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River of the Gods
- Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile
- Narrated by: Paul Michael
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
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Publisher's summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The harrowing story of one of the great feats of exploration of all time and its complicated legacy—from the New York Times bestselling author of The River of Doubt and Destiny of the Republic
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: THE WASHINGTON POST • GOODREADS
"A lean, fast-paced account of the almost absurdly dangerous quest by [Richard Burton and John Speke] to solve the geographic riddle of their era."—The New York Times Book Review
For millennia the location of the Nile River’s headwaters was shrouded in mystery. In the 19th century, there was a frenzy of interest in ancient Egypt. At the same time, European powers sent off waves of explorations intended to map the unknown corners of the globe–and extend their colonial empires.
Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke were sent by the Royal Geographical Society to claim the prize for England. Burton spoke twenty-nine languages, and was a decorated soldier. He was also mercurial, subtle, and an iconoclastic atheist. Speke was a young aristocrat and Army officer determined to make his mark, passionate about hunting, Burton’s opposite in temperament and beliefs.
From the start the two men clashed. They would endure tremendous hardships, illness, and constant setbacks. Two years in, deep in the African interior, Burton became too sick to press on, but Speke did, and claimed he found the source in a great lake that he christened Lake Victoria. When they returned to England, Speke rushed to take credit, disparaging Burton. Burton disputed his claim, and Speke launched another expedition to Africa to prove it. The two became venomous enemies, with the public siding with the more charismatic Burton, to Speke’s great envy. The day before they were to publicly debate, Speke shot himself.
Yet there was a third man on both expeditions, his name obscured by imperial annals, whose exploits were even more extraordinary. This was Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who was enslaved and shipped from his home village in East Africa to India. When the man who purchased him died, he made his way into the local Sultan’s army, and eventually traveled back to Africa, where he used his resourcefulness, linguistic prowess and raw courage to forge a living as a guide. Without Bombay and men like him, who led, carried, and protected the expedition, neither Englishman would have come close to the headwaters of the Nile, or perhaps even survived.
In River of the Gods Candice Millard has written another peerless story of courage and adventure, set against the backdrop of the race to exploit Africa by the colonial powers.
Critic reviews
New York Times Bestseller • A Best Book of the Year: WASHINGTON POST, NPR, GOODREADS, BOOKPAGE, Audible • One of The Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction • One of Smithsonian’s 10 best History Books of 2022 •
“River of the Gods is a lean, fast-paced account of the almost absurdly dangerous quest by [Richard Burton and John Speke] to solve the geographic riddle of their era. . . Candice Millard has earned her legions of admirers. She is a graceful writer and a careful researcher, and she knows how to navigate a tangled tale.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Millard’s research and very readable storytelling are admirable. . . Ultimately, the identity of the person who first discovered the source of the White Nile may be a trivial matter. Ms. Millard conscientiously investigates the issue, of course, but River of the Gods is compelling because she does justice to the psyches and behavior of Burton and Speke—keenly flawed but enthralling, sometimes marvelous people.”—Wall Street Journal
“Millard recounts all of these travails with a fluid grace that wears its learning lightly.”—The Washington Post
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For centuries, the city of Alexandria Beneath the Mountains was a meeting point of East and West. Then it vanished. In 1833, it was discovered in Afghanistan by the unlikeliest person imaginable: Charles Masson, deserter, pilgrim, doctor, archaeologist, spy, one of the most respected scholars in Asia, and the greatest of nineteenth-century travelers.
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Exquisite! A Transporting Tale
- By Meg on 05-02-22
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Between Man and Beast
- An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure that Took the Victorian World By Storm
- By: Monte Reel
- Narrated by: Bob Walter
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In 1856 Paul Du Chaillu marched into the equatorial wilderness of West Africa determined to bag an animal that, according to legend, was nothing short of a monster. When he emerged three years later, the summation of his efforts only hinted at what he'd experienced in one of the most dangerous regions on earth. Armed with an astonishing collection of zoological specimens, Du Chaillu leapt from the physical challenges of the jungle straight into the center of the biggest issues of the time.
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Extraordinary book! Masterpiece.
- By BVerité on 04-23-13
By: Monte Reel
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The Lost City of Z
- A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
- By: David Grann
- Narrated by: Mark Deakins
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A sensational disappearance that made headlines around the world. A quest for truth that leads to death, madness or disappearance for those who seek to solve it. The Lost City of Z is a blockbuster adventure narrative about what lies beneath the impenetrable jungle canopy of the Amazon. After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed New Yorker writer David Grann set out to find out what happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z.
