From Publishers Weekly
While many know Sean Connery as "The Man Who Would Be King," few know 19th-century maverick Josiah Harlan, whose adventures probably inspired John Huston's version of Kipling's tale. But the research of British journalist Macintyre (The Englishman's Daughter) gives readers both Harlan's story and a thought-provoking perspective on the history of superpower intervention in Afghanistan. Born to a Pennsylvania Quaker family in 1799, the self-educated Harlan studied Greek and Roman history before becoming a Freemason and shipping out to Calcutta at age 21. Jilted by his fiancée, Harlan decided to seek his fortune on the Asian subcontinent. Calling himself a doctor, he briefly served as a military surgeon with the British army in the Burma War, before tales of Afghanistan fired his imagination. Disguised as a Muslim holy man, Harlan wheeled and dealed his way to Kabul, buying up mercenaries and bribing tribal leaders like a seasoned Afghan warlord. In 1838, Harlan was crowned king of the fierce Hazara people, although the British overthrow of the sitting Afghan ruler soon forced his departure. While mapping Harlan's adventures, Macintyre entertains readers with odd episodes (e.g., Harlan visiting an Afghan sauna fueled by burning night soil) and myriad ironies (e.g., Freemason Harlan trading secrets with an old Rosicrucian sorcerer in an Afghan cave). Harlan's story alone is fascinating, but its resonance with modern-day struggles—Harlan urging the British to try "fiscal diplomacy" (i.e., gold) instead of "invading and subjugating an unoffending people"—makes it compelling. Maps not seen by PW. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
A lost chapter from the annals of romantic travel to the East, Josiah Harlan's exploits in 19th-century Afghanistan and modern-day Pakistan are the stuff of a rollicking boy's adventure tale. At a time when few Westerners had ever ventured into that still-troubled region of the globe, this strange Pennsylvania Quaker plotted intrigue in the court of the Afghan king in the 1830s, did a stint as governor under the Sikh Maharaja of the Punjab and found himself mixed up in the politics of the Great Game, the rivalry between czarist Russia and imperial Britain for control of Central Asia.Harlan fancied himself a latter-day conqueror in the mold of Alexander the Great. Never a modest man, he was prone to extravagant -- if not quixotic -- gestures. In 1838, for example, high atop a mountain in the frozen vastness of the Hindu Kush, Harlan bombastically reinvented himself as an Afghan tribal chief, taking the title "Prince of Ghor, Lord of the Hazarahs." If Harlan's life sounds like something out a Kipling tale, that's partly because it is. As English writer Ben Macintyre tells us in his excellent new biography, Harlan's escapades gave Kipling the theme for one of his famous short stories (also called "The Man Who Would Be King"), a cautionary tale about two adventurers who play at being gods but suffer gruesome consequences for their hubris. Harlan's fate has been obscurity; but for Macintyre, his "unwritten half-life seemed uncannily contemporary," a prophetic counterpoint to the American campaign in Afghanistan. Macintyre's judicious portrait of this American eccentric is partly an act of redress, partly an act of recovery. A dearth of material concerning his subject hobbled his approach, although he did discover a large cache of Harlan's unpublished (and comically purple) writings. Few contemporary sources refer to Harlan; what little there are come from British documents, which, as Macintyre explains, are "conspicuously hostile." Macintyre is even-handed in his treatment of Harlan, critical of his flaws but also sympathetic and generous.Harlan's odyssey began in romantic rejection: On an 1822 commercial mission to India on behalf of his merchant father, he got news that his fiancée had run off with another man. Devastated, Harlan vowed never to return to his home country. He passed himself off as a surgeon (he had no formal training) and worked as a doctor for the British East India Company.But Harlan quickly grew bored with life in the British imperial service; he had wilder, more ambitious schemes for advancement. Fascinated with Alexander the Great's ancient journeys across Central Asia and reports describing Afghanistan as a mythical proving ground where one could be a prince, he set off for the western reaches of British India in 1826. Fetching up in the dusty border town of Ludiana, he found a potential means to glory in the recently deposed Afghan monarch, Shah Shujah al-Moolk. The two made a pact: Harlan would make his way to Kabul and rally the Shah's supporters against his usurper, the Dost Mohammed Khan, and make way for the Shah's triumphant return. Harlan expected a royal title for his troubles.Things, however, did not quite work out that way. Harlan spent the next several years trekking across the North West Frontier (now Pakistan) and eastern Afghanistan. Along the way, he wrote lavish descriptions of the sublime Afghan landscapes, learned fluent Persian and mastered the frightfully complex relationships between Afghan tribes. Once in Kabul, he found the Dost firmly installed, a worthy adversary who commanded respect. Harlan thought better of fomenting a revolt, and made his way back to Punjab, wherehe entered into the service of the Sikh ruler of the Punjab, Ranjit Singh, with whom he would clash. Harlan was transformed in the course of his journeys; what began as an orientalist fantasy became something more than that. Macintyre explains: "The colonist would eventually be colonized, not merely comprehending Afghan culture more profoundly than any foreigner before him, but adopting it." At first Harlan may have been a believer in "civilized expansionism" who spoke the language of "cultural emancipation," but he eventually grew ambivalent about the price of conquest. Ultimately, Harlan's maverick freelancing put him on a collision course with the British. After violently breaking with Ranjit Singh in 1836, Harlan became the Dost's military adviser, helping him to prepare for war against the Sikh kingdom in Punjab. Meanwhile, Britain was furiously trying to prevent the Dost from making a treaty with the Russians. But Khan's dithering only infuriated the British, who then mounted an invasion that proved disastrous both for the invader and Afghanistan.Forced to leave his beloved Kabul in 1839, appalled by the savage tactics of the campaign, Harlan unleashed a polemical volley against Great Britain in his 1842 memoir. Far from being civilized invaders, the English brought "military despotism" and little else to the Afghans, he fumed. The book's controversial reception in Britain -- which was driven out of Afghanistan in a merciless rout that same year -- scuttled Harlan's literary career. Still, reading his potent criticisms of the heavyhanded methods of invading armies, one cannot help but think about other great powers and their entanglements in faraway places. Reviewed by Matthew PriceCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Booklist
In the nineteenth century, just as it is in the twenty-first, Afghanistan was a brutal, chaotic, and dangerous land. Then, agents of the Russian and British empires schemed for control of the country. Into this volatile mix, an unlikely but compelling character inserted himself. Josiah Harlan was raised in a prosperous, pious Quaker family in rural Pennsylvania. As an energetic, insatiably curious boy, he was enthralled with the exploits of Alexander the Great. His fascination with Alexander and the lands of Central Asia led him to a series of military adventures in Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier region that had remarkable parallels with some of the tales told in Rudyard Kipling's classic short story "The Man Who Would Be King." Macintyre, a columnist for the Times of London, tells this story with zest, aplomb, and just a touch of sadness. Harlan was an unusual combination of romanticism and hardheaded practicality, and his encounters with a variety of British imperialists, double-dealing mercenaries, and emirs with a penchant for torture make for a thrilling real-life yarn. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Carol Herman, The Washington Times
"Caine and Connery may have been easier to care about...but Macintyre...gives Harlan’s story its political edge and context."


