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A New York Times best-seller when it was first published, Rice's biography is the gripping story of a fierce, magnetic, and brilliant man whose real-life accomplishments are the stuff of legend. Rice retraces Burton's steps as the first European adventurer to search for the source of the Nile; to enter, disguised, the forbidden cities of Mecca and Medina; and to travel through remote stretches of India, the Near East, and Africa. From his spying exploits to his startling literary accomplishments (the discovery and translation of the Kama Sutra and his seventeen-volume translation of Arabian Nights), Burton was an engrossing, larger-than-life Victorian figure, and Rice's splendid biography lays open a portrayal as dramatic, complicated, and compelling as the man himself.… (more)
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It is for that reason that I found this work so disappointing. It is quite an achievement to author a biography of Sir Richard Burton and leave the reader bored and generally disinterested. A person with the lifetime of activities, successes and yes, failures boasted by Burton deserves better. Burton served Her Majesty’s government for his entire adult life, first as an officer in the military wing of the East India Company, then as a clandestine operative in various postings throughout Asia and Africa, before finally becoming a consular figure at a variety of backwater postings. He is perhaps best known for his participation in the search for and discovery of the source of the White Nile, Lake Victoria. It was the allegations and incriminations that were generated from these expeditions, and his rivalry with John Hanning Speke that account for a large part of his notoriety.
However, the African expeditions were only a small part of his life, which included an undercover trip to Mecca along with numerous other dangerous travels and discoveries. Burton was quite the author, penning dozens of works detailing both his explorations, as well as translations of what were then obscure literary works from the areas in which he traveling, for he was quite the cunning linguist, being conversant in many tongues and dialects.
With such an interesting subject, you would think a captivating and engaging biography would be hard to avoid, but the author here bogs down again and again in minutia which brings little to the story. Roughly the first third of the book, dealing largely with Burton’s dalliance with Islamic religious practices is borderline unreadable except as a sleep aid. The book also engages in relatively extreme hagiography, not unusual in many biographies, but excessive at times. The author criticizes the British government for failing to appreciate and reward Burton for his efforts on its behalf, but he seemed to spend the biggest part of his time traveling throughout the world while supposedly on duty. Despite constant complaints of penury, he doesn’t seem to have missed any trips.
Finally, this was a paperback with two sections of photographs. Unfortunately, the photographs were virtually completely illegible because they were printed on cheap paper. Imagine printing a photograph on a grocery sack and you can imagine the quality of photos in this book. In other words, this work is a wasted effort in my opinion.