Sad Story of Burton, Speke, and the Nile; or, Was John Hanning Speke a Cad?

W. B. Carnochan is the Richard W. Lyman Professor of the Humanities Emeritus at Stanford University and former Director of the Stanford Humanities Center. His works include Gibbon's Solitude: The Inward World of the Historian (1987), The Battleground of the Curriculum: Liberal Education and American Experience (1993), and Momentary Bliss: An American Memoir (1999).

• The Sad Story of Burton, Speke, and the Nile; or, Was John Hanning Speke a Cad? Looking at the Evidence W. B. Carnochan Stanford General Books An Imprint of Stanford University Press Stanford, California 2006

"Bliss Carnochan cuts through the mythology surrounding Burton's character and the events leading to Speke's tragic death with a lucid and sensitive analysis of the documents. He does so with relish for his tale and no loss of its inherent drama." - Ann Schlee "The Sad Store of Burton, Speke, and the Nile is a fascinating whodunit..." - Wall Street Journal "Carnochan investigates the history of the case through a careful reading of contemporary accounts, making for a strangely engaging tale that's part detective story, part textual analysis." - Geographical Magazine "Employing a close but never pedantic reading of the published writings of Speke and Burton, Carnochan gives us a fuller, more nuanced and insightful analysis of their clash of personalities and its consequences than we can find elsewhere. This is an astute, engaging, and beautifully written study." - Dane Kennedy "A detective story with an important scholarly subtext, a rattling good travelers' tale that is also a deep and unresolved tragedy, The Sad Story of Burton, Speke, and the Nile holds the reader's attention from beginning to end." - Nicolas Barker (editor of The Book Collector)