Review
Praise for The Englishman's Daughter

"Ben Macintyre approaches history the way a fine novelist approaches the world. He sees things that have always been there, ripe with resonance, but have always been overlooked in their fullness. Then he articulates them brilliantly, and suddenly we see the world more clearly and intensely. The Englishman's Daughter, though based on literal history, is as true as art." --Robert Olen Butler

"A poignant love story set against the backdrop of war, tragedy, treachery [that] turns into a page turning mystery and a spy story worthy of Deighton or le Carré." --Lyn MacDonald, The Times (London)

"An unusually poignant work of history." --Rosemary Herbert, The Boston Globe

"A gripping, illuminating story.' --Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times



Alexander Frater, The New York Times Book Review
"Macintyre’s riveting, scrupulously researched book should place this remarkable man where he rightfully belongs."


Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Globe
"Macintyre has been able to piece together this never-before-told story by a great archival find…[He] tells [it] with unflagging élan."


Raymond Fiore, Entertainment Weekly
"Macintyre unearths a trove of unseen documents...and imparts a tactile understanding of Afghanistan’s cultural impulses. B+"


Leela Jacinto, The Nation
"The book is a Kiplingeque fantasy guaranteed to get even the dourest reader’s blood racing."


The Baltimore Sun
"[A] fascinating account of Harlan’s unlikely adventures…Thanks to Macintyre’s fine book, Harlan at last gets his due."


The New Yorker
"Macintyre recounts Harlan’s travels with dispatch, and draws on unpublished journals to let his subject’s voice seep through."


