A Splendid Savage: The Restless Life of Frederick Russell Burnham Reprint Edition, Kindle Edition

by Steve Kemper (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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ISBN-13: 978-0393353907

ISBN-10: 0393353907

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"Rich, detailed, and pitch-perfect, with the witty and wonderful skipping off every page." —Maxwell Carter, Wall Street Journal

Frederick Russell Burnham’s (1861–1947) amazing story resembles a newsreel fused with a Saturday matinee thriller. One of the few people who could turn his garrulous friend Theodore Roosevelt into a listener, Burnham was once world-famous as “the American scout.” His expertise in woodcraft, learned from frontiersmen and Indians, helped inspire another friend, Robert Baden-Powell, to found the Boy Scouts. His adventures encompassed Apache wars and range feuds, booms and busts in mining camps around the globe, explorations in remote regions of Africa, and death-defying military feats that brought him renown and high honors. His skills led to his unusual appointment, as an American, to be Chief of Scouts for the British during the Boer War, where his daring exploits earned him the Distinguished Service Order from King Edward VII.

After a lifetime pursuing golden prospects from the deserts of Mexico and Africa to the tundra of the Klondike, Burnham found wealth, in his sixties, near his childhood home in southern California. Other men of his era had a few such adventures, but Burnham had them all. His friend H. Rider Haggard, author of many best-selling exotic tales, remarked, “In real life he is more interesting than any of my heroes of romance.”

Among other well-known individuals who figure in Burnham’s story are Cecil Rhodes and William Howard Taft, as well as some of the wealthiest men of the day, including John Hays Hammond, E. H. Harriman, Henry Payne Whitney, and the Guggenheim brothers.

Failure and tragedy streaked his life as well, but he was endlessly willing to set off into the unknown, where the future felt up for grabs and values worth dying for were at stake. Steve Kemper brings a quintessential American story to vivid life in this gripping biography.

F.R. Burnham
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Steve Kemper is the author of A Labyrinth of Kingdoms: 10,000 Miles through Islamic Africa and Code Name Ginger, among other books, as well as many articles for national magazines.

Peter Berkrot, a forty-year veteran of stage and screen, has voiced over three hundred audiobook titles, winning Earphones Awards, a 2012 Audie Award nomination, and a 2016 Audie Award.

--This text refers to the audioCD edition.

Review

[A] life was so full of derring-do and fearless exploits that, lacking historical record, one would assume him to be myth.

-- "Outside magazine"

A brilliant biography...The arc of his life, which reads like a Jack London adventure, stretched well beyond the borders of the American West in time and scope.

-- "True West magazine"

A rollicking, gripping portrait.

-- "Library Journal"

A splendid book about an amazing life.

-- "History Book Club"

An account chockfull of adventures that feel ripped from dime-store novels.

-- "Publishers Weekly"

In Kemper's sure and enthusiastic hands, Burnham storms through the pages of this rousing volume...No two-dimensional action hero, the author deftly shows Burnham in the round as an embodiment of contradictions in his attitudes...Thrilling adventures presented with the flair they deserve.

-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"

Monumental...every chapter of which could inspire a thrilling novel on its own.

-- "Historical Novel Society"

Narrator Peter Berkrot's voice is earthy, raw, and authoritative. It's the perfect match for the story of Frederick Russell Burnham, a man with a life that seems so improbable that, well, it could only be true...Listeners of this wide-ranging biography will find Berkrot's performance to be grounding, even when the events being recounted seem far-fetched.

-- "AudioFile"

Rich, detailed, and pitch-perfect, with the witty and wonderful skipping off every page.

-- "Wall Street Journal" --This text refers to the audioCD edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00YYT9ATU
Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (January 25, 2016)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 25, 2016
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 6320 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 410 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #291,826 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #390 in Adventurer & Explorer Biographies
- #443 in Travel Biographies & Memoirs
- #834 in Military & Spies Biographies

Customer Reviews:
234 ratings

About the author

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Steve Kemper

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In November 2022, Mariner Books (HarperCollins) will publish my new book, Our Man in Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor. It's a behind-the-scenes narrative about the volatile lead-up to the war with Japan, told from the perspective of the American who knew that country best at the time—Joseph C. Grew, the United States ambassador from 1932 to 1942. In 2019 the National Endowment for the Humanities gave me a grant through its Public Scholar Program to support the research and writing.

