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I'm currently reading "Explorers of the Nile", by Tim Jeal, which I was prompted to buy by hearing an abridged radio adaptation on BBC Radio about a year ago. The book tells the story of the attempts by European explorers in the mid 19th century to discover the source of the Nile; the "holy grail" of African exploration at the time. A fascinating story it is, too, with bitter rivalry and backstabbing between the explorers involved. The book makes this complex part of history very readable, and is very well-researched. It's a long book, so I'm reading it alongside other things.
One of the interesting things about a book like this is to read the original sources referred in the book. Virtually all of them are available as page-scanned PDFs at "archive.org", and many of them were extremely popular books in their own day, particularly Richard Burton's (somewhat exaggerated) accounts of his travels, and Henry Morton Stanley's book "How I Found Livingstone" (he of the famous "Dr Livingstone, I presume?" question). Stanley was a newspaper journalist who was sent to Africa by his proprietor to both search for Livingstone (who most people believed dead) and to write about it for his newspaper.
Excellent book. Highly recommended.
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