The Weekly Standard
"Macintyre invests his subject with a humanity that…sets him apart…[He] should be lauded for reviving this indomitable figure…"


The Advocate
"…authoritative history paired with vivid storytelling…that gets at the flesh and blood of events and people…"


Book Description
The Riveting Account of the American Who Inspired Kipling's Classic Tale and the John Huston Movie

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 in the mountainous wilds of Afghanistan. He declared himself Prince of Ghor, Lord of the Hazarahs, spiritual and military heir to Alexander the Great.

The true story of Josiah Harlan, a Pennsylvania Quaker and the first American ever to enter Afghanistan, has never been told before, yet the life and writings of this extraordinary man echo down the centuries, as America finds itself embroiled once more in the land he first explored and described 180 years ago.

Soldier, spy, doctor, naturalist, traveler, and writer, Josiah Harlan wanted to be a king, with all the imperialist hubris of his times. In an extraordinary twenty-year journey around Central Asia, he was variously employed as surgeon to the Maharaja of Punjab, revolutionary agent for the exiled Afghan king, and then commander in chief of the Afghan armies. In 1838, he set off in the footsteps of Alexander the Great across the Hindu Kush and forged his own kingdom, only to be ejected from Afghanistan a few months later by the invading British.

Using a trove of newly discovered documents and Harlan's own unpublished journals, Ben Macintyre tells the astonishing true story of the man who would be the first and last American king.



About the Author
Ben Macintyre is the author of three books, most recently The Englishman's Daughter (FSG, 2002). A senior writer and columnist for The Times of London, he was the newspaper's correspondent in New York, Paris, and Washington D.C. He now lives in London.



Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan by Ben Macintyre. Copyright © 2004 by Macintyre Books Inc. To be published in April, 2004 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.


PREFACE

In the winter of 1839, a conqueror, enthroned on a large bull elephant, raised his standard in the wild mountains of the Hindu Kush. His soldiers cheered, fired matchlock rifles into the air, and beat swords against their shields made of hide. Two thousand native horsemen shouted their loyalty, each in his own tongue: Afghan Pathans, Persian Qizil-bash, Hindus, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Hazaras of the highlands, descendants of the Mongol horde. Six cannons roared to salute the flag, their echoes ricocheting across the snowy pinnacles.

The commander reviewed his troops with satisfaction. Not yet forty, the face above the long black beard was already as rugged as the landscape around it. Beneath a flowing fox fur cloak he wore robes of maroon and green satin, a girdle of silver and lace, and a great silver buckle in the shape of a soldier's breastplate. His cat-skin cap was circled with gold.

Like Alexander of Macedon, who had led his army on the same mountain path twenty-one centuries earlier, the leader was called great by his followers, and his titles, past, present, and future, were many: Prince of Ghor, Paramount Chief of the Hazarajat, Lord of Kurram, governor of Jasrora and Gujarat, personal surgeon to Maharaja Ranjit Singh of the Five Rivers, the Highly Stationed One equipped with Ardour and Might, Chief of the mighty Khans, Paragon of the Magnificent Grandees, Holy Sahib Zader, Companion of the Imperial Stirrup, Nearest Friend of Shah Shoojah al-Moolk, King of Afghanistan, Chief Sirdar and Commandant of the invincible armies of Dost Mohammed Khan, mighty Amir of Kabul, Pearl of the Ages and Commander of the Faithful. He was also known as Hallan Sahib Bahadur, victor of the battle of Jamrud, slaver of infidel Sikhs, scourge of Uzbek slavers, and was even said to have magical power. Some claimed that he was an expert alchemist who had forged a priceless talisman to make the dumb speak and conjured gold from base metal, a teller of stories in every tongue, and master in the art of intrigue. In his own language, the prince was known by other names: doctor, soldier, spy, botanist, naturalist, and poet; but also mercenary, even mountebank.

His Highness never traveled without his books, and when the guard had been posted for the night and she mastiffs how led to ward off the wolf packs in the ravines, he retired to his tent and wrote, tumbling torrents of words in a language none but he could read. In his journal he recorded: "I unfurled my country's banner to the breeze, under a salute of twenty-six guns, and the star-spangled banner gracefully waved amidst the icy peaks, seemingly sacred to the solitude of an undisturbed eternity."

For His Highness Hallar Sahib had another name and another title: Josiah Harlan, Quaker, of Chester County, Pennsylvania.


