Customer Reviews

The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton

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Soon after graduating from high school many decades ago, it was my good fortune to discover Sir Richard Francis Burton, one of the great explorer/intellects of any age. That was a major turning point in my life. Burton inspired in me passions to achieve beyond the ordinary. Later, I became a scientist and, perhaps because I had imprinted upon Burton at a formative stage of my life, was able to open hitherto unexplored intellectual domains of my own.

I was eager to learn everything I could about Burton. Along the way, I discovered Fawn Brodie's book on Burton, a carefully-researched work that draws upon a wealth of historical data in depicting Burton's life and accomplishments. With a fast-paced, fascinating writing style that impels the reader forward page after page, Brodie takes us through Burton's own early formative years, his adventures in India, his pilgrimages to the forbidden cities of Mecca and Harar, his exploration for the source of the Nile, his rivalry with fellow explorer and nemesis, John Hanning Speke, his marriage to Isabel, and his profound accomplishments as an intellect and writer. Brodie's is a masterful work that compelled me to reread it many times down through the years. In fact, I read it so many times that it finally fell apart. I was delighted to find it for sale on Amazon, and recently purchased a new copy to replace the tattered old companion.

Those who wish to learn about Burton from a renowned scholar and historian are likely to treasure Brodie's book that has received many splendid reviews.

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton would be a worthy study for anyone interested in the potentials of the human being. A man of multiple talents and achievements, to count and adequately summarize them all would be an improbable task. This man accomplished more in a lifetime than most of us mere mortals could in several. As a 19th century British explorer, he stands with the legendary - Livingston, Stanley, Baker and Speke. What set him apart from these luminaries, towers above in fact, was is scholarship. His writing talents, publishing countless volumes, his uncanny lingual gift, (twenty-five languages, including several dialects that amount to over forty) and his inroads into anthropology, ethnology, religion and archaeology, make him one of the truly great individuals of the Victorian age. Brodie's treatment of Burton is a worthy tribute to the man, and after reading over four other life histories of Sir Richard; I can say with all honesty, that it is one of the best.

I have to admit that I have a severe aversion to that sixties literary trend of applying Freudian psychoanalysis in a biographical study. It is difficult enough analysing the living, let alone the dead and gone. Brodie is guilty of this method in this biography; however, she does it without taking anything away from the subject. Most all the typical psychoanalytical symptoms are present: the Oedipus complex, latent homosexuality, and preoccupations with sex in general. Brodie's analyses, though, is not a closed shop - she remains open to her subject. In other words, her psychoanalytic musings do not cloud the uniqueness and larger than life qualities of this man. It's a side issue, and therefore can be ignored.

What is so startling about Burton was his enormous passion to know, his tireless travels and recordings of the unknown and exotic. He not only was everything mentioned above, but a poet of talent, geologist, amateur physician, expert swordsman and skilful spy. A precursor to Freud, he studied the sexual customs of many cultures and was a fierce critic of Victorian values on the subject. This man's curiosity knew no bounds and he ensured he did not waste a minute of his sixty-nine years - a relatively short life considering what the man accomplished.

There are many biographies about Burton, but this one seems to encapsulate the man's spirit and zest for life. Brodie writes an enthralling biography and anyone interested in this towering figure of the 19th century, this text is highly recommended.

The Devil Drives by Fawn Brodie is the life story of Sir Richard Burton, a hero of mine. Burton was driven by the desire to acquire knowledge; he faced his own mortality frequently to acquire new 'firsts;' but he was also a complex man of numerous contradictions. Most importantly he wasn't only a do-er; he did not just master dozens of languages, make himself one of the greatest swordsmen of Europe, penetrate Mecca, find Lake Tanganyika for the West, translate the Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra, and a g'jillion other feats. He also wrote about them, sharing candid facts, often too risque for Victorian readers, as only a Man of the World like Richard Burton could.

I was impressed with the interest Brodie took in Lady Burton. If one wants to know the man, then one must look at his wife. Especially in this case, where Isabel Burton does not even seem as though she could have been someone that Richard would have tolerated to hold a conversation with, let alone devote a large chuck of this life to. Isabel was, in fact, the very type of woman Burton, in his writing, claimed to dislike: chaste and superstitious. How could the man who brought the Kama Sutra to the West and sampled life widely (wink wink) have chosen to spend his best years in a sexless marriage? Very odd, indeed.

The Devil Drives is an outstanding book. It is well written and interesting, although one does need to take the mid-century psycho-analyses with a grain of salt. I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to live life to the fullest and needs a role model from whom to learn.