My previous book, A Splendid Savage: the Restless Life of Frederick Russell Burnham (W. W. Norton, 2016), is the biography of a man once world-famous as "the American scout." Before that, I wrote A Labyrinth of Kingdoms: 10,000 Miles Through Islamic Africa (W. W. Norton, 2012), about Heinrich Barth, one of Africa's greatest explorers yet nearly forgotten today. The book is a nonfiction historical adventure that recreates Barth’s incredible five-year, 10,000 mile journey in the 1850s. The Boston Globe named Labyrinth one of the best nonfiction books of 2012.

My first book, Code Name Ginger: the Story Behind Segway and Dean Kamen's Quest to Invent a New World (Harvard Business School Press, 2003), was selected by Barnes & Noble for its Discover Great New Writers award. Harper published the paperback under the title Reinventing the Wheel: a Story of Genius, Innovation, and Grand Ambition.

Other credits: Smithsonian, National Geographic, National Geographic Adventure, National Geographic Traveler, Outside, Wall Street Journal, Yankee, National Wildlife, The Ecologist, Plenty, BBC Wildlife, and many other magazines and newspapers.

I have taught writing and journalism as an adjunct professor at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and at Fairfield University.

I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. After graduating from the University of Detroit, I taught literature and writing at the University of Connecticut while earning a Ph.D. I've received several awards for my work, as well as a grant from the W. Alton Jones Foundation for an environmental investigation in Bolivia.

I live in West Hartford, Connecticut, with my wife Judith Kaufman, a studio goldsmith.

My website: www.stevekemper.net

My blog: http://blog.stevekemper.net

Customer reviews

5 star		76%
4 star		19%
3 star		3%
2 star		1%
1 star		1%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Great Addition!

Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2016

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35 years ago I asked the screen writer John Milius if he’d considered telling Burnham’s story on film. His response, “nobody would believe it.” Kemper’s Splendid Savage reminds me of the truth of John’s words.
This book contains a wealth of information collected from previously unpublished sources and does a great job of filling in the gaps left open in Burnham’s two books. Highly recommended to anyone interested in the history of the American West, the making of a Nation, the law of Unintended Consequences and certainly anything to do with the character traits and skill set required for Special Forces.
A couple of critical reviewers were apparently put off by Kemper’s inclusion of Burnham’s (and Churchill’s and Teddy Roosevelt’s among others) views of race, but also including an explanation that these views were not unremarkable for the time. This hardly struck me as some sort of PC garbage, but rather taking the opportunity to suggest to a reader who was unfamiliar or appalled with these common views that they were in fact common and well-reasoned based on observation at the time.
In any case, kudo’s to the author and I highly recommend the book. Mine was the Kindle version, but I’m buying a hard copy to put on my book shelf next to my original two volume set of Burnham and Richard Harding Davis’s work.

18 people found this helpful

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Bobby D.

