Edward Hoagland has taken a place among the best living practitioners of the sentence—and like many present prose writers he concentrates not on fiction but on fact…. Last year he summed up a decade of his essays with two books: The Edward Hoagland Reader … collects 21 essays from four earlier books; African Calliope, which recounts "A Journey to the Sudan," we must, for lack of better terminology, call a travel book.

If it is clearly inadequate to call African Calliope a travel book, it is difficult in general to categorize Edward Hoagland. Although he uses much factual detail, he is not a writer of what The New Yorker calls fact-pieces, like the wonderful John McPhee. Nor is he typically an autobiographer, whose subject is endlessly himself. His writing combines world and self, or creates a self that we watch with delight as it observes and renders the world...