New York Times hears "many echoes for our own time" in Tim Jeal's Stanley

In a cover article for the New York Times Sunday Book Review, writer Paul Theroux reviews Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal. Theroux writes that the famous--and infamous--Henry David Stanley "was probably the greatest explorer ever to set foot in Africa," and that Jeal's biography demonstrates this fact "in a way that makes it a superb adventure story as well as a feat of advocacy." The book progresses "like the most vivid sort of Victorian novel," while still being the "most felicitous, the best informed, the most complete and readable and exhaustive" of the many Stanley biographies out there. Theroux also emphasizes the "many modern dimensions of Jeal's book," saying that "Stanley's life speaks to our time, throwing light on the nannying ambitions that outsiders still wish upon Africa."

Read the entire review.

Henry Morton Stanley, so the tale goes, was a cruel imperialist who connived with King Leopold II of Belgium in horrific crimes against the people of the Congo. He also conducted the most legendary celebrity interview in history, opening with, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

But these perceptions are not quite true, Tim Jeal shows in this grand and colorful biography. With unprecedented access to previously closed Stanley family archives, Jeal reveals the amazing extent to which Stanley’s public career and intimate life have been misunderstood and undervalued. Jeal recovers the reality of Stanley’s life—a life of almost impossible extremes—in this moving story of tragedy, adventure, disappointment, and success.

Comments

[Elizabeth Yaron]

I read, enthralled, Tim Jeal's book STANLEY. What ironies, treacheries, concealments, misinterpretations - and political and journalistic travesties. Nothing has changed in the world of nations and men. Who really knows what goes on? No one feels this more than those of us who live in the United States.