PROLOGUE

In 1989, as an aspiring foreign correspondent, I was sent to Afghanistan to cover the final stages of the decade-long war between the Soviet army and the CIA-backed Mujahideen Guerrillas. Afghanistan was then the crucible of the Cold War. Just as the Russians and the British had tussled for preminence there in the nineteenth century in the undeclared war Rudyard Kipling called "the Great Game," so the United States and the U.S.S.R. fought for supremacy in the Afghan mountains at the end of the twentieth. The Soviets were losing and would soon withdraw, leaving behind fifty thousand dead soldiers and a million dead Afghans.

Having made arrangements to join one of the seven Mujahideen groups, I headed to Peshawar on Pakistan's North-West Frontier, forty miles from the Afghan border. Once a part of Afghanistan itself and the summer capital of Afghan kings, Peshawar was the principal staging post in Pakistan for the anti-Soviet insurgency. The bazaar was thronged with tough-looking Pushtuns, the Afghan warrior tribe the British knew as Pathans, many with machine guns slung casually over their shoulders. An enterprising stall holder offered to sell me a captured soviet tank. I settled instead for the standard Mujahideen outfit, obligatory for any "resistance tour": Pathan pancake hat and dun-colored saggy pajumas, or shalwar kamiz, over which I wore the regulation foreign correspondent's sleeveless photographer's jacket with many unnecessary pockets. I had already grown something that might pass for a beard.

At dawn the next day a trio of armed Mujahideen knocked at the door of my hotel room and led me to a waiting jeep. For the next twelve hours we drove up the Khyber Pass, and then onto rocky tracks that wound deep into the mountains, until we finally arrived at the camp of the Mujahideen commander Gulbuddin Hekmaryar. I was too callow to know it at the time, but black-bearded Hekmaryar was the most fundamentalist of the Mujahideen leaders, a man as ruthless as he was ambitious, whose brutal shelling of Kabul in the civil war that followed killed thousands of civilians and devastated the city. The entrance to his camp was marked by a lone sentry and a large, dead culture. impaled on a post, the first victim I had seen of the Afghan war. Over the ensuing weeks I was swept away by my own Afghan adventure. The Mujahideen fighters looked after me as one might a vulnerable and rather dim younger brother, and I tiled breatheless dispatches for my newspaper, with rather too much curphasis on the first person. I thought myself very dashing indeed.

Returning to Peshawar after my first stint "inside", I went to the American Club, the social hub of the Western crowd. The place was often frequented by journalists, young ones like myself, but also scarred veterans in their anecdotage, along with arms dealers, aid workers, and monosyllabic Americans who were probably spies or mercenaries. Almost everyone had stories of night skirmishes and narrow escapes, the self-inflating chaff of the war zone. We were all living out our romantic fantasies in a land that invited and nourished them.

During the day we longed around the pool and relaxed by swimming, planning, and Kipling. The works of Rudyard Kipling were required reading, for Britain's hard of imperialism captured the wildness and wonder of the North-West Frontier like no other writer, before or since. It was in Peshawar, fresh from my first foray into Afghanistan, that I first read "The Man Who Would Be King," Kipling's timeless short story that John Huston later adapted into a film starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine. Written in 1888, when Kipling was just twenty-three and working as a journalist for the Allahabad Pioneer, "The Man Who Would Be King" tells the rale of a hearded adventurer, Daniel Dravot, who penetrates the remotest mountains of Afghanistan in the middle years of Victoria's reign, disguised as a Muslim holy man. Following the trail of Alexander the Great deep into the Hindu Kush, he trains a tribal army and is crowned king by the local tribesmen. Adopting the symbols of Freemasonry, he proclaims his own take religion and is exalted as a living god until, like all who aspire to deity, he crashes to earth. It was thrilling stuff, a story of freelance imperialism in which a white man becomes a powerful potentate in distant land, but also a cautionary tale of colonial hubris, ending in disaster. The narrator is a newspaperman, who hears the story from the adventurer's dying partner. "The Man Who Would Be King" made a profound and lasting impression on me.

Over the next few years, I made several more reporting trips to Afghanistan and twice visited Kabul, but after the Soviets retreated, the West swiftly lost interest. The defeat of the Soviet army by the Afghan Mujahideen contributed to the collapse of Communism, but as Afghanistan fractured into civil war, the country was left to slide toward fundamentalism, eventually producing Islam's most mutant form, the extremist, terrorist Taliban. Long before the rule of the mullahs, the news story had moved on-and so had I, to New York, then Paris, and finally to Washington. I returned to Britain just a few days before September 11, 2001.