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A Worthy Read for Armchair Explorers
- By Jennifer Seattle, WA on 03-01-09
By: David Grann
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Gertrude Bell
- Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations
- By: Georgina Howell
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 18 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
She has been called the female Lawrence of Arabia, which, while not inaccurate, fails to give Gertrude Bell her due. She was at one time the most powerful woman in the British Empire: a nation builder, the driving force behind the creation of modern-day Iraq. Born in 1868 into a world of privilege, Bell turned her back on Victorian society, choosing to read history at Oxford and going on to become an archaeologist, spy, Arabist, linguist, author, poet, photographer, and legendary mountaineer.
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Shattering The Glass Ceiling in Britain
- By Nostromo on 08-05-18
By: Georgina Howell
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Burke and Wills
- The Triumph and Tragedy of Australia's Most Famous Explorers
- By: Peter FitzSimons
- Narrated by: Michael Carman
- Length: 23 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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The iconic Australian exploration story - brought to life by Peter FitzSimons, Australia's storyteller. 'They have left here today!' he calls to the others. When King puts his hand down above the ashes of the fire, it is to find it still hot. There is even a tiny flame flickering from the end of one log. They must have left just hours ago. Melbourne, 20 August 1860. In an ambitious quest to be the first Europeans to cross the harsh Australian continent, the Victorian Exploring Expedition sets off, with 15,000 well-wishers cheering them on.
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This Yarn Is Rather Needling—Off The Rails, Even
- By Nicholas Robinson on 05-08-20
By: Peter FitzSimons
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A Woman in Arabia
- The Writings of the Queen of the Desert
- By: Gertrude Bell, Georgina Howell - introduction, Georgina Howell - editor
- Narrated by: Sian Thomas, Adjoa Andoh
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Gertrude Bell was leaning in 100 years before Sheryl Sandberg. One of the great woman adventurers of the 20th century, she turned her back on Victorian society to study at Oxford and travel the world and became the chief architect of British policy in the Middle East after World War I. Mountaineer, archaeologist, Arabist, writer, poet, linguist, and spy, she dedicated her life to championing the Arab cause and was instrumental in drawing the borders that define today's Middle East.
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Raw historiography of a spectacular heroine
- By Josef on 01-07-16
By: Gertrude Bell, and others
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Barrow's Boys
- By: Fergus Fleming
- Narrated by: James Gillies
- Length: 17 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Barrow's Boys is a spellbinding account of perilous journeys to uncharted areas under the most challenging conditions. Fergus Fleming captures the passion for exploration that led a band of men into situations that would humble today's bravest adventurers.
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Wow
- By Robert B. Golson on 07-05-17
By: Fergus Fleming
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War of Two
- Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Duel That Stunned the Nation
- By: John Sedgwick
- Narrated by: P. J. Ochlan
- Length: 17 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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A provocative and penetrating investigation into the rivalry between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, whose infamous duel left the founding father dead and turned a sitting vice president into a fugitive. In the summer of 1804, two of America's most eminent statesmen squared off, pistols raised, on a bluff along the Hudson River. That two such men would risk not only their lives but the stability of the young country they helped forge is almost beyond comprehension. Yet we know that it happened.
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Provocative
- By Jean on 11-25-15
By: John Sedgwick
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Desert Queen
- The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia
- By: Janet Wallach
- Narrated by: Jean Gilpin
- Length: 20 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Turning her back on her privileged life in Victorian England, Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), fired by her innate curiosity, journeyed the world and became fascinated with all things Arab. Traveling the length and breadth of the Arab region, armed with a love for its language and its people, she not only produced several enormously popular books based on her experiences but became instrumental to the British foreign office. When World War I erupted, and the British needed the loyalty of the Arab leaders, it was Gertrude Bell's work and connections that helped provided the brain for T. E. Lawrence's military brawn.
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Great beginning, then gets boring
- By Msz on 03-31-16
By: Janet Wallach
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Hero of the Empire
- The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill
- By: Candice Millard
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
At age 24 Winston Churchill was utterly convinced it was his destiny to become prime minister of England one day, despite the fact he had just lost his first election campaign for Parliament. He believed that to achieve his goal, he had to do something spectacular on the battlefield. Despite deliberately putting himself in extreme danger as a British army officer in colonial wars in India and Sudan and as a journalist covering a Cuban uprising against the Spanish, glory and fame had eluded him.
