The crotchety explorer, I presume

The most romantic of the 38 anniversaries my wife and I have celebrated came in 2005. We spent the night in a hut on the banks of the Zambezi River hearing a symphony of snorting hippos. The next morning I saw a mention of how the 1,600-mile Zambezi was missionary/explorer David Livingstone’s heartbreak: He hoped it would be a great avenue for commerce, but it proved to be unnavigable.

That tidbit led me to read widely about Livingstone, and to write about him in WORLD columns published on July 16 and Aug. 6, 2005—but Jay Milbrandt’s The Daring Heart of David Livingstone (Nelson, 2014) still taught me a lot. Milbrandt brings out Livingstone’s great desire to end the slave trade in East Africa and also shows him to be a loner, not a leader: “He could go weeks without speaking a single word.”

Milbrandt shows how personality nuances that qualify us for one calling disqualify us for another: “The unwavering persistence that allowed him to rise above other explorers commandeered his personality under stress. He refused to answer his men’s questions. … The longer his men went without encouragement from their leader, the deeper he entrenched bitterness. … His private journals overflowed with words, humor, and wit. The expedition received none of it.”

Livingstone resented followers and family because they slowed him up: “Traveling alone, Livingstone pressed ahead at a tenacious pace. This strategy made him a successful explorer—a leg up over other explorers of his day, [who] would travel in large caravans with hundreds of porters carrying many months of supplies.” But working faster than others had a cost. He neglected his wife. His eldest son, instead of joining him in Africa, drifted to the United Sates, enlisted in the Civil War, and died in battle there.

In 1864, after Livingstone failed to navigate the Zambezi, he wrote, “The future will justify my words and hopes.” He was the successor to William Wilberforce in fighting the slave trade, and through his efforts Britain ended it in East Africa after battling both Portuguese colonialists and Muslim traders. He had almost zero evangelistic success in his lifetime, but mustard seeds he sowed grew into large plants. He failed in his fixation to find the source of the Nile, but inspired British boys to be bold and courageous.

Short stops

New, popularly written histories about other exciting 19th-century events include Matthew Goodman’s Eighty Days (Ballantine, 2013), a well-told tale of Nellie Bly’s record-setting circumnavigation of the world (and Elizabeth Bisland’s second-place finish). Edward Dolnick tells good stories about the California gold rush of 1849 in The Rush (Little Brown, 2014). Daniel Stashower’s The Hour of Peril (Minotaur, 2013) describes how Allan Pinkerton and others foiled the secret plot to murder Abraham Lincoln just before his inauguration in 1861.

Vikings are like dinosaurs, powerful and long-time-ago, so they fascinate kids: Parents who want to learn about the wild men that Christianity civilized can pick up Anders Winroth’s The Age of the Vikings (Princeton University Press, 2014), a scholarly book about the Scandinavian warriors who ravaged towns alongside waterways from a.d. 700 to 1100. One chapter shows how Christianity came to Viking lands but did not drive out older faiths, as evidenced by a photo of a soapstone mold that allowed its artisan-owner to cast either a Christian cross or a model of Thor’s hammer. It’s too bad that Winroth assumes Scandinavia’s semi-embrace of Christianity came about through power politics rather than any changes of heart.

In Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914-1918 (Allen Lane, 2014), scholar Alexander Watson explains well the sense of encirclement that Central Powers leaders felt, as well as the series of bad decisions they made that resulted in a lost war, a dismal peace, and preparations for a new and even more deadly war. —M.O.