Books: He Got His Man

THE RELUCTANT RESCUE (304 pp.)—Olivia Manning—Doubleday ($3.50).

Henry Morton ("Dr. Livingstone, I presume?") Stanley was one of the small boys' heroes of the 19th Century. His reputation is having harder going in the 20th. It is now well established that Missionary Livingstone did not consider himself lost, and had little desire to be "found." But though Stanley came back without his man (Livingstone preferred to continue exploring and freeing natives from Arab slave traders), Journalist Stanley's trip built circulation for James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald, and a profitable career for himself.

He was on a lecture tour 16 years later, when the...