David Livingstone - His Own Words

David Livingstone - His Own Words: HOW to Explore Your Calling

He crossed a continent on foot. He buried his wife on a riverbank. He died on his knees, mid-prayer, refusing to go home until his work was finished. David Livingstone was a Blantyre mill-hand who taught himself Latin on the factory floor and became one of the most consequential explorers in history - the first European to cross Africa coast to coast, the first to see the falls he named for his queen, Victoria, and the man whose eyewitness accounts of the East African slave trade helped turn a nation's conscience against it.This volume tells that story entirely in his own words - pulled from his published journals, his letters, and the narrative of the expeditions that consumed his life. You'll walk with him through the Kalahari on nothing but trust in the extraordinary skills of a Bushman guide. You'll sit beside him as a lion's jaws close on his arm and he watches, strangely calm, "like a mouse after the first shake of a cat." You'll read the letter he never sent home in time, and the diary entry describing the grave he wanted - a still forest, no hand to disturb his bones - written five years before he got exactly that death, kneeling in prayer, four thousand miles from anyone who loved him.Along the way: a tense standoff with an armed war party where he simply refuses to fire first. A night he narrowly escapes an assassination attempt meant for someone else. A market-day massacre that leaves him certain, for the first time, of what his life is actually for. And a quiet, little-known chapter - his 1861 stop on the island of Johanna (now called Anjouan), where he shot and preserved a specimen of a giant fruit bat that would carry his name into science a century and a half before a modern-day naturalist Shumba (the editor of this book) would go looking for the last surviving examples of this critically endangered species.This is not a sanitized hero's tale. It is Livingstone unfiltered - stubborn, self-critical, occasionally funny, and utterly incapable of turning back.