In the wake of that atrocity, as America declared war on terrorism and the Taliban, I found myself writing about Afghanistan again, trawling through the histories to piece together a narrative of that broken land for my newspaper. While American "daisy cutter" bombs were blasting al-Qaida fighters out of the caves of Tora Bora and special forces were hunting through the same Afghan hills I had known a decade earlier, I was combing the stacks of the British Library. There was one name that caught my attention, deep in the footnotes of books about nineteenth-century Afghanistan: Josiah Harlan, the first American ever to enter that country. A Pennsylvania-born Quaker and Freemason, Harlan had slipped into Kabul disguised "as a dervish" in 1824, long before the British got there. The American adventurer was said to have trained an army for the amir of Kabul, crossed the Hindu Kush, and proclaimed himself a prince in the mountains. His story sounded impossibly romantic, deeply implausible, and strangely familiar. I was not the first to notice the similarity between this life and Kipling's short story. The U.S. State Department précis on Afghanistan notes that "Josiah Harlan, and adventurer from Pennsylvania who was an adviser in Afghan politics in the 1830s, reputedly inspired Rudyard Kipling's story 'The Man Who Would be King.'" Harlan's reputation would certainly have been known in Allahabad when Kipling was working there: the novelist adapted the American Freemason and former soldier into an English Freemason and former soldier, but the parallels between the real Josiah Harlan and the fictional Daniel Dravot, Kipling's self-made king of Kafiristan, are too close to be coincidental.

There were tantalizingly few details about the life of the American, and the principal contemporary sources, almost all British, were conspicuously hostile. The first official British history of the First Afghan War (1839-42) dismissed him as "clever and unscrupulous . . . an American adventurer, now a doctor and now a general, who was ready to take any kind of service with any one disposed to pay him." Harlan published only one book in his lifetime, a polemical anti-British tract. In 1939, more than sixty years after his death, a researcher pulled together some fragments of his unpublished work, but concluded that the bulk of Harlan's writings-journals, letter, and an entire manuscript recording his adventures-had all been destroyed in a house fire in 1929.

Harlan, it seemed, was doomed to remain a fleeting and enigmatic presence in history, a figure in fiction, but not in fact. As American soldiers poured into Afghanistan at the beginning of the twenty-first century, seeking to bring order to the chaos, this unwritten half-life seemed uncannily contemporary. Harlan had taken the pioneer spirit to a completely different frontier. Here was a Wild West figure in the far wilder East, who had achieved a peculiarly American feat by voyaging over the sea to terra incognita and making himself a king. And yet, in his own country he was entirely unknown.

I extended my search to the Punjab, where Harlan had lived in the 1820s, to his birthplace in Pennsylvania, to San Francisco, where he died, and back to Kabul. Gradually Harlan's life began to take shape: in the official records of Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Lahore, in the memoirs and diaries of contemporary travelers and soldiers, and in the intelligence archives of imperial India. In a tiny museum in Chester County, Pennsylvania, I finally discovered Harlan's lost voice: in an old box, buried and forgotten among the files, was a tattered manuscript handwritten in curling copperplate, most of Harlan's missing autobiography, unnoticed and unread since his death, along with letters, poems, and drawings.

In 1842, Harlan boasted to a newspaper reporter that he had once been the prince of Ghor or Ghorce, a realm high in the Hindu Kush, under a secret treaty with its ruler. "He transferred his principality to me in feudal service, binding himself and his tribe to pay tribute for ever," Harlan was quoted as saying. "The absolute and complete possession of his government was legally conveyed according to official form, by a treaty which I have still preserved." This contract was assumed to be lost. Some claimed it had never existed. But there, yellow with age at the bottom of the box, was a document, written in Persian and stamped with an intricately beautiful oval seal: a treaty, 170 years old, forged between an Afghan prince and the man who would be king.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"In the winter of 1838, an adventurer, surrounded by native troops and mounted on an elephant, raised the American flag on the summit of the Hindu Kush in the mountainous wilds of Afghanistan. He declared himself Prince of Ghor, Paramount Chief of the Hazarajat, and the spiritual and military heir to Alexander the Great. His name was Josiah Harlan. A Pennsylvania Quaker, Harlan was the first American ever to enter Afghanistan. The Man Who Would Be King is the extraordinary true story of the man who inspired Kipling's classic tale." "Soldier, spy, doctor, naturalist, traveler, and writer, Josiah Harlan was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, in 1799. At the age of twenty-two, after a failed love affair, he set off on what was to become an amazing twenty-year journey through Central Asia. Among his many exploits, he was variously employed as surgeon to the Maharaja of Punjab, revolutionary agent for the exiled Afghan King, and commander in chief of the Afghan armies. He modeled himself after Alexander the Great and followed in his footsteps across the Hindu Kush, where he successfully forged his own kingdom - only to be ejected from Afghanistan a few months later by the invading British. Harlan retired to the United States, where he raised his own regiment during the Civil War and engaged in a variety of harebrained schemes, including the introduction of the camel to the American West as a viable means of locomotion, and the cultivation of exotic Afghan grapes." Based on the remarkable discovery of Josiah Harlan's own unpublished journals, The Man Who Would Be King tells for the first time the story of a political adventurer who personified an imperialistic impulse fully sixty years before the Spanish-American War. Colorful, exotic, and entertaining, this is also a cautionary tale that echoes down the centuries as the United States finds itself entangled, once again, with Afghanistan.

