Customer Reviews

Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer

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This artfully written biography of Henry Morton Stanley, the brave and tireless African explorer best known for finding Livingstone, has important implications for today's pleasure-oriented society, though the reader may not realize it until he has completed the book and read the Afterword. Stanley cannot be understood or fully appreciated outside of the Victorian age in whch he lived, and Tim Jeal does a masterful job of placing him squarely into this context and then telling the adventure story of the century (think of Lewis and Clark multiplied by four). This book could not have been written until now due to the unavailability of many Stanley letters and archives, which were only recently made public and which, by their adsence, have distorted the perceptions of previous biographers. Having this material in hand, the author has now been able to present a more three-dimensional portrait of Stanley showing the depth of his humanity and his great love for Africa and its inhabitants. I became absorbed from the very beginning and found myself anguishing over and over as I read the tragic-heroic tale of Africa's greatest explorer. Thank you Tim Jeal for this excellent read!

The most interesting biographies are those that break new ground, either through new access to information or with new opinion. Jeal's is a good combination of the two, providing a well argued case for why Stanley should be rescued from the same part of history that holds darker characters like Mosely and put on a new pedestal. Ok, so Stanley still won't win any awards for sainthood, but Jeal points out that not even Livingstone was a saint. Saints wouldn't have survived 19th century central Africa. Jeal does a tremendous job of putting his finger on the anxious search for approval that drove Stanley throughout his life and his refusal to ever acknowledge his birth as the bastard son of Wales, raised in a workhouse. Strangely, since Jeal seems so determined to polish Stanley's reputation, he takes poorly aimed shots at those who shared the stage in England. Burton is repeatedly and wrongly dismissed as a racist. Does Jeal stop to ask himself how many racists would have enough respect for other cultures to speak 28 languages or spend years incognito in foreign lands? Despite these unnecessary diversions, this book is well worth the read, as much a physcoanalysis as an adventure.

Stanley's life is epic in scale and Tim Jeal's moving, page-turning biography gives us the whole amazing story - his abandonment by his parents, his years in a Welsh workhouse, the decade in America that saved him, his journalism, his death-defying and terrifying African journeys, his romantic attachments and his troubled marriage. Stanley's deep personal wounds made him hide his true identity and claim to be American-born for most of his life. He wrote that his "real self" was "darkly encased", but thanks to scores of new documents, Jeal reveals behind the armour a generous-hearted, vulnerable man, who pretended to be the hard man of Africa, and yet solved more of the "Dark Continent's" secrets than any other explorer. An exciting, inspiring and at times agonizing story.

"Dr. Livingstone, I presume," was a catchphrase in its time, and it is this phrase that is remembered, if anyone remembers anything about Livingstone or Henry Morton Stanley who coined it. He coined it, but he did not utter it upon discovering David Livingstone in deepest Africa. In fact, Stanley lied about the phrase, and it cost him some of his reputation, and he was untruthful, too, about his bastard origins, which cost him more, and helped make him controversial in his own time. Tim Jeal thirty years ago wrote a revisionist biography of Livingstone which revealed the explorer and missionary to be decidedly unsaintly. Now he has written _Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer_ (Yale University Press), which takes revisionism in the other direction. Stanley has been scapegoated as being partly responsible for the unscrupulous European conquest of Africa, especially King Leopold's horrors within the Belgian Congo. He has been depicted as a racist, and as a brute. Jeal convincingly shows such concepts to be wrong and unfair. Unlike any previous biographer, Jeal has had access to Stanley's private papers and does a superb job of detection to shed new light on an extraordinary man whose greatest flaws were his scars from rejection as a child and his resultant insecurity, flaws that lay a foundation for his lies and exaggerations which would come back to haunt his legacy.

