of the Moon" about the African travails of Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke,in the late 1850's, and have spent the last two decades reading whatever I could get on the subject. Jeal, whose biography of Henry Stanley makes it clear he was one of the toughest, greatest African explorers, has now brought out this great summary of the latter half of the 19th century, when British (and some French and Germans) explorers undertook hardships that boggle the mind, and showed courage and endurance off the scale, to determine the millennia-old question of the source of the Nile. I knew enough of the general subject to know pretty quickly that Jeal has a mild agenda here - to bring the career of John Hanning Speke, so trashed by most Burton biographies, back into primacy for who he was and what he did, rather than what Burton said he did. It was tough; like many fans of Victorian explorers, Burton is so larger-than-life that his dark magnificence is very seductive. But I must admit Jeal, if not dethroning Burton, certainly raised Speke's achievement in my eyes. (And if you don't know what I"m talking about, you're missing one of the great case histories of human interaction and human endurance... read the book! It's the most thorough summary of the Victorian explorers since Alan Moorehead's great books back in the '60's and outshines him by having access to tons of new sources and new interpretations on this most fascinating of subjects. I should note that I began the book at the beginning of a horrific trans-Atlantic flight and finished it, more dead than alive, 14 hours later, but the book never lost me for a moment. Bravo!

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