The Last Expedition: Stanley's Mad Journey Through The Congo - Hardcover

Liebowitz, Daniel; Pearson, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393059030 ISBN 13: 9780393059038

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2005

Synopsis

Traces the nineteenth-century, three-year African expedition of Henry Morton Stanley, a journey that was launched with the official intention of rescuing jihad victim lieutenant Emin Pasha of the southern Sudan, in an account that reveals Stanley's secret agenda of territorial expansion and the brutal killings of thousands of Africans. 20,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Daniel Liebowitz, M.D., and Charles Pearson live in northern California.

From Publishers Weekly

In this engrossing chronicle of a noble rescue mission turned sour, the monstrosities come as often from its central character as they do from the forests of Equatoria that he and his officers explored. Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904) was "an unwanted bastard" who became arguably the Victorian era's greatest explorer. Liebowitz, a retired physician, and TV documentary writer Pearson reason convincingly that the shame of Stanley's Dickensian childhood gave rise to his hunger for glory and his nonexistent empathy: almost prerequisites for the 1886–1889 mission (to rescue the governor of Equatoria, now the southern part of Sudan) that was the pretext for Stanley's expedition. The authors move to great effect between the record of events in Stanley's journal and those of his officers. The book becomes slightly tedious in its overly detailed slog through the three-year trek, in which a key colleague went mad, a good half of the expedition died and the survivors arrived too late. After almost 300 lugubrious pages, the final chapters relating the aftermath of the expedition make for quicker, if no less dark, reading. This account may have too much logistical minutiae for mass appeal, but history buffs and students of colonial and African studies will find it purposefully harrowing. Agent, Inkwell Management. (July 25)
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About this edition

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0393059030
• ISBN 13: 9780393059038
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 355