The normally cantankerous Paul Theroux has a glowing review of Tim Jeal's new biography of Henry Morton Stanley in this week's New York Times Sunday Book Review. Here is the concluding paragraph:
There have been many biographies of Stanley, but Jeal's is the most felicitous, the best informed, the most complete and readable and exhaustive, profiting from his access to an immense new trove of Stanley material. In its progress from workhouse to mud hut to baronial mansion, it is like the most vivid sort of Victorian novel, that of a tough little man battling against the odds and ahead of his time in seeing the Congo clearly, its history (in his words) "two centuries of pitiless persecution of black men by sordid whites."
My students find Stanley and his ilk fascinating and frankly a bit mystifying. Jeal's biography looks to be a must-read.