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Far More Than Simply, Hero of the Empire!
- By Matthew on 09-21-16
By: Candice Millard
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King Leopold's Ghost
- A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
- By: Adam Hochschild
- Narrated by: Geoffrey Howard
- Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the late 1890s, Edmund Dene Morel, a young British shipping company agent, noticed something strange about the cargoes of his company's ships as they arrived from and departed for the Congo. Incoming ships were crammed with valuable ivory and rubber. Outbound ships carried little more than soldiers and firearms. Correctly concluding that only slave labor could account for these cargoes, Morel almost singlehandedly made this slave-labor regime the premier human rights story in the world.
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Fascinating
- By Edith on 01-20-11
By: Adam Hochschild
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The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman
- Women in the West, Book 1
- By: Margot Mifflin
- Narrated by: Kaipo Schwab
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In 1851, Olive Oatman was a 13-year-old pioneer traveling west toward Zion, with her Mormon family. Within a decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, caught between cultures. The Blue Tattoo tells the harrowing story of this forgotten heroine of frontier America. Orphaned when her family was brutally killed by Yavapai Indians, Oatman lived as a slave to her captors for a year before being traded to the Mohave, who tattooed her face and raised her as their own.
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Mispronunciations
- By R. Brown on 06-07-18
By: Margot Mifflin
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Undaunted Courage
- By: Stephen E. Ambrose
- Narrated by: Barrett Whitener
- Length: 21 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson selected his personal secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, to lead a voyage up the Missouri River, across the forbidding Rockies, and - by way of the Snake and the Columbia rivers - down to the Pacific Ocean. Lewis and his partner, Captain William Clark, endured incredible hardships and witnessed astounding sights. With great perseverance, they worked their way into an unexplored West. When they returned two years later, they had long since been given up for dead.
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Narration kills a great book
- By Kindle Customer on 02-10-08
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Jack London
- An American Life
- By: Earle Labor
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 16 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Jack London was born a working class, fatherless Californian in 1876. In his youth, he was a boundlessly energetic adventurer on the bustling West Coast - an oyster pirate, a hobo, a sailor, and a prospector by turns. He spent his brief life rapidly accumulating the experiences that would inform his acclaimed best-selling books The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf.
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Glad I chose this
- By SherryH on 04-14-19
By: Earle Labor
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Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in the 1970s. With the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative shot him dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell's murderer was acquitted—thanks to the same attorney who had previously defended the reverend. Casey Cep brings this story to life, from the shocking murders to the courtroom drama to the racial politics of the Deep South.
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The foundations of modern knowledge - philosophy, math, astronomy, geography - were laid by the Greeks, whose ideas were written on scrolls and stored in libraries across the Mediterranean and beyond. But as the vast Roman Empire disintegrated, so did appreciation of these precious texts. Christianity cast a shadow over so-called pagan thought, books were burned, and the library of Alexandria, the greatest repository of classical knowledge, was destroyed. Yet some texts did survive and The Map of Knowledge explores the role played by seven cities around the Mediterranean....
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Orphaned at a young age, Edith Stuyvesant Dresser claimed lineage from one of New York's best known families. She grew up in Newport and Paris, and her engagement and marriage to George Vanderbilt was one of the most watched events of Gilded Age society. But none of this prepared her to be mistress of Biltmore House. Before their marriage, the wealthy and bookish Vanderbilt had dedicated his life to creating a spectacular European-style estate on 125,000 acres of North Carolina wilderness.
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Very factual
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Electric City
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During the Roaring Twenties, two of the most revered and influential men in American business proposed to transform one of the country’s poorest regions into a dream technological metropolis, a shining paradise of small farms, giant factories, and sparkling laboratories. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison’s “Detroit of the South” would be 10 times the size of Manhattan, powered by renewable energy, and free of air pollution. And it would reshape American society.
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Feels incomplete
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Superlative
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The world's largest land mammal could help us end cancer. The fastest bird is showing us how to solve a century-old engineering mystery. The oldest tree is giving us insights into climate change. The loudest whale is offering clues about the impact of solar storms. For a long time, scientists ignored superlative life forms as outliers. Increasingly, though, researchers are coming to see great value in studying plants and animals that exist on the outermost edges of the bell curve.