An entertaining life... loved the Los Angeles connection

Reviewed in the United States on March 6, 2020

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History is fickle and leaves many interesting stories and personalities on the precipice of Fame or lost to our collective memory. In some cases, it takes an entertaining life story and a good biographer or movie maker to capture s personality worth knowing. (Look what David Lean and Peter O'Toole did for T E Lawrence). In Splendid Savage (what Burnham called himself) Steven Kemper brings us the amazing adventures and history of Frederick Burnham who grew to only 5’ 4”. In later life got rich in an oil discovery on Dominguez Hill in Los Angeles; then building a mansion next to the Hollywoodland sign in the 1920s. He leads a wandering life as a scout, prospector, promoter, warrior who often ended up on what we might today deem the wrong side of history. Interestingly the author Kemper spends a great deal of the book using Burnham's life to open up a discussion of the history and perspective of events as they were accepted by most (whites) at the time. Pointing out for example that Burnham was both a conservationist at the same time he accepted racial eugenics and sided with colonial white settlements in Arizona, Rhodesia, and Mexico (and wished to import African animals to set up hunting preserves on federal lands.)
Kemper sums up Burnham’s life this way. “He was endlessly willing to set off into the unknown and start over. His natural habitat was the frontier, a place of escape and hope and violence.” Here is just a shortlist of Burnham’s adventures: Born in 1862 on the Minnesota frontier whereas a baby escaped an Indian raid… he ended up living on his own in Los Angeles at the age of twelve… he became a scout and fought the Apaches… took part in range wars… prospected for gold (numerous times and places)… gave up on American (as too crowded) and moved to Africa (bringing his family which included his wife who was amazing in her own right)… in Africa, he scouted for Rhodesia and fought the Boers for the British… returned to Pasadena, Ca and bought an Orange grove (and several other ranches)… could never remain in one spot…returned to East Africa where he found the continents larges coal deposits… started up a colony of settlers in Mexico… went mining for gold in the Klondike … used his mining expertise and acquaintances to find valuable metals needed for WW! Weapons… knew Teddy Roosevelt and many notables of his time (always looking for investors and benefactors)… wrote his autobiography (the rights were bought by Earnest Hemingway who planed a TV series but who’s suicide came before he wrote a single script.)
A large part of these amazing, unsettled, adventurous life can be told because of Burnham’s wife Blanch who saved his long and detailed letters. She had to learn to live alone for long periods of time although she did join Burnham on many trips. Burnham died at 86 in 1947 his life seeing a whirlwind of change.
Although I have given the book a high rating and found it a very interesting and fact fill read I did find some sections that needed better editing and clarity. The African sections would have been helped with better maps and because I am unfamiliar with that area's geography so I found this narrative of battles and sides fought at times confusing. I much more enjoyed the descriptions of the Southwest and Alaska. Also, Kemper ends the book with a chapter highlighting many controversies about the truth of various exploits (mostly those in African campaigns as a scout). I found this interesting but it also seemed to undermine Kemper’s own belief and narrative of the events questioned. (Yet, he does a good job of debunking the attacks.) Like T E Lawrence, when one writes one’s own history the truth sometimes remains obscured by the fog of war. Botton line I am very happy I discovered Frederick Burnham even if he did participate and support some unsavory history.

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Informed Consumer

A fair and accurate summary of a man about whom much is exaggerated

Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2019

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I had heard quite a few people talking about this book and so finally decided I should check it out. I'm certainly glad I did as the book was a wonderful read and I was not disappointed in the slightest.

If you study various periods of history certain names tend to continuously pop up as culturally relevant to the society of the era as a whole. For the late 1800's and early 1900's Russell was one of those names. The man lived such a wandering, extensive, and frankly full life that chronicling all of it would take a lifetime in and of itself, likely filling several volumes. That is of course assuming you can even compile enough surviving material to compose an accurate telling of F.B.R.'s entire life.

What Steve Kemper has done here is compress that incredibly full life into what I would argue is one of the most fair, balanced, and accurate summaries of this extraordinary man [Russell] and his almost mythical life that I have yet to see.

Russell was what I would consider to be the quintessential male archetype of his time, embodying those most masculine of traits for good or ill from the era which spawned him. Certainly no stranger to controversy (much of it long after his death) Russell is quite an interesting study in the often contradictory nature of man and his eternal struggle with his own cognitive dissonance.

All in all I think Kemper did quite a fair job of accurately and fairly summarizing a man about whom much is exaggerated. If I had to come up with one complaint it would be that he does jump around a fair bit and can sometimes be a bit harder to follow, but this is likely to not be an issue for everyone.

>Who this book is for:
-People who enjoy biographies of fantastic and adventurous characters from history who accomplished an almost unthinkable amount in their lifetime

>Who this book is not for:
-People with a closed mind and preconceived notion of who F.B.R was and who are unwilling to absorb new information on the subject.

TL;DR:

If you like action/adventure stories about big characters and fantastical feats then give this a read.

If not, then pass.

3 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

david parsons

Well written

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 30, 2018

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dislike the attitudes of the past, but he had an amazing life, packed full of adventure.

One person found this helpful

mr jr morrison

Item 100% as advertised

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 22, 2019

Verified Purchase

Item 100% as advertised

James P. Davis

Just wonderful

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 21, 2017

Verified Purchase

This is a wonderful book. Unlike many dry, overly-academic biographies, the author manages to combine historical accuracy with creative storytelling. Burnham was a fascinating character, and this book does him justice. Highly recommended.

2 people found this helpful

Disa Ostrom-Jaye

he really enjoyed it.

Reviewed in Canada on February 8, 2018

Verified Purchase

this book was a gift for my husband who knows a lot about Burnham, he really enjoyed it.