In 1867, British General Robert Napier led what was for the time, a mammoth expedition into the heart of Ethiopia. Its mission – to chastise the proud Emperor Tewodros (r. 1855–68), who, feeling slighted by the lack of British response to his letter to Queen Victoria, had taken hostage two British envoys and some other Europeans. The most important outcome of that expedition was the suicide of the emperor, an act that catapulted him to iconic status. Little noticed at the time was the three-or four-year-old child who was freed from the Maqdala prison, where the emperor had held him and his parents, and then carried away by the expeditionary force. That child eventually took the name Charles Martin, a hybrid of the names of his benevolent captor/rescuer and of his adoptive father in India. In Ethiopian history, he is more famously known as Hakim (Dr) Warqenah Eshate (1864–1952). His life and career read as one long odyssey, taking him in alternating turns to India, Burma, England, and back to Ethiopia.

Peter Garretson has now given us the first (and eagerly awaited) full biography of this character, so torn between his Victorian upbringing and his passion for his native land. Ambivalence was to be the hallmark of his identity. He had capped the medical degree that he had obtained in India with a license in surgery from the prestigious Royal College of Surgeons at the University of Edinburgh. Yet he would not be allowed to sit for the Indian Medical Service Examination because he was not a British-born subject. His fellow Ethiopians tended to view him with a combination of indulgence and ire at his aberrant manners. In particular, his tireless crusade against the slave trade that was making Ethiopia an international pariah was to land him in some difficulty. Yet, contrary to what the author seems to suggest in his conclusion (p. 301), his progressive credentials were never in doubt.

The biography is primarily based on the diary that Warqenah kept for fifty years with amazing regularity, supplemented by his autobiography and a few interviews with friends and members of Warqenah's family, as well as by archival and secondary sources. Garretson gives us a comprehensive account of his ‘multifaceted and fascinating’ life and personality. That life started with his educational formation, first in India and then in Scotland, which was followed by 17 years of medical service in Burma. The Burmese experience, according to Garretson, formed a crucial training ground in his subsequent administrative career in Ethopia. His first trip to Ethiopia came in 1896, when, stirred into patriotic duty at the time of his country's victorious war with Italy, he wanted to put his medical skills at the service of his many wounded countrymen. Ultimately, his medical service was put to greater use for the tripartite (British, Ethiopian, and Italian) suppression of a Somali nationalist uprising in the Ethiopian Ogaden region that was led by Sayyid Muhammad Abdille Hasan.

His marriage in 1910 to Qatsala Tullu, daughter of a prominent Oromo notable in the outskirts of Addis Ababa, was a landmark event; Garretson describes it as ‘the most important event of Warqenah's adult life’ (p. 75). Not only was the marriage blessed with many children – six sons and seven daughters – but it also proved to be a mutually rewarding relationship for the spouses. Qatsala evolved into one of the most progressive women of her time while her connections with the palace brightened Warqenah's political fortunes. Their acrimonious divorce in 1935 marked the beginning of his declining influence in the court. This was followed some two years later by the execution of his two favourite sons, Yosef and Benyam, in the wake of an attempt on the life of Fascist Italian viceroy, Rodolfo Graziani. In between those dates, Warqenah was to serve his country in various capacities: as physician to the ailing Emperor Menilek; medical director of the Menilek II Hospital; administrator of the hot springs, Fel Weha, in Addis Ababa; superintendent of the second modern school in the country, Tafari Makonnen School; governor of the model province of Charchar in eastern Ethiopia; and Ethiopian ambassador to London at the outbreak of the Italo-Ethiopian war in 1935.

Exhaustive as Garretson's treatment of Warqenah's variegated life is, it suffers from over-reliance on the subject's diary, at times even for some of the general developments in the country's history. The book would also have benefitted from a good introductory chapter, which could have set the general political and social context for the biography, thus sparing the author from contextual digressions at various points. As it stands, the disappointingly short introduction reads more like a summary of the book. The book could also have benefitted from some more rigorous copy-editing. These imperfections aside, students of Ethiopian history are greatly indebted to Garretson for this comprehensive account of the life of a unique member of a fascinating generation of Ethiopian intellectuals.