Edward Hoagland has been enormously praised, and with some justice. The quality of his huge output is consistently high. He is so good that he ought to be much better. The Edward Hoagland Reader and African Calliope, both published in 1979, show his power and his weakness.

As a good essayist he is interested in everything, his especial passions being the wilderness, animals, circuses, crowds, and the city. In all these he shows the easy familiarity of the complete With-It. He retails his wide information tirelessly but painlessly. (p. 500)

The Hoagland Reader shows the essayist as sprinter, African Calliope as distance runner. [The latter] is an extended account of Hoagland's travels in the Sudan…. African Calliope, like its subject, is bewildering but fascinating. The sharp phrase, the lively though characteristically gruesome simile, the eye cocked for dirt and distress and hunger and hideous ugliness and cruelty, with a cast...