FROM THE CRITICS

Matthew Price - The Washington Post

As English writer Ben Macintyre tells us in his excellent new biography, Harlan's escapades gave Kipling the theme for one of his famous short stories (also called The Man Who Would Be King), a cautionary tale about two adventurers who play at being gods but suffer gruesome consequences for their hubris. Harlan's fate has been obscurity; but for Macintyre, his "unwritten half-life seemed uncannily contemporary," a prophetic counterpoint to the American campaign in Afghanistan. Macintyre's judicious portrait of this American eccentric is partly an act of redress, partly an act of recovery.

The New York Times

Macintyre's riveting, scrupulously researched book should place this remarkable man where he rightfully belongs: in the pantheon of 19th-century American folk heroes. Harlan's own journal -- never published (there's a story about that too, involving a venomous hate campaign mounted in England) -- echoes through these pages with an authority and poetic resonance Kipling himself might have admired. — Alexander Frater

The New Yorker

A broken heart can lead men astray, but few have wandered as far off course as Josiah Harlan, a Pennsylvania Quaker. In 1822, after sailing to Calcutta on a merchant ship, he learned that his fiancée in America had married another man. He set out on a journey that ultimately brought him to Afghanistan, with the mad hope of carving out a kingdom for himself. Amazingly, he halfway succeeded. Trading on little more than a flair for diplomatic pomp, Harlan became a confidant of Afghan princes and a player in the Great Game between Russia and Britain. Macintyre recounts Harlan’s travels with dispatch, and draws on unpublished journals to let his subject’s voice seep through. Harlan was relentless in cataloguing his obsessions, which included camels, alchemy, and fresh fruit; the first American to visit Kabul, he wrote memorably about the sherbet sold in the bazaar there, made with snow carried by donkey from the Hindu Kush.

Publishers Weekly

While many know Sean Connery as "The Man Who Would Be King," few know 19th-century maverick Josiah Harlan, whose adventures probably inspired John Huston's version of Kipling's tale. But the research of British journalist Macintyre (The Englishman's Daughter) gives readers both Harlan's story and a thought-provoking perspective on the history of superpower intervention in Afghanistan. Born to a Pennsylvania Quaker family in 1799, the self-educated Harlan studied Greek and Roman history before becoming a Freemason and shipping out to Calcutta at age 21. Jilted by his fianc e, Harlan decided to seek his fortune on the Asian subcontinent. Calling himself a doctor, he briefly served as a military surgeon with the British army in the Burma War, before tales of Afghanistan fired his imagination. Disguised as a Muslim holy man, Harlan wheeled and dealed his way to Kabul, buying up mercenaries and bribing tribal leaders like a seasoned Afghan warlord. In 1838, Harlan was crowned king of the fierce Hazara people, although the British overthrow of the sitting Afghan ruler soon forced his departure. While mapping Harlan's adventures, Macintyre entertains readers with odd episodes (e.g., Harlan visiting an Afghan sauna fueled by burning night soil) and myriad ironies (e.g., Freemason Harlan trading secrets with an old Rosicrucian sorcerer in an Afghan cave). Harlan's story alone is fascinating, but its resonance with modern-day struggles-Harlan urging the British to try "fiscal diplomacy" (i.e., gold) instead of "invading and subjugating an unoffending people"-makes it compelling. Maps not seen by PW. Agent, Ed Victor. (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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