Stanley was born John Rowlands in Wales in 1841, and was abandoned by his promiscuous teenaged mother; his father is not known. He had a workhouse upbringing, changing his name after shipping to New Orleans. He served in the Confederate and Union armies, and became a reporter, successfully selling an editor on his project of finding Livingston who had left to find the source of the Nile in 1868. He had a subsequent expedition across the continent and down the Congo River, and then one reversing this route. The obstacles of the journeys were appalling; Jeal's descriptions of dangerous animals, starvation, infections, and threats from natives make for riveting but uncomfortable reading. Stanley was glad to be on an expedition, but described himself as having "a careless indifference as to what Fate may have in store for me." Jeal writes, "This fatalism - and the sense that his deprived childhood had left him with precious little to lose - helped him endure misfortune, since it could never surprise him as it did more fortunate men." Stanley admired and respected the African natives, but especially on his final expedition, his officers could treat them with disdain or horrific abuse.

Such events blackened Stanley's reputation, although they were largely beyond his control and completely beyond his own moral uprightness. His reputation has suffered the most by his agreement to work in the Congo for the duplicitous King Leopold of Belgium. Leopold fooled Stanley and most European leaders into thinking that he was taking over parts of Africa merely to eliminate slavery and promote trade, but unleashed astonishingly atrocious horrors of occupation upon the area. Jeal shows that Stanley did not steal land from the chiefs in the Congo, as critics have accused him, and he would not press land deals on behalf of Leopold if they were unfair to the natives. Stanley believed in colonialism, but he had no interest in making his fortune in Africa; his personal fortune was, as he had always planned, from his post-expedition books, which were bestsellers. He was a shrewd judge of the characters of African natives, but he was a naïf in dealing with others; his romantic life consisted of an earnest searching for a partner, repeated jiltings, and finally a late marriage with a politically-striving woman who forced him to into Parliament (he hated it) and kept him from returning to Africa. His faults and misfortunes were many, but he had repeated success in overcoming them, only to fall into a postmortem reputation as a brute and a racist. Jeal's illuminating book is a corrective, and tells an engaging, exciting story of a key figure in the opening of Africa.

This is the finest biography that I have read in some time. The writing is superb and it is based upon the most thorough research on its subject yet. The author is uniquely qualified to write this book as he has also written the definitive book on Stanley's counterpart, Dr. Livingstone. What makes this book so compelling is the subject himself. He was abandoned by his mother and never knew his father. The kind grandfather who took care of him died suddenly when Stanley was five years old and his mother's family had him placed in a workhouse. There he stayed for ten years when he left at age fifteen. His life became an odyssey which took him to America back to England and then to Africa where he achieved fame. Despite his accomplishments as discoverer and author, his personal life was full of disappointment. His attempt to hide his illegitimacy had led him to lie about his background. This coverup came close to unraveling on numerous occasions. Years after his career had ended he returned to New Orleans incognito where he walked the cemeteries looking for a "Stanley" tombstone that would give him a name to use in documenting his story. The irony was that one of the world's greatest discoverers could never find himself. An excellent book about a fascinating subject.

Years ago I stumbled on a book of fiction about Stanley's captaining of the ill-fated relief mission to "save" Emin Pasha in the late 1880's. I simply couldn't believe that what I was reading about the horrors of the journey were real, so began by reading my first Stanley biography. The horrors were real, and the courage required of African explorers was almost beyond imagination. Stanley, more than any man, knew that dark side.

From the beginning I've been riveted by the man's accomplishments and (like T.E. Lawrence, as another review has perceptively noted) his many attempts to 'create himself' for the media to cover up a sad, neglected, Dickensian childhood. The most recent biography of Stanley I read, by John Bierman, depressed me, because it leaned so hard on Stanley's toughness that he came out as a brutal bully with no redeeming features whatsoever. My initial admiration waned.

