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Summary: Samuel Baker - some character
Review: This book makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in 19th century Africa. Above all, it gives a clear insight into how Africa and, in particular, the Nile was viewed by European adventurers and hunters at the time. Samuel Baker was a very able writer and his fluid style and keen eye for scientific detail make this book a pleasure to read. Perhaps the only negative aspect of the book is that it goes into too much detail on Baker's hunting expeditions and the modern reader may find some of these episodes quite savage and cruel. Apart from that, it is a book which is well worth reading and which gives the reader a much better understanding of how life really was in these remote areas in the late 19th century.
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Summary: Early African Adventure as Only a Brit Could Tell It
Review: You've got to like the sometimes tedious, journal-style approach of early explorers, or at least be willing to put up with it, to appreciate this book. However, it holds some remarkable writing, insight and yes adventure. Baker was a contemporary of Richard Burton, John Henning Speke, Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone, all famous for their searches for the source of the Nile River in Africa. If you know anything about this time in history and about Africa itself, then you know that Africa was almost always fatal. Few who went into the interior returned, and those who did usually paid with their health. Not a pretty picture. Into this scene walks Samuel Baker, a wealthy, larger than life British aristocrat with a passion for exploration and excitement. Baker was a man who tackled rather than simply lived life. A fine linguist, writer, artist and sportsman who hunted with a knife because it was too easy to kill with a gun, he was also extremely practical with a "let's get on with it" attitude towards his travels. Nothing but determined, he presses forward when others would have said, "enough." Are you surprised that he succeeds where others have failed? I wasn't. What I like about Baker's writing is that he knows how to tell a story. He is as interested in the people as he is in the facts of what happened. It also helps that Baker himself edited this book, picking and choosing the entries from his longer journal. If Baker is pompous and full of his own superiority at times, he can be forgiven. All in all this is a good read. It helps, however to have read his first book "The Albert N'yanza Great Basic of the Nile" first.
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