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Fascinating survey of amazing biology
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Into Africa
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"Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" So goes the signature introduction of New York Herald star journalist Henry Morton Stanley to renowned explorer Dr. David Livingstone, who had been missing for six years in the wilds of Africa. Into Africa ushers us into the meeting of these remarkable men. In 1866, when Livingstone journeyed into the heart of the African continent in search of the Nile's source, the land was rough, unknown to Europeans, and inhabited by man-eating tribes.
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Riveting
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What listeners say about River of the Gods
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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- Scott Wallace
- 02-19-23
Excellent. Story and Performance both Outstanding
Don't be put off by a couple of negative reviews that disparage the narration. In fact, the narration is excellent: vanilla American generally, with voices of the characters variously rendered in accurate British, Irish, Indian, and African accents. It's true that Speke's voice, as rendered here, substitutes "w" for "r" -- I don't know whether Speke was said to have had a speech impediment, but anyone familiar with ultra-refined upper-class English accents would not find this voice out of place. In any case, here it serves to distinguish Burton's voice from Speke's for the listener. The book generally casts Speke as the more morally reprehensible, so giving him a somewhat laughable voice seems not inappropriate.
As for the story... well, Alan Moorehead's durable 1960 classic "The White Nile" is more brilliant and exciting and thorough (and his "The Blue Nile" an even better read.). But Millard does a very good job with the material, giving more emphasis to the conflict between Burton and Speke than Moorehead did.
This is a good, popularized account of the events surrounding the search for the source of the Nile, and I think anyone would find it to be a good read. And it will especially appeal to people with personal knowledge of that part of the world.
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- Nancy F. Heller
- 06-05-22
Amazing
Candace millard has done it again, written a riveting book. It’s beautifully read and it reads like fiction despite being non fiction. Amazing! Must read.
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- Heath Fogelman
- 06-17-22
Fascinating story and people
A remarkable story about the extraordinary trials of exploration and the competing explorers who undertook them.
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- Hal
- 06-21-22
Great reader, great book
I loved the reader of this book and the book! Having lived in England his change of accents and persona were fantastic. Having been born in Egypt And now suffering from the deceit theft and general ill will of two selfish brothers, this book spoke to me. What Burton had to overcome physically and mentally in order to maintain the quality of character that he did towards Speak is remarkable. One Can die two ways: be killed by a weapon/disease or one can kill one’s own character. Burton never lowered his own standards, did the right thing and had an amazing adventurous life. And he never lost his center. A remarkable story!
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- Amazon Customer
- 06-23-22
Love this book!
I love historical books about the 19th Century English all over the world, exploring, conquering and generally thinking they are far superior to any nationality or race. This book tells a story in such detail that it’s hard to push the stop button (as opposed to “hard to put down”). I especially loved the narrator when he used different voices as he read quotes. Speke had a mild speech impediment, the dialects of the Scots, the African guides. I knew exactly who was talking. Can’t recommend this book enough.
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- Cynthia Gladstone
- 03-12-23
Fascinating story
Not uplifting but remarkable slice and very informative & important historical slice of the past….& dare I say present! I do say whew!
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- HardyBoy64
- 07-13-23
Another Millard Masterpiece
Great book!!! Candice Millard is the most consistent history writer today. All 4 of her books are gems. I can’t wait for #5!
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- Emily Walton
- 02-21-24
High drama
I loved how the author trusted us to stick with some major shifts in the story - slow burn that sticks with you. Well done
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- LD
- 07-02-23
A story of man's explorations
I've read River of Doubt and Destiny of the Republic by Ms Millard and her other book on Churchill's early years. This book does not quite reach the heights of the books on TR and Garfield. Nonetheless, it's worth the listen. An interesting telling of a story about the British fascination with finding the source of the Nile that not many know about.
My listening experience, however, was diminished by the narrator. The narrator is gifted at accents and vocal tones. That made it easy for him to assign each subject person a specific accent and voice. But flipping back and forth to patrician British accents, French accents, mis-pronouncing Spanish accents...it was too much...was very distracting and in some segments cartoonish. A good narrator can convey the change in person with great subtlety. Here, I fault both the actor and the director for not trusting the listener and exercising such strong and blatant acting rather than just narrating.
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- W. Glencoe
- 09-30-23
My applause to Millard and Burton
Book of some of the fascinating story of English thought, African exploration and history, but most of all the life of an incredible man named Richard Burton.
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1 person found this helpful