It is thus a delight to find in such a superb, well-written, and thoroughly researched biography as this, that Henry Stanley was a genuine human being, flawed and fascinating, gentle and brutal, demanding and obsessed by duty. Jule presents a multi-dimensional character and one's respect for other biographers, who've simply beaten Stanley for the sins of his generation, wanes in direct proportion to the realization of all that Stanley achieved in spite of his inner demons. That sad, abandoned child lived in Stanley until the day he died, but what remarkable courage he showed in spite of it! And what permanent changes he helped bring to world history, even if others took his great explorations and made horrible things of them.

Also, with all due respect to many of the earlier, brilliant African explorers such as Burton or Stanley Baker, how remarkably free of racism and paternalistic 'cant' Stanley was. Burton himself was almost a pathological racist. There is no trace of this in Stanley. Again and again, when he lost his temper, it was because his fellow whites invariably treated the natives with (at best) contempt and, at worst, with brutality. The irony that it has become fashionable to portray Stanley himself as a brutal racist, is simply one of many in this biography.

This should remain by far the best, most thorough, and most balanced biography of this remarkable man for the foreseeable future. Thank you, Mr. Jeal, for portraying the whole man again. And what a remarkable story it is, truly starker than any fiction!

This book tells the story of one of history's most misunderstood and mischaracterized individuals. Henry Stanley rose from poverty to become one of the world's most effective but least known explorers, uncovering central Africa's mysteries and unwittingly creating the groundwork for the rape and bondage of a continent. From the famous but never-uttered "Dr. Livingston, I presume," to the reduced public stature resulting from the self-serving detrimental statements of others, Stanley emerges as a complex man worthy of a better and truer place in history than he accomplished. In addition to the personal tale, this book opens to the reader the state of 19th century Africa and is worth reading if only from this perspective.

Allow me state here at the beginning of my review that categorically Tim Jeal's biography of Henry Morton Stanley is a masterpiece. The book is epic in scope and proves to be both a wonderful narration of a life as well as a statement in support of the rehabilitation of Stanley's reputation. The book stands along side of my favorite biographies such as PETER THE GREAT by Robert Massie, AMERICAN CAESAR by William Manchester, and PRINCE OF OUR DISORDER (T.E. Lawrence) by John E. Mack. Much of Stanley's story seems to mirror T/E. Lawrence. Both illegitimate and trying to find a place in the world when the British class system was an obstacle to achievement to those of lowly birth. Both in many ways reinvented themselves but never were able to overcome the circumstances of their birth and childhood secrets. But as amazing as is the story of Lawrence of Arabia Tim Jeals reveals Stanley to be as just as an incredible life. I am not going to go into the various expeditions and events of Stanley's life in this review. You can discover those for yourself. But would like to comment that Jeals biography has a heavy amount of insightful psychological background to his narrative as well as almost a legal brief defense of Stanley's reputation whom Jeal clearly feels has been badly stereotyped, I found this approach exciting and most interesting although at times I wondered if the unfavorable view of Stanley needed an advocate. But this is a warts and all biography and Jeal does present Stanley as most human. In the end Jeal convinced me that my favorite African Explorer, Richard Burton was not the greatest. Stanley gets the nod now. I highly recommend this book to you. I think you will be amazed by this life and by the way it unfolds through Tim Jeal's exceptional writing.

Stanley takes you to a place in history where you may have never traveled. A name associated with Africa but never explored. Makes you get up from your reading and reference the World Atlas re the Congo. A terrific adventure story and it's all true.

The problem with this book is that it's 475 pages long. If you're gonna read a 475-page book it better be about something you're awfully interested in, and I was only marginally interested in Stanley. The research I've done indicates that this is the definitive book about him, which is great and all, but I didn't really need a definitive book about him; a 300-page summary would've done fine.

In addition, I find Jeal's take on Stanley overly apologetic. I get it, he wasn't quite as bad as everyone makes him out to be, but that doesn't mean he was a totally righteous dude; Jeal goes too far sometimes.

He's a good writer though, easy to read, so at least it moved pretty quickly.

I wouldn't call this required reading unless you're a serious Stanley buff.