(from my personal reading journal, Feb. 14, 2024)
I love a focused microhistory, and if Millard's catalog of bombastically-titled bestsellers are to be considered, the genre has some absolute bangers. River of the Gods focuses not, as I first assumed, on the overall European obsession with the Mile, but on the very tail end of that obsession, particularly the 1856-1860 journey to Lake Tanganyika, its precipitating events, and the fallout in the lives of those who undertook the journey.
The expedition was headed by orientalist, polyglot, and pervert Richard Burton, and he brought along notables John Speke, who went on to see the lake Victoria Nyanza (the "actual" Nile source until around 2006) and stole Burton's glory; and Sidi Mubarak Bombay, a waYao man sold into slavery in India who later became the best-traveled man in Africa. the journey was harrowing to say the least, and wasn't entirely fruitful in the end (the Akagera river is a more remote source, identified in 1950), but was a great geographic boon for Western understanding at the time.
I appreciated Millard's handling of the uncomfortable questions a modern reader would have for such a tale--what about the imperialism? the African guides?--and found her exploration of Speke's role in the ideologic background of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 fascinating. It turns out that the explorers of the time largely knew the value of native guides and their expert knowledge (even if the held proto-eugenic beliefs about them), but the heads of society back in the West felt differently, and their influence became the prevailing ideal.
Overall, quite interesting. I'd like to learn more about this era of history, fraught as it was, and would like to read more of her previous books.