If this man had never existed, Hollyweird could do a movie of some of his exploits and it would be considered over the top. He was fully a man both of his era and beyond it. His time in Africa alone was amazing, despite the fact that he and his fellow travelers did not find the source of the Nile river. That said, this is one of the better overall biographies of Sir Burton. The author has a good feel for the overall tone and prejuidices of the era and how Sir Burton did not fit in in polite English society. How much did I like this book, well I had read it years ago and decided I had to have a copy to keep. If true history with all its faults and wonders is something you enjoy, you need to read this book. For all that, I didn't even mention that he was an extraordinarily talented linquist as well as an author.

I read this one years ago, when it was first published. This was my first expierence and admittedly my first encounter with this remarkable man. This has lead me, over the years, to read much more of Sir Richard Burton. Each work I read, each bit of information I gather, I am even for fascinated with this individual, his accomplishments and his writings. This has been a nice reading hobby for me over the past number of year and it all started with Ms. Brodie's work. I am grateful. The book is well written, well researched and is very, very readable. Highly recommend this one.

Soon after graduating from high school many decades ago, it was my good fortune to discover Sir Richard Francis Burton, one of the great explorer/intellects of any age. That was a major turning point in my life. Burton inspired in me passions to achieve beyond the ordinary. Later, I became a scientist and, perhaps because I had imprinted upon Burton at a formative stage of my life, was able to open hitherto unexplored intellectual domains of my own.

I was eager to learn everything I could about Burton. Along the way, I discovered Fawn Brodie's book on Burton, a carefully-researched work that draws upon a wealth of historical data in depicting Burton's life and accomplishments. With a fast-paced, fascinating writing style that impels the reader forward page after page, Brodie takes us through Burton's own early formative years, his adventures in India, his pilgrimages to the forbidden cities of Mecca and Harar, his exploration for the source of the Nile, his rivalry with fellow explorer and nemesis, John Hanning Speke, his marriage to Isabel, and his profound accomplishments as an intellect and writer. Brodie's is a masterful work that compelled me to reread it many times down through the years. In fact, I read it so many times that it finally fell apart. I was delighted to find it for sale on Amazon, and recently purchased a new copy to replace the tattered old companion....

Burton was one of the most enigmatic characters of the Victorian era, towering above his peers yet unable to find his place among them. Ms. Brodie does an admirable job illuminating him and puts this difficult man in context. His greatest strength was his integrity, and vanity his weakness. Burton learned more than 25 languages and ranks as one of the great explorers of the 19th century. Ms. Brodie recounts his travels in India, Africa, South America, and the US in a style uncharacteristic of most biographers. She brings them to life. I cannot recommend this book enough.

This is a captivating account of a unique and restless individual driven to observe and graphically document the often very cruel life of the Middle East and Africa in the nineteenth-century. This will not bore.

Fawn Brodie was an interesting biographer, very much a product of her era. I've read both of her best known works, this being one and No Man Knows My History (about the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith being the other. Both were flawed in the same way. In both books, Ms. Brodie seems determined, a priori, to put an spicy Peyton-Place spin on her subject's lives which probably has no real basis in fact. Then everything else she presents in the book is put forward to support that spin and anything else of contradictory merit is left out.

In my opinion, her other irritating habit, which is evident in both books, is her way of presenting the innermost thoughts of her subjects in any given situation, as if she had some kind of telepathic knowledge of those thoughts. After she pulls up those imaginary thoughts she then judges them using a dated, flawed, Freudian, politically-correct, Sixties revisionist sensibility. Trust me, when she does this, it isn't sly or smooth. You'll notice and it'll stick in your craw like a thirty year old Ju-Ju Bee you found in the back of your Grandpa's junk drawer and foolishly decided to eat anyway.

Thirty years ago I think this approach probably sold alot of books for Ms. Brodie, but today it seems somewhat lazy and trite -- especially when you consider that the two men she trivializes were characters of infinite complexity, genius and impenetrable ambiguity. No one has ever succeeded in figuring them out, certainly not Ms. Brodie using her Psych 101 diagnose it yourself kit.

Rice's biography of Burton is the one to get for the history, as for the sine qua non biography of Smith -- it still hasn't been written. The Mormon apologists do nothing but parrot the Party Line, the anti-Mormon diatribes spout hyperbolic venom. As for Smith, no one still knows his history.

Richard Burton was an enigmatic, sour, oftentimes neurotic voyeur with the intention of beating his contemporaries and traveling the globe learning and exposing the cultures he came across. Ms. Brodie also has a tie with writing other biographies of sensational men (Joseph Smith, Jr of Mormon fame) and this book is an educated insight into Richard Burton's travels, motives, and surroundings. The maps included along with photographs, illustrations, and excerpts of Burton's own words help move the narrative along. It can be 'old English' tedious, but is well worth the delve into a man that went against the grain in every way.