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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

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Mungo Park (1771–1805) was a Scottish explorer who, at the age of twenty-four, travelled alone to Africa in search of the Niger River. A decade later, he returned to Africa on an ill-fated second mission, this time sponsored by the British government. Though there were no survivors of this journey, Park and the last few members of his expedition were reported to have met their deaths while attempting to follow the Niger to its end. Kate Ferguson Marsters is Assistant Professor of English at Gannon University.

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