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    Josiah the Great: The True Story of The Man Who Would Be King
    Unavailable
    Josiah the Great: The True Story of The Man Who Would Be King
    Unavailable
    Josiah the Great: The True Story of The Man Who Would Be King
    Ebook514 pages9 hours

    Josiah the Great: The True Story of The Man Who Would Be King

    By Ben Macintyre

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    The amazing tale of a resourceful and unscrupulous early-19th-century American adventurer who forges his own kingdom in the wilds of Afghanistan.

    In the year 1838, a young adventurer, surrounded by his native troops and mounted on an elephant, raised the American flag on the summit of the Hindu Kush and declared himself Prince of Ghor, the heir to Alexander the Great.

    Josiah Harlan, the first American to set foot in Afghanistan, would become the model for Kipling’s ‘The Man Who Would be King’, but the true story of his life is stranger than fiction. A soldier, spy, doctor, naturalist and writer, Harlan set off into the wilds of Central Asia after a failed love affair in 1820. Following a brief stint as a surgeon in the East India Company’s army, he joined the court of the deposed Afghan monarch Shah Shujah, and then slipped into Kabul disguised as a Muslim priest to foment rebellion. For the next two decades he would play a pivotal role in the bloody politics of the region.

    Using a trove of newly discovered documents, including Harlan’s long-lost journals, Ben Macintyre has followed Harlan’s footsteps to uncover an astonishing, untold chapter in the history of the Great Game. If you enjoyed William Dalrymple’s ‘Return of a King’, ‘Josiah the Great’ should be on your reading list.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateFeb 2, 2012
    ISBN9780007406852
    Unavailable
    Josiah the Great: The True Story of The Man Who Would Be King
    Author

    Ben Macintyre

    Ben MacIntyre is the author of ‘Forgotten Fatherland’, published by Macmillan to great acclaim. He is Paris correspondent on ‘The Times’.

    Read more from Ben Macintyre

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    Reviews for Josiah the Great

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      Ben Macintyre's biography of Josiah Marshall, Pennsylvania Quaker turned Afghan adventurer, is an interesting if somewhat uncritical treatment, relying as it does mostly on Marshall's own (and thus presumably biased) accounts of his adventures. Marshall's exploits certainly are worthy of attention, but a bit more perspective on them would have been welcome. A few other small errors marred the book for me too (George Washington did not sign the Declaration of Independence!), but on the whole it's a perfectly acceptable popular history (and the last couple chapters on Marshall's post-Afghanistan life are very well done).
    • 4/5
      A piece of forgotten history made incredibly relevant by the times. But the author wisely avoids the temptation to draw too much from it. Instead, he simply presents the story of a man who throws his Quaker upbringing to the winds to seek fame and fortune in an unknown part of the world. A good retelling of an interesting story.