A Splendid Savage: The Restless Life of Frederick Russell Burnham

by Steve Kemper Narrated by Peter Berkrot

Overview

Frederick Russell Burnham's amazing story resembles a newsreel fused with a Saturday matinee thriller.

One of the few people who could turn his garrulous friend Theodore Roosevelt into a listener, Burnham was once world-famous as “the American scout.” His expertise in woodcraft, learned from frontiersmen and Indians, helped inspire another friend, Robert Baden-Powell, to found the Boy Scouts. His adventures encompassed Apache wars and range feuds, booms and busts in mining camps around the globe, explorations in remote regions of Africa, and death-defying military feats that brought him renown and high honors. His skills led to his unusual appointment, as an American, to be chief of scouts for the British during the Boer War, where his daring exploits earned him the Distinguished Service Order from King Edward VII.

After a lifetime pursuing golden prospects from the deserts of Mexico and Africa to the tundra of the Klondike, Burnham found wealth, in his sixties, near his childhood home in southern California. Other men of his era had a few such adventures, but Burnham had them all. His friend H. Rider Haggard, author of many bestselling exotic tales, remarked, “In real life he is more interesting than any of my heroes.”

Among other well-known individuals who figure in Burnham's story are Cecil Rhodes and William Howard Taft, as well as some of the wealthiest men of the day, including John Hays Hammond, E. H. Harriman, Harry Payne Whitney, and the Guggenheim brothers.

Failure and tragedy streaked his life as well, but he was endlessly willing to set off into the unknown, where the future felt up for grabs and values worth dying for were at stake. Steve Kemper brings a quintessential American story to vivid life in this gripping biography.

Editorial Reviews

History Book Club - Clyde A. Milner

"A splendid book about an amazing life. If this work were not history, it might seem an overly ambitious adventure novel whose hero deserved a multi-volume series."

True West - Stuart Rosebrook

"A brilliant biography of a Westering man whose life would have been remembered by all who have studied and written about the West, except for the fact that the arc of his life, which reads like a Jack London adventure, stretched well beyond the borders of the American West in time and scope."

Outside magazine - Jonah Ogles

"Frederick Russell Burnham, whose life was so full of derring-do and fearless exploits that, lacking historical record, one would assume him to be myth."

Historical Novel Society

"Monumental…every chapter of which could inspire a thrilling novel on its own."

Wall Street Journal - Maxwell Carter

"There’s almost too much for one book, let alone one life…Mr. Kemper’s narrative is rich, detailed, and pitch-perfect, with the witty and wonderful skipping off every page."

MAY 2017 - AudioFile

Narrator Peter Berkrot’s voice is earthy, raw, and authoritative. It's the perfect match for the story of Frederick Russell Burnham, a man with a life that seems so improbable that, well, it could only be true. In the 1800s, Burham was a frontiersman with a life made for an epic biography. His adventures include pursuing riches in the Yukon Gold Rush, engaging as a wartime tracker during the Apache wars, and traveling to Africa. Along the way, Burnham founded the Boy Scouts. Listeners of this wide-ranging biography will find Berkrot’s performance to be grounding, even when the events being recounted seem far-fetched. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2015-10-14
Freelance journalist Kemper (A Labyrinth of Kingdoms: 10,000 Miles through Islamic Africa, 2012, etc.) revives a legendary adventurer, "one of the only people who could turn [his] garrulous…friend Theodore Roosevelt into a listener." All but forgotten today, at the turn of the last century the exploits of the American scout and prospector Frederick Russell Burnham (1861-1947) were front-page news. Burnham lived a life of astonishing adventure "almost too far-fetched for credibility, as if an old newsreel got mashed up with a Saturday matinee thriller." Often accompanied by his "intrepid wife Blanche, who could charm high society or handle a shotgun, depending on what was needed," Burnham prospected widely in North America and Africa and tracked Apaches in Arizona and Boers in South Africa, where he scouted behind enemy lines over 100 times. He joined the Yukon gold rush and protected President William Howard Taft from an assassin. Kemper portrays Burnham as exemplifying the adventurer's virtues of courage, sacrifice, self-discipline, self-reliance, and physical and mental toughness. He was possibly the best white tracker who ever lived. War correspondent Richard Harding Davis called him "the Sherlock Holmes of all out-of-doors," and Lord Frederick Roberts, commander of British forces in South Africa, wrote, "any one of Major Burnham's adventures would provide an ordinary man with conversation for the rest of his life." In Kemper's sure and enthusiastic hands, Burnham storms through the pages of this rousing volume, outwitting determined foes and collecting mining and ranching interests on two continents that never seemed to pay off as expected. No two-dimensional action hero, the author deftly shows Burnham in the round as an embodiment of contradictions in his attitudes and actions regarding politics, wealth, nature, and family. Kemper also addresses with honesty and sensitivity attitudes about race and empire that Burnham's activities incidentally served and that he shared to some degree with many public men of the age. Thrilling adventures presented with the flair they deserve.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169808865
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	03/21/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

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