Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa

"This edition is well analyzed, with a lengthy introduction and voluminous footnotes that significantly add to an understanding of the original document. Important for any collection on Africa ..."--Library Journal "Western Sudan ... means for me an episode in Mungo Park's life. It means for me the vision of a young, emaciated, fair-haired man, clad simply in a tattered shirt and worn-out breeches, gasping painfully for breath and lying on the ground in the shade of an enormous African tree (species unknown), while from a neighboring village of grass huts a charitable black-skinned woman is approaching him with a calabash full of pure cold water, a simple draught which, according to himself, seems to have effected a miraculous cure." - Joseph Conrad, from Geography and Some Explorers "In a time when the world has grown tame and we have to manufacture our adventures, Mungo Park's Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa is both an education and a delight. The Africa he entered was uncharted and unknown, the farthest outpost of a truly wild and richly mysterious planet. He was the first European to go there and come back again, and he rewarded his society - and ours - with a geographical and anthropological marvel of a book, an adventure story to cap them all." - T. Coraghessan Boyle