Van Wyk, Peter

The author is a fitting choice to write about Fred Burnham, the American who inspired the Boy Scouts. In 1965, he met Burnham's son, Roderick, who had accompanied his father to Africa in 1893. Rod spent a decade providing the author with recollections, books, diaries, journals and newspaper and magazine articles.

But the great prize, forty years of private correspondence between Burnham and Baden-Powell, was not unsealed from the archives at Yale University until AD 2000.

The author has been a foreign correspondent in the Far East and has written for "Readers